The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - D-Day -- 80 Years Later

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

With the 80th anniversary of perhaps the greatest military gamble in history upon us this week, we look at D-Day.  Canada played a significant role that day, one in which we can be extremely proud.  Today we invite the well-known and much respected British historian James Holland onto The Bridge to guide us through the highlights of a day that changed the Second World War.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. This week marks the 80th anniversary of D-Day. That's going to be our focus for the next couple of shows. Coming right up. And hello there, welcome to another week of The Bridge. As mentioned, D-Day is our focus for the next couple of days, and we're going to get right to it with an outstanding guest to walk us through some of the major points to think about when you think D-Day.

But first, a little housekeeping. Let's get that out of the way right away. Thursday's program this week, we'll have a question of the week, as we've been doing ever since January. Last couple of weeks, we've had a very successful kind of what's on your mind show. This is going to get back to a specific question. So keep in mind, I'll give you the question in a minute. Name, location you're writing from, and keep your answer,

you know, brief, to the point. Usually a paragraph will do it. So we look forward to hearing from you. Here's the question. This is a little different than anything we've tried before, so I'll be fascinated to see what you think of it.

Here's the question. What do you know now that you wish you had known when you were younger? What do you know now that you wish you had known when you were younger? Okay, that's wide open, right? That leaves you a lot of space. Name, location, keep your answers brief, and all answers must be in by 6 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday. All right. Let's talk D-Day. When I think D-Day, I think of a place called Beni Sur Mer.

It's a cemetery. And it's about roughly two kilometers from Juneau Beach. On a clear day, you can see the waters off Juneau Beach. And the reason it's a cemetery of particular significance for us Canadians is it's the Canadian War Cemetery that marks the D-Day landings and the Battle for Normandy. There are just over 2,000 grave sites in the Benny Surmere Cemetery, including almost all of those Canadians who died on D-Day, on June 6, 340. The rest died in the battles that followed D-Day, because there were a lot of battles that followed D-Day,

as the Canadians moved towards Caen. It's a beautiful spot, surrounded by maple trees. It's Canadian territory. France said, that's Canada. So you can stand on the other side of the ocean in France at that cemetery and be at home because it's Canada.

And like all the war cemeteries that got different parts of Europe and other places in the world where Canadians are buried who served, when you walk past those gravestones, you'll see the name and the rank, the regiment sometimes. And you'll see the date of birth, the date of death. Or you'll straight up see the age. And so many of those fellows who died on D-Day, were young. Many were in their teens.

Most were in their 20s, early 20s. There were some in their 30s. But you think about the sacrifices, these were all volunteers. You wonder about the contributions they would have made to the country if there hadn't been a war. Instead, their contribution was sacrifice. You know the saying, they died so we could enjoy the lives we have today.

It's an incredibly moving place. All right. With that, let's talk about what happened on June 6th. Let's talk about D-Day. Because we all have our images. So who am I going to talk to about that? Well, I've done a lot of D-Day shows over the years. Some of you have witnessed some of the ones I did,

you know, from Juneau Beach when I was with the CBC for television. I've done them the last couple of years here on the bridge. Over time, I've had many different guests. Canadian historians, Canadian military people, Brian Stewart, who's been with me and walked those beaches more than a few times.

I've had international historians as well. Today's someone who I've always been fascinated by because he's in so many different television specials primarily about World War II, but not exclusively. He's British. He's a British historian. His name's James Holland. You've almost, if you're interested in history and military history, you've almost certainly seen him.

He has an incredibly successful podcast right now. It's called We Have Ways of Making You Talk that he hosts along with Al Murray. It's a great podcast. He's a research fellow at St. Andrews University and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. You can find him on Twitter and you can find him on Instagram. He's a very engaging guy.

He's not shy about saying what he feels and what he means about whatever the topic may be. So I reached out to him, I guess a couple of months ago on that, and said, because he's busy writing a book right now. He's always writing a book. He's got lots of books out there that deal with history. He's in the middle of writing a book right now. He's always writing a book. He's got lots of books out there that deal with history. He's in the middle of writing a book. Well, I guess it's more than the middle because it's coming out in September on Monte Cassino, the great battle

that many Canadians were involved in as well in Italy in the Second World War. But I reached out to him and I said, have you got time? Have you got a half an hour or so at some point before June 6th? And he said, absolutely. I'd love to do it. And so we talked just the other day, and this is our conversation about D-Day. So let's see.

