Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About D-Day

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About D-Day | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra

"‘What does the D in D day stand for?’

‘I'm often asked about this question. And the answer is it doesn't stand for anything. The truth of the matter is that all operations had a very boring title. No one had really standardised anything, and the D is simply the phonetic alphabet, just as H is for Hour. And this is the way you tie down in military speak a precise time and date for your operation. And it hadn't happened really very much before. And this is really Winston Churchill tying things down... it doesn't stand for deliverance or anything else that people suggest. It's simply the first initial letter of the word Day.’

‘So essentially, it's Day Day’...

'There's huge amounts of debates and we could have hours and hours of wonderful fun debating why and where and how. The Americans want to go early. We realized that the Germans are so tough an enemy. The British policy throughout 1942 and 1943 is to persuade our American colleagues to wait and gain experience and also develop all the craft and tanks and aircraft we need and in the right quantities before we eventually land, because a premature landing would have been absolutely disastrous. That was what Churchill felt at the time. Roosevelt supported him. We have to give a big shout to our Canadian partners, they're often in danger of being left out of the D Day story. And, and it's not only manpower, it's their huge manufacturing capacity that helped Britain in her hour of need. So it all really comes together for 1944. Churchill is reluctant to go ahead too quickly. The Americans eventually get suspicious of this. And so there is a narrative that Churchill was against D Day. I don't think it was so much that he was against D day. His obsession was the Mediterranean, which was really a British sea in those days, whereas the Americans wanted to get on with the main business which they saw as an invasion of France. And eventually it's at the big power conference in Tehran, where Stalin and Roosevelt really gang up on the British and also at Casablanca and we eventually sort of cave in to American and Russian pressure to get on and name D Day as a date and give it a commander in chief who is, of course, Eisenhower.’...

Allied ration packs are very interesting. The British have devised them and they're still with us today. And generally the Briton, Canadian ration packs produce a, a wholesome if stodgy meal that will last for 24 hours and produce about 1500 calories a day. That's more than the civilians are getting. The American ration packs are even much more luxurious. And those are producing something like four and a half thousand calories a day. So much, much more. And are full of things like chocolate that are in short supply for, for the Brits. This is also the arrival of freeze dried coffee for the first time. So you find that in American, Russian packs. And that sets the gold standard. The Germans do have rations, but it's very much based on what they can get from the French civilian population. German home industry producing foodstuffs is really hampered by the Allied sea blockade. So German rations are very, very poor indeed. And whenever they can, they supplement with whatever they can capture from the Brits and the Americans. So there's a huge disparity...

I think more people were killed in the training for D Day than on the actual day itself. And that underlines just how realistic and tough the training was. So this isn't about the blame game. It's the fact that that training was necessary and relevant. And you know, the takeaway from that is if you undertake something that's so crucially important to deciding the future of World War Two, the gloves come off, you will lose people in training. And the very fact that those those deaths never counted before because they crossed different armies, different nationalities, different training areas, and all sorts of different causes of death: explosives that go off prematurely, drowning, there's a lot who died from drowning. All of this adds up to the fact that the D Day casualty bill, if the training hadn't been that tough, would have been double, treble what it was on the actual day. But let's put this in context. The planners of D day were expecting 20,000 people to die on that first day alone. We don't even approach anything like that. So we get away with much, much lighter casualties than we could ever possibly have imagined. And that's an enormous gift to the allies. The campaign itself as it goes on, exceeds our worst planning assumptions with, with casualties, but with D Day itself as a snapshot, we get away remarkably lightly...

‘We tend to think of the Germans fighting D Day as this wonderful war machine. That's only the machine that arrives in the later stages of the Normandy campaign. And so the story of the allies who are superbly well equipped, average age 21, or having undertaken at least a year's worth of relevant meaningful training. We need to contrast with the German defenders - average age 35. Rommel had met a gunner who was aged 58 in a gun emplacement. Most of whom have not done any meaningful training and by comparison of their equipments, they are much less well fed, less well equipped, they have poorer supplies of ammunition, their medical training and resources are, are far inferior. And most of the Germans in Normandy on D Day are reliant on horses and bicycles for their mobility. The Allies don't take a single horse to the Normandy campaign at all. That's the truth of the matter of weighing up the two sides on D Day and we often forget it. Why? Well, we overlook the fact that the Germans are reliant on over 150,000 horses in Normandy, because we look at the newsreels. And this is where the Germans still score very highly in our perception of World War Two today. All the newsreels show German tanks and half tracks and trucks and kugelwagens their equivalent of the Jeep driving up to the front. And the reality is the number of vehicles in the German Armed Forces is tiny, and they're short of fuel, and they risk a great deal by moving around in daylight. So the vast majority of Germans move on foot, reliant on horses to tow all their heavy stuff or bicycles. And that's a huge huge disparity. But today if we are studying the Second World War, we look at those newsreels, the model makers love them to, to reproduce all the different variety of German kit that they see on the newsreels. And the reality is the cameramen were told to turn off their cameras whenever horses came into view.’"