SecondEighty years ago this month, a young man from south London named Wally Parr floated thousands of feet above the English Channel in a flimsy wooden glider. He is not alone. Sitting alongside him in one of six such aircraft were fellow soldiers from the British Army’s 6th Airborne Division. The night before D-Day, they headed behind enemy lines to seize a bridge from the Germans. Some people cannot see the dawn.
If the 181 people aboard these gliders were scared, adrenaline and paranoia might help soothe their nerves. One person reflected: “What keeps most people fighting is that, despite seeing someone die on the left or center, they always think it won’t be them.” This was the case for the late Pte Parr, who died in 2005. Words recorded during an interview after World War II. Here, Samuel Lawrence, a young actor dressed in 1940s street clothes, brings these words to life through lip-syncing.
This heartbreaking three-part series commemorates what British, American and Canadian soldiers did on a single day in June 1944, but also broadens the focus to include the testimonies of French civilians and resistance fighters, and considers young The experiences of German gunners and radio operators as they waited in bunkers for the arrival of some 150,000 incoming Allied troops. In each case, actors are dressed in period costumes, bringing decades-old audio interviews to life.
It was a huge success. Not since “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson’s 2018 film “They Shall Not Grow Old” colorized black-and-white footage of soldiers in the trenches of World War I, giving an up-close and personal look at the centuries-old war. Since his death, the sacrifice of the veteran soldier in the bar drama has aroused emotional resonance among 21st century audiences. Yet that’s exactly what D-Day: The Unheard Tapes series director Mark Radice, along with lip-sync actors, film crews, historians and re-enactment groups, did. This simple yet elegant approach, in which recordings of deceased people are performed by living actors, can be compared with the likes of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Rain or Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, which is set in the Channel ‘s epic wartime films rival those that ensure age doesn’t wither their memories.
As the glider was released from the Halifax bomber and towed skyward from Dorset, we heard someone opening the door to reveal the dark French fields below. “It was very quiet,” Major John Howard recalled. Sitting next to him and Parr in the glider was Lieutenant Den Blatheridge, whose wife was due to give birth two weeks after D-Day.
The glider crash broke the silence. Major Howard recalled checking that his men were unwounded and then realized that they were only 50 yards away from the Benouville Bridge, which their mission was to capture and stop any advance of German tanks. Seconds later, Lieutenant Blatheridge was shot and killed in a shootout between his men and Nazi troops, making him one of the first casualties of D-Day, meaning his daughter was growing up Zhong never knew her father. When he died, Wally Parr knelt beside him. “He put in so many years of training,” we heard Parr tell us. “He only lasted 20 or 30 seconds.”
D-Day: The Unheard Tapes is filled with such beautifully crafted vignettes – clearly expressing the sorrow and compassion of war. At dawn on June 6, over Normandy, we heard thousands of U.S. troops bobbing in choppy