D-Day: The Tide Turns

The key initial objectives for the Allied airborne forces were to try and seal the approaches to the Normandy beaches from east and west in order to make it harder for the Germans to bring up reinforcements to a, support their forces in the coastal fortifications and b, to try and drive in the Allied flanks.

I think I'm correct in saying it was the largest airborne operation that had yet existed in history so that that had unprecedented issues of, as it were, getting it right and, you know, the Allies were right to be concerned.

Weather forecasting is extremely difficult. I live in Exeter, which is where the British Meteorological Office is, and our weather forecast is often episodic, shall we say, in its accuracy. And that is with the advantage of modern computers and the computer crunching of vast amounts of information. In 1944, weather forecasting was, to use the term primitive, would suggest that these people were in some way defective. That's not the case. They were operating within the parameters of the information available. But essentially, you are trying to predict what the weather is going to be by looking at what it is out in the Atlantic.

Neptune is still the biggest, most complex amphibious operation in history. And amphibious operations generally are the most complex operations that armed forces can do. Because it's like a gigantic game of Tetris. You're moving around ships and aircraft and soldiers and trying to get them all in the same place at the same time.

The fleet that's used for Neptune is ranging from tiny little assault landing craft of the kind that you see in Saving Private Ryan, right up to really significant size converted liners that are being used as landing ships.

The older style of landing on a beach would often be that you would have most of the troops in basically large rowing boats, which might be towed by a smaller number of motorboats.

When you got to the beach, the heavily laden troops would have to climb over the sides of these boats. They might well end up in quite deep water, and it would all be basically chaos. It would be quite a slow process.

Nuala Calvi is the author of the New York Times bestseller GI Brides, the wartime girls who crossed the Atlantic for love.

And as the ships came in, local kids would rush to the docks to meet them because they'd heard that the GIs had lots of candy and chewing gum.

His books include The French Resistance and Normandy, the landings to the liberation of Paris.

Before D-Day, the French Resistance gave many, many pieces of intelligence to the British, mainly, and to a certain extent to the Americans.

General Donovan, who was leading the Office of Strategic Services, OSS, which is the ancestor of the CIA, considered that the French had given 80% of the information necessary to plan our world.

His books include The French Resistance and Normandy, the landings to the liberation of Paris.

Sian Rees is a historian and biographer. Her books include Lucie Aubrac, the French Resistance heroine who defied the Gestapo.

Her books include The Spy Who Loved, The Women Who Flew for Hitler and Agent Zoe.

Her books include The Spy Who Loved, The Women Who Flew for Hitler and Agent Zoe.

Her books include The Spy Who Loved, The Women Who Flew for Hitler and Agent Zoe.

Professor Thomas Faber, author of Becoming Hitler, The Making of a Nazi.

Ever since being in power, he had got this tendency to, late at night, to summon people around him.

He would ask them questions, but ultimately he would give these monologues that could last half a night.

They were often actually dreaded by people closest to him, because they knew if they were called into one of those monologues, they wouldn't get much sleep that night.

Jonathan Trigg, author of D-Day Through German Eyes.

Hitler had a very, very strange working routine.

So he would sleep in late, and he would very rarely be up before kind of midday.

But he would work until the early hours.

So he was a night owl. He liked to be up at, you know, three, four, five in the morning.

And of course what that meant was that when he did finally go to bed, all his staff were told, well, don't, whatever you do, don't wake up the Fhrer.

Oh, you know, he's not a morning person.

Professor Nicholas O'Shaughnessy, author of Selling Hitler, Propaganda and the Nazi Brand.

Hitler's nightmare is happening now. The Allies have landed, but no one dare wake Hitler.

The Fhrer is asleep. King Redbeard is asleep in his mountain.

You mustn't, mustn't wake him because he's the most glorious man in all history.

He must have his sleep.

Rather typical of Hitler in the mid to later war, how utterly disastrous he was.

Copy was often censored by the Ministry of Information, but it didn't have to be. You could publish whatever you liked.

And afterwards, Wilmot wrote one of the classic histories of the Second World War, The Struggle for Europe.

The Allies had their secret master plan which was to tow harbours across the Channel, the famous Mulberry Harbours which were then to be installed at Aramanche, which was to allow the delivery of vast numbers of tanks and general military hardware onto the shores of France.