“They told us to expect hell; they weren’t lying”

80 years ago on June 6, a young man from South London, Wally Parr, was flying through the night in a flimsy wooden glider a few thousand feet above the English Channel. He wasn’t alone. With him in one of the six gliders were his colleagues from the British Army’s 6th Airborne Division. The night before the Allies landed in Normandy they were heading behind enemy lines to capture a bridge from the Germans. Some would not see the dawn.

“What keeps most men in battle,” reflects one of them, “is that even though they see people dying left and right, they always have the idea that they’re not going to be among them.” These were the words of veteran veteran Wally Parr, who died in 2005, recorded during a post-World War II interview. These words from his interview are brought to life in the BBC2 series ‘D-Day: The Unheard Tapes’. It’s a moving three-episode series which commemorates what British, American and Canadian soldiers did one day in June 1944. But it also broadens its approach to include the accounts of French civilians and Resistance fighters – as well as the experiences of young of German gunners and radio operators in their shelters as they awaited the entry of some 150,000 Allied troops. In this series, actors in period costumes and uniforms are used to bring decades of audio interviews to life.

D-Day: The Unheard Tapes series director Mark Radiss, along with lip-syncers, film crews, historians and re-enactment teams, do just that. The simple, elegantly executed idea of ​​having the dead men’s recorded words interpreted by live actors rivals what epic war dramas set in the English Channel such as Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan or Dunkirk have done ” by Christopher Nolan: they ensure that the passage of time will not erase their memory.

As the glider, freed from the Halifax bomber that had towed it skyward from Dorset, balanced – writes TV critic Stuart Jeffries – we hear that someone opened the door to see the dark French fields below. “It was so quiet,” recalls Major John Howard, next to him and Parr in the airship was Lieutenant Dan Brotheridge, whose wife was due to give birth two weeks after the Allied D-Day in Normandy.

The silence was broken when the glider landed uneventfully. Major Howard remembers checking that his men were uninjured and then realizing they were only 50 meters from the Benouville Bridge they had been assigned to capture to stop any German tank advance. Seconds later, his men found themselves in a firefight with Nazi troops, during which Lieutenant Brotheridge was shot dead – making him one of the first casualties of D-Day and meaning his daughter grew up never knowing her father. Wally Parr knelt over him as he died. “Despite all the years of training he’d done,” we heard Par tell us, “he only lasted 20-30 seconds.”

“D-Day: The Unheard Tapes” overflows with such beautifully realized moments – bringing out the sadness and pity of war. Like when June 6 dawned over Normandy and thousands of American soldiers were 20 km away from Omaha Beach, thrashing in stormy waters on high-sided landing craft. An image familiar to anyone who has seen Saving Private Ryan.

Often seasick, pelted by incoming fire, some of these men speak of being ready to fight, while others nervously express their fears of death – an understandable fear, given that mass casualties were factored into the plans for Operation Overlord. As one of the men, Corporal Harry Parley of the US Army’s 29th Infantry Division, says: “We were told they expected about 30% casualties during the invasion.”

How did you feel when you arrived at Omaha Beach? Parley, sympathetically played by Ethan McHale, tells us: “The ramp came down, and you tightened up, took a deep breath and started to pray.”

The chaos and carnage that was these Americans’ first experience of France is eloquently summed up in this exchange. “What did they tell you to expect?” a reporter asks an African-American soldier. “Wait for hell. They didn’t lie to us about that.”

The series ‘D-Day: The Unheard Tapes’ is available on iPlayer.