Why don't we take our break right now so we don't have to interrupt the discussion. And then we'll start up with our conversation with James Holland. So first of all, this quick break, back right after this. And we're back right here on SiriusXM, Channel 167 Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. It's The Bridge.

I'm Peter Mansbridge. Let's get into our conversation right away with James Holland. Here we go. James Holland, it's great to have you with us. You have many fans in Canada. I'm one of them. And so I'm looking forward to this conversation about D-Day. There's no doubt that D-Day was an incredible accomplishment. We all agree to that. But you often say we've, in a way, got the wrong impression, based partly on movies, about what really happened that day. So can you explain that to start?

Yeah, well, first of all, thank you very much for inviting me on. It's an honour and a pleasure to be here, Peter. And let me also say that it's great to be talking on a Canadian podcast and to a Canadian because my admiration for what the Canadians did in the Second World War is no bounds. I mean, talk about a country that punched above its weight. It's absolutely extraordinary. You think about an entire part of um bomber command being a canadian group you think about the huge contribution that the canadian um navy made to

the war in the atlantic you think about the fact that uh there's an army in in northwest europe you think about the um um contribution to italy um air forces all around the world. I mean, it's absolutely astonishing for a country which, in terms of population, was pretty small. And when you think that the vast majority of those people

who took part were also, of course, volunteers. So it's often forgotten. I don't think people shout loud enough for the Canadians and the Canadian effort. And of course, not least on D-Day itself, which where the Canadians suffered the most as a proportion of those who have landed.

On D-Day itself, not the Americans at Omaha Beach, which I think is kind of often forgotten. And I think that goes back to your point you're making, is that movies have had an impact on how we view it. Obviously, Hollywood equals the United States, and they're putting out the money. And if they're going to make a film about D-Day, they're going to make it about Americans,

and you can't blame them for that. And that's absolutely the way it was. But of course, what it does do is excuse how we think of the war. And it thinks about, you know, a lot of people would be forgiven for thinking that d-day itself was was u.s led that it was all about omaha beach and that was the kind of number one landing spot and all the rest of it you know what you hope is that people will will find those movies interesting or band of brothers or whatever and and and i'm one of them

um and then want to find out more and it But it's important that when people do find out more that they understand what's really going on. And it's a massive beast operation overlord. The cross-channel invasion is a huge enterprise, so many moving parts. But the fact of the matter is that all three service chiefs are British. Out of the 4,127 assault craft, I think it's something like

3,163 are British. 792 out of the 1,213 warships are British. Two-thirds of the forces landed are British and Dominion troops, and so on and so forth. And that balance of power shifts to the Americans later on in the campaign and later on in the war, but not on D day itself. And as I was saying, you know, the Canadians, the effort they make on D day is exceptional. And again, it's you've got Canadians in the air, you've got them out at sea in the Navy, you've got them landing on the

beaches at Juno. But you've also got them playing a very, very important role on D plus one, where they basically stop the Waffen SS 12 Waffen SS Panzer Division, the Hitler-Jugend Division in their tracks. And it's a really, really decisive moment. It's a really decisive moment for the whole campaign. So, yes, it's not it's not how a lot of people think it is. I should say that, you know, some Canadians will think, oh, well, you know, he's just saying that because he's on a Canadian podcast. But I can vouch for the fact that you've done over the years. So I accept your claims and your suggestions. Yeah, I'm not just trying to suck up to you.

I can promise you. You mentioned leadership and, you know, the three chiefs of the land and sea and the Air Force were all British. At the top, though, as we all know, was Eisenhower as the Supreme Allied Commander. And I want to try and get a sense from you about, I mean, obviously there was a political decision to do the invasion of Europe, the Northwest Europe, and then it was handed over to the military chiefs. In the end, though, after all the planning, after all the training,

after all the readiness, somebody had to push go. And it was Eisenhower. I want to try and understand, have you helped us understand the pressure of that moment, what that must have been like? Just absolutely enormous because so much is resting on this. As you say, so much planning, so many stores, so much, so much, so many moving parts. Operation Overlord and the naval part of it, Operation Neptune,

are massive undertakings. You know, months and months in the planning. So many different people, so many different parts of equipment and material that all needs to be organized and allocated and follow-ups and all the rest of it. You finally get to the beginning of June. You've had this amazing late May where the weather is absolutely scorchio and the sun has been beating down and that's been breaking into the first couple of days of June and so much

about the invasion is based upon the channel being like a mill pond or certainly not being particularly choppy. And suddenly you've got this horror story of the weather. And frankly wherever you go on the gap between fronts on the 5th or wherever you go between gaps in the front on the sixth is a moot point because uh you know in the early hours of the fifth of june the weather was becalmed and uh much you know clear skies again

it just it wasn't at midnight you know when all the airborne forces were dropping the decision to with the weather was based on signs of a small little ridge of high pressure pushing through which may or may not be there on the 6th of june you know it could easily have dissolved and disappeared off into the north sea and never arrived over normandy coast or over the channel at all and one has to remember that for all the sophistication of weather forecasting in the 1940s, it is nothing as it is today. And with all the GPS and all the tracking and all the kind of weather stations that we have,

we still get it wrong, even to this day. So it's a much more kind of hazardous beast predicting it back in June 1944 than it is today. So huge amount of pressure on the weather men but ultimately they're not going to be strung up if they get it wrong the man who's going to be he's he's got the the burden of hundreds of thousands of troops and planning and potentially millions of people's lives if it all goes pear-shaped, on his shoulders is Eisenhower. And he takes the call. He makes that decision.

He thinks about it for 30 seconds, puts his hands on his face, looks up and goes, OK, let's go. I mean, what a guy. I'm overflowing with praise for the Canadians, but I'm also overflowing with praise for Eisenhower I think was a truly great man and the higher you go up the chain the few decisions you have to make

but the decisions you make are more difficult and he takes those on the chin and let's just think about his background you know he's a pretty humble background born in Texas working class family Mr Abilene in Kansas very smart kid works hard

grafts hard gets him gets through school gets his sports scholarship gets to west point works his way up from nothing and now he's dealing with presidents prime ministers generals and kings and queens and what have you and he's got the burden of the of the free world resting on his shoulders and he doesn't share it from that he looks it squarely in the face and makes a call and it was the right call was there anyone around him saying oh i don't know general this this is too much of a risk yes lee mallory was um so so um air chief marshal uh so traffic lee mallory is the overall ally commander he's former um he was commander of um a 12 group in the battle of britain which was the area of area fighter command to some north of london including

duxford and east anglia um then gets works his way up the greasy pole and uh becomes fighter head of commander chief of fighter command and then gets made um overall allied commander of air forces for uh for for d-day he's the brother of the more famous george who uh gets loses his life on everest in 1924 george mallory um and for my money he's one of the least talented commanders that britain produces in the second world war he's he's not much cop at all and he's one of the least talented commanders that Britain produces in the Second World War. He's not much cop at all, and he's been faffing and worrying about the airborne drop. He's been faffing and worrying about

everything, and he's against sending everyone in on D-Day. But Monty is all for it. Tedder is for it. The Deputy Supreme Allied Commander. And so is Ramsey. And really, it's Ramsey more than anyone else who needs to make the call because this is about shipping more than anything else it is about air power and

having to deal with cloud and all the rest of it really this is about how you handle ships the big problem you've got is you've got these assault craft the whole point about assault craft is that they've got very shallow draft you know even a landing ship which is you know 120 meters in length has a you know when full has a draft of only four for eight inches, which, of course, is absolutely nothing. And these are specially designed so that you can land on a beach. And, you know, one of the features about the Normandy beaches is they're very, very shallow.

So they go out a long way. The tide comes in very quickly. And the problem with those assault vessels is they've got very flat sides. And if your wind is coming at 90 degrees to the direction in which you're trying to travel, then the side of that assault craft effectively acts as a sail. And that's problematic because it means your ability to land where you want to land and maintain control of your assault vessel as you're landing is extremely difficult indeed. And all sorts of factors about the invasion, the use of duplex drive Sherman tanks, which are, you know, inverted commas, floating tanks.

I know it seems seems ridiculous that a 30 ton tank can float, but it can sort of swim. You know, the whole plan is for them to be unleashed at 7,000 yards. Well, 7,000 yards is, you know, three and a half miles or something. I mean, it's a hell of a long way out. And that is all predicated on it being like a millpond. So what do you do? What's plan B when you're actually chopping around in a kind of force four, force five? You know, force four, force five means fairly choppy waves.

It means, you know, you're getting white caps on the top of your waves. It's not totally horrendous, but it is if you're in a landing craft and you're already terrified and you're already struggling to see, you know, make sense of what is going on. So the challenges are absolutely immense. So the decision to go is not taken lightly i bet um on the other side you've got the germans and their defenses hitler having decided about a couple of years before that he needed a an atlantic wall he needed defense structure basically from norway to the French-Spanish border. And damned if he didn't actually pull off a lot of that. Talk about that for a minute,

because I think people tend to forget that there actually was a defensive structure, which, you know, wasn't 100% complete, but nevertheless, it had been quite an accomplishment in a very short period of time. Yes, I suppose so. I mean, the Atlantic Wall, I mean, you know, we're not talking about the Great Wall of China here.

What we're talking about is a series of strong points. Vida Stans Nesta, as they're called or wn they're numbered and they go and they're numbered one to whatever in a particular sector and they go all the way along from the arctic coast all the way down to the the border of france and spain it's a hell of a long way there's well over 9 000 fixed structures there on that that length of which 98 percent of which never actually see any action whatsoever in the entire war they're augmented by

gargantuan amounts of wire and millions of mines that they're all inflated so that you know particular points off beaches and off coastal areas where there's roads or ports or whatever the defences tend to be a bit stronger but the truth of the matter is is

you know the germans have got a massive manpower crisis so although we talk about the german army um we you know really a lot of those troops are troops in german uniforms rather than german troops who sort of mean you know they have a lot of conscripts of ukrainians and czechs and poles and estonians and lavians and and so on people who you know don't want to be there are not interested in being there um who have been forced to sign up for the furor who had very limited training um they're under equipped uh and frankly they're a shower one of the reasons that Rommel, who is the commander of Army Group B, which covers that entire area from the Pas-de-Calais and north up into Flanders, all the way down through to Normandy and Brittany,

and who's in charge of that whole stretch, he's having an absolute panic when he takes over in the early part of 1944 because he knows that these defences are nowhere near strong enough. And one of the reasons why he's putting Rommel's asparagus which are these poles you you may have seen with charges on the end of them and belgian gates and and uh and various other beach obstacles all over the place and the reason why he's wanting to put ever more and ever more numbers of mines is because he knows that the troops that are defending these the coastline are paper thin badly trained badly equipped and not really up to the job in hand and and that's true the hopes of the germline are paper thin badly trained badly equipped and not really up to the job in hand and

and that's true the hopes of the germans are less um being thrust onto the atlantic wall and much more onto the mobile divisions that they've got in france which amounts to the number of 10 there's nine panzer divisions one panzer grenadier division and basically the only difference is in a panzer grenadier, you've got more motorised infantry, slightly fewer tanks, but basically they're kind of, you know, they're all the best equipped German divisions, they've got, they're bristling with weaponry, they're the most motivated,

they're all German rather than troops in German uniforms, and they hold the key. But that's a hell of an arse, expecting them to be able to kind of kick the allies back into the sea so the kind of broad hope is that that the atlantic wall this crust will be able to hold the allies at bay for just long enough to allow these mobile divisions to arrive

into the bridgehead organize themselves and then launch a kind of you know mass counter-attack before the allies are able to bring overwhelming amounts of men and material into that bridgehead. That's the plan. But I mean, it's extremely unlikely to work because there's just not enough of them and Allied air superiority is so significant that they won't be able to move very easily in daylight.

In the run-up to D-Day, all the bridges over the Seine and most over the Loire have been destroyed, most of the marshalling yards. The Third Reich is completely dependent on the Reichsbahn, the German railway system, for getting 90% of its material from A to B. And they've been absolutely hammered. The radar stations have been knocked out. They're only operating at kind of 4% efficiency across the whole atlantic wall etc etc so if you're a german looking at this

it's a pretty sorry tale um the problem is is for for the allies is you still got to jump out of a landing craft and face machine guns and you know 50 millimeter anti-tank guns and 75 millimeter anti-tank guns not very many heavy guns and lots and lots of mortars and mines and wire and it's incredibly difficult and the weather's awful so those are the challenges i'm not trying to kind of belittle the challenge but but the idea that it's some sort of magnificent defensive network i think is rather overstating it you know i'll give you an example of this if you look at the you know a lot of people when they go to normandy they've one of the things that they beeline for is the is the Kriegsmarine or the German naval battery at Long Sumer.

And, you know, when you go there, you think, crikey, that's impressive. Look at these huge, great concrete casements. And when you're thinking about impregnable German festungs, you know, fortresses, one has in one's mind sort of huge, great kind of domes of with with sort of big guns pointing out of them and exactly the way the the long sumer battery is still there but it's not a battery it's a troop it's four guns you know and these are you know six inch guns well just one of the cruisers that's firing against them hms ajax has got more guns than they have in their troop of four. You know, it's got six six inch guns rather than four six inch guns. And those four guns never sink a single allied ship at all. They're absolutely hammered from start to scratch.

The following morning, D plus one, the Devons come in and overrun the whole place. The guns have already been knocked out, you know, in the early hours of D-Day and then briefly kind of resuscitate one of them by the afternoon and that's then quickly silenced again all that effort all that concrete all those guns put into position achieves absolutely diddly squat and you know and that's because there's not enough of them however formidable they look to the modern tourist the truth of the matter is you've got four six inch guns and that's not very much you know and when you're thinking about you know omaha beach for example there are you know 85 machine guns on that immediate stretch there are maybe i don't know 15 or so kind of 50 millimeter 75 millimeter guns there's one 88 millimeter there's not a single

gun over 88 millimeter in size and when we talk about 88 millimeter we talk about the diameter of the shell that it fires opposite them are 183 guns of over 90 millimeter you know the entire normandy coastline on the invasion front of d-day there are only 32 heavy guns that the germans have have. It's really not very many. So I think it's very easy to look at this and look at this purely through the prism of the Allied experience and think, gosh, look at all that concrete. That's formidable. Look at all those machine guns firing at us.

Look at all those guns firing. And of course, yes, absolutely. And that's why people are being killed. And that's why people are being shot up. And that's why it's difficult on D-Day in the early hours, made worse by the kind of terrible weather and people not arriving where they should be. So they're arriving, you know, let's take the example of Omaha Beach, for example. A lot of the reasons why they have such heavy casualties is because the landing ships are not landing in the areas where there are fewer strong points. The strong points are all gathered around the exit points from the beach.

So if you land in between those at the foot of a cliff where there is no exit point, it's much less dangerous. And you have lots of American troops landing, even from the 29th Infantry Division, for example, who are landing without any casualties at all. It's just if you're landing right in the middle of the worst, heaviest defended place in the early moments of D-Day itself,

then you're going to get hammered. And that's exactly what happens to, you know, Company A, for example, of the 116th Infantry Regiment. But it's really, really important that you, you know, one pauses and takes a look at it from the German perspective as well. And, you know, whether you're on Omaha Beach or whether you're at Santa Ban

or whether you're at Canta ban or whether you're at corsell uh on juno beach you would not want to be a german soldier there or rather i should say you would not want to be a soldier in german uniform there you really would not because what you would look at is a sea of overwhelming force power and might which is all coming towards you and you are simply not going to win. And of course they don't. Well, I know you're being careful the way you word this, but it could come off to some like you're suggesting that once you've beaten the weather, it was, you know, fait accompli.

You knew what was going to happen. It was just such an overpowering force. They'd landed successfully. It was going to happen. They were going to take and secure that beachhead. Yep. But is that the case? I mean, what could have gone wrong?

I think so, yes. I think so. I mean, there are lots of things that could go wrong. There's lots of jeopardy. One of the biggest things that could go wrong is that lots of ships would be destroyed and the minefields would stretch out between seven and ten miles out at sea.

The mine clearing operation, of which the the uh royal canadian navy uh played a a significant part i should say was absolutely genius and was um an operation was carried out with of extreme complexity which was carried out with immense skill and which is just completely ignored and forgotten about now because it's it's just as it well it happened you know so there was no drama and the reason was no drama was because of the skillful application of that operation but there were thousands and thousands of mines seam mines out there which could have caused huge problems to the invasion force but didn't because

the operation was completely successful. There's all sorts of things that could go wrong. You know, the weather went wrong. You know, that did go wrong. It's whether you've got enough contingency to kind of be able to kind of pull it off. The expectation was that many, many more people would be killed and wounded than were killed and wounded. And obviously, to land in such a circumstance,

in a landing craft or drop from the sky or whatever, from a parachute or in a glider, into an unknown enemy where you have no idea what's going to come, where you are opening this second front, you're a part of such an enormous occasion, requires courage of absolute enormity. I mean, I am completely in that that anyone would do that it is not for the faint-hearted by any stretch of the imagination and lots of people did get killed

and they're always going to get killed because there is always going to be enough people defending that coastline that are going to cause problems you know they're going to be behind their concrete bunker with their machine guns with their mortars with their heavier guns with lots of mines lots of wire there's going to be confusion, there's going to be mayhem, people are getting shot up, bullets are flying everywhere, mortars are flying everywhere, shrapnels flying everywhere. Of course there's going to be casualties, and there are casualties.

But looking at the German defences, and then looking at the weight of force that the Allies are bringing to bear, you cannot see a circumstance in which the crust, the Atlantic wall, is going to be able to stop that invasion happening. I just can't see how it can happen. And that's not just being wise after the event. The invasion was planned so meticulously, so carefully, with so much thought to minimize the amount of risk. So that when they went, they knew that they kind of won the intelligence piece, that they knew that they had enough aircraft, control of the skies, enough warships, enough assault craft to be able to kind of make a landing. How it all panned out, whether they would kick back into the sea in the ensuing days. You know, D-Day is not the trouble all day, really,

in the big scheme of things. It is if you're in the first wave of troops, of course. But for the Allies in general, D-Day itself is not a problem because as long as you've got tactical surprise, you hold all the aces. It's what happens in D plus one, D plus two, D plus three, plus four. You know, it's in the ensuing weeks that's a challenge. And it's whether those mobile the ensuing weeks it's a there's a challenge and it's whether

those those mobile divisions that the germans have whether they can get themselves quickly to the bridgehead whether they can organize themselves coordinate themselves and organize a counterattack but but but you know it is really worth mentioning that on d plus one you've got the sherbrooke fuselage um uh in sherman tanks um you've got the i can't Fusiliers in Sherman tanks. You've got the, I can't remember what the name of the, I think it's the Nova Scotias. Yeah. One single battalion of the Nova Scotias pushing forward through a little village called Buron and then heading towards Oti.

And they're heading to Carpiquet, which is the airfield southwest of Caen. And they're heading there. Overnight, the first leading units of the 12th SS Panzer Division, the Hitlerjugend, have started arriving. An entire regiment is in place, a reinforced regiment, because the 12th SS is a division of over 20,000 strong, which is sort of double the size of a static infantry division, for example, which is on the coastline.

And they've got overwhelming numbers of machine guns, of tanks, of assault guns, of motorized infantry. And they, 12SS, launch a counterattack against the Canadians at a little village called Oti, just as the Canadians are pausing pausing and they're at the uh central the sort of central square kind of washing pond in the middle of the village they're all kind of slaking their first filling out the water bottles and the rest of it suddenly they get attacked from behind the houses by the ss and they're pushed back a number of canadians are killed a number of them are just brutally executed rounded up and taken to the abbe Dardenne and executed as well. Wounded men are deliberately run over by tank tracks, by Panzer IV tank tracks, by these SS guys.

They're pushed back about a mile and a half. And that's as far as the SS get. Now, admittedly, by the middle of the afternoon, the Novus Gauchos and the Schaubert Fusiliers are able to kind of call upon a bit of artillery support, but not start off with. But really, the bottom line is the one infantry battalion and one tank regiment of 50-odd tanks has stopped the main counterattack thrust of one of the best equipped panzer divisions in the entire German armed forces. And that tells you three things it tells you first of all that perhaps the ss aren't quite as good as they're cracked up to be it tells you that the canadians are perhaps an awful lot better than people give them credit for and it also tells you that attacking in normandy is incredibly difficult and that's the number one lesson to take away it is really really hard because the moment

you're attacking you're exposing yourself and particularly that part of the of the uh of the invasion front it's very wide open um farmland you know you can see you know the enemy can see you coming um further to the west you've got the blockage and the narrow fields and lanes and flooded areas and the rest of which poses a whole other series of issues as well. But it's incredibly difficult to attack. And so what the Allies were able to do is through their kind of superb levels of organisation and build-up, and despite the weather and despite the subsequent great storm

that happens on the 19th to the 21st of June, they were able to build up, they're winning that race of who can build up decisive amounts of material into the bridgehead quicker. Will it be the Allies who've got to come across the sea from southern England, or will it be the Germans who are already on the continent? And the Allies win that battle.

And so, first of all, I don't think there's much doubt that D-Day is going to be successful. It doesn't seem that way if you're there, but the whole point of being a historian is that you look at these things and you look at it with a much more complete picture. And you can sort of make these judgment calls, I think, kind of 80 years on. The chance that the Germans have to organize themselves into a coordinated counterattack, that is gone by the end of June.

That moment has passed. And at that point, there's only one outcome for the campaign. How long it takes, how many people are killed, how many people are wounded, how much levels of destruction there is, all that. That is very much up for grabs. But the overall outcome is no longer in doubt. In that first week, you know, D plus one to D plus seven, and there were those, you gave us an example, the situation where the Canadians were pushed back, you know, a mile and a half or so.

Was there a point in that first week that the, you know, the Eisenhowers and those below him would have said, I'm worried here. You know, we're vulnerable. They're coming in, the Panzer divisions, and they're better equipped and they're making gains on us. Or was that just kind of a one-off on the Canadian side or was this happening right across the front? Well, no, because the Panzer Lehrer is the next one to arrive.

The Panzer Lehrer is, for my money, probably the best suited unit that the Germans have for Normandy because commanded by Fritz Behrlein, who's hugely experienced, but also experienced in fighting the Allies. So he understands about Allied air power and the dominance of Allied air power and so on. And they're very well-trained and highly motivated and well-equipped division.

And again, they don't really highly motivated and well equipped division. And again, you know, they don't really make any headway at all. They hit a brick wall of British troops in this case. And, you know, it's just if you're Eisenhower, you would be feeling quietly confident in those first seven days. You would not be taking anything for granted. There'd be no room for any kind of complacency whatsoever. You'd be a bit frantic about making sure that you're getting as many men and troops over there as quickly as possible. You want to be aggressive and you want to be pushing on and you want to be seeing signs of weakness in the enemy.

But I think overall, you'd be reasonably satisfied that as far as things were going it was all looking reasonably good because you know you've got first two landing strips on d plus one for example in normandy you know by the 15th of june i think you've got something like five airfields up and running you've got maybe 10 by by uh the 20th of june i mean you know that, that's significant. And that means, of course, that you've got even more control of the skies because it means that you haven't got to go back to southern England and waste fuel. You know, you've basically got home advantage

because you've got fighter aircraft that can take off and can attack enemy units just as soon as they're basically airborne. So that's a huge advantage as well. And that's all part of the planning and the organization. You know, kind of train hard, fight easy is the old adage. And it sort of applies to the Allies as well. Of course, it always seems very different when you're a senior commander

or even when you're a junior commander and you've actually got to do the hard yards and push forward because, as the 12 SS discovered, you know, attacking in Normandy is really, really hard. And the point is that once those counterattacks have been blunted, it's then up to the Allies to organise themselves. The first major operation is Operation Epson, which was launched in the British sector on the 26th of June.

And they're undercooked because the Great Storm has deprived them of an entire corps' worth of troops that are been supposed to be landed and haven't been. And but what it does do is it draws in ever increasing numbers of Panzer divisions as they are arriving into the Normandy. And they're just flung straight into the battle. You know, a division of kind of 50,000, 20,000 men is not moving as an entire bulk. They've got different advance lines. They're coming in in different units. And so what's happening is they've been flung into the battle in penny packets and are tritted right from the word go.

And basically by the time that Operation Epsom runs out of steam on the 1st of July, there is absolutely no conceivable chance that the Germans will be able to organise a counterattack, a proper coordinated counterattack, because they've just been flung in to kind of deal with Operation Epsom immediately and have been attrited in the process. And it's a disaster for them from which they never kind of really, really recover. Now, again, that doesn't mean to say that they're not a formidable opposition and enemy to deal with. They are because they've got lots of guns

and they've got lots of mortars and lots of machine guns and lots of mines and so on and so forth and artillery pieces, etc. And it goes back to the same problem that, you know, when you're attacking, you've got to expose yourself. But there's a difference between putting your men in danger and losing the battle. And the two things are not the same at all. You know, Canadian troops, British troops, American troops, whatever, they're all in danger the whole time that they're in Normandy. And we know this by the kind of huge attritional rate across the whole campaign. I mean, in the 77 days of the Normandy campaign, there's an average daily average of something like 6,875 casualties per day across both sides well that makes it more attritional than than passion delver done in the song in in the first world war which are normally seen as sort of by words for kind of wholesale slaughter

so that's the scale that you're dealing with but there's a difference between it being awful and incredibly dangerous and huge lots of men being you know unbelievably brave and courageous and risking putting their necks on the lines and And the allies actually losing, you know, so I think that, you know, it's important to kind of separate those two things. One last question. I want, you know, I want to go back to the beaches, go back to June 6th. I've walked those beaches, many of them, and you've walked them many times, more than I have. You like to say that, and I've seen you say this on some of your documentaries,

that no matter how many books you read or movies you watch or programs like this that you listen to, nothing compares to actually walking the walk. So when you go back, what do you think of when you walk those beaches? Well, I mean, I always go back to the people and the people involved. And I just sort of think what I, you know, and, you know, I always find I've always felt a little bit wistful, to be honest, because, you know, you see these beaches now and you see kids playing on them and kite surfers and you know people enjoying the beaches as they should i mean that's what people were sacrificing their lives for so that people could live in liberty and freedom and enjoy the beach and sunshine and the waves and sand and ice creams and all those sort of things and yet we all

know what happened there and you know particularly when you're in someone like gold beach you know you're one is very mindful of the legacy of the war because the remnants of the mulberry harbor can still be seen you know stretching out into the sea these sort of huge great concrete blocks and whatever and what i think about is what it must have been like on that that morning coming in there i mean it's all very well you know historians like myself kind of sort of broadly saying well we had it covered and it was all going to be you know game over straight from the word go and without all the bases covered and it was all going to be, you know, game over straight from the word go and we'd had all the bases covered and it was going to be easy peasy.

I don't think it was going to be easy peasy, but I mean, my point really was that I think it was, you know, I just don't think the Germans had the strength to be able to kind of resist what the Allies were bringing to bear. But try telling that to a kind of, you know, a 19-year-old infantryman in that landing craft, you know, struggling with seasickness and rocking around on the waves and suddenly the, you know know the ramp goes down and there's firing and mayhem and

your best mate's been killed and you know absolutely terrifying i mean really really terrifying and a lot of the work i've done in recent years has been kind of following diaries and letters and stuff of people who were actually there at the time in the Second World War. What you realize is that these guys are the same as us. You know, L.P. Hartley famously says that the past is a foreign country. Well, not really. It might be, but the people in it are just the same. You know, we're just this current generation that's treading the earth for the moment. But we've been preceded by plenty of people who are just like us. And, you know, those young men had the same fears and doubts and worries and anxieties and emotions that we would have if we were having to do it today.

They're no different whatsoever. And yet they answered the call and they did what they had to do. And, you know, we've benefited all the years later, 80 years on. We're still just about at peace in the West. But, you know know we've we've benefited from that sacrifice and it's important that everyone remembers that and doesn't forget it and realizes just how easy it is to slip back into these very very dark times you know it feels like right now we're kind of slightly sleepwalking at the moment you know the threat from around the

world you know whether it be from the environment or whether it be from from um not very nice people with uh over ambitious autocrats around the world wanting to kind of cause mayhem you know this is this is a troubled world in which we live in and um i i think you know anniversaries are useful because it's it does pause us to stop and think and we need to think about right now is you know you thinkiversaries are useful because it does cause us to stop and think. And we need to think about right now is, you know, you think about D-Day is a kind of sort of incredible example of what can happen when Western democracies pull together in the right direction for a common cause. But, you know, and that makes them unbeatable, I think, against paranoid, mistrusting autocrats. But also autocrats are incredibly good at exploiting weaknesses.

And when you're not united and you're not prepared and you're not ready and you're sleepwalking, you've got trouble waiting around the corner. And, you know, we should pause at this anniversary and think about what happened all those years ago and learn those lessons and make sure that we don't repeat them again james holland thank you so much for this really appreciate it my pleasure um okay let me just uh james holland you know i told you it's a it's great to just sit back and listen to this guy because he clearly knows his stuff. And he takes you back into a moment in time, really, by giving his sense of the history of that day, June 6th, and the days that immediately followed it. As I mentioned at the beginning, before we started, he has books on the battle for Normandy. So, you know, if you're looking for more from him on this subject, you can find it at any good bookstore, certainly online. And he's working on a new book that comes out in September.

Casino 44, the bloodiest battle of the Italian campaign. That involved Canadian troops as well. That's Monte Cassino, you know, that abbey that was on top of the mountain that they spent, you know, days, weeks, months, I believe, trying to capture that. They attacked it from the ground. They bombed it from the air, the whole thing. It was a long, bloody battle.

So that's James Holland's latest book. But this was a topic of discussion that's so important this week. As James said, anniversaries can be really important, especially in the time we're living through right now. So give it your attention if you can this week. Really hope you do. Tomorrow, day two of our special coverage of D-Day, Nala Ayed. Remember Nala?

Of course you do. You're still here. She hosts the CBC Radio's Ideas. She was a colleague of mine when I was at the Nationals. She's one of the world's best foreign correspondents, covered so many of the hot spots. Quite something. Well, she's also an author. And her second book is out now. It's related to D-Day.

It's a love story. It's a spy story. It's Canadian. It's a really good book. We're going to talk about it tomorrow with Nala. So I hope you'll join us. Don't forget that question of the week, right? You've got a couple of days to come up with your answer. What do you know now

that you wish you had known when you were younger? Don't forget to put in your name, the location you're writing from. Keep it tight. Have your answer in before 6pm Eastern Time on Wednesday. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening today. It's been a pleasure talking with you, as it always is. We'll see you again in almost 24 hours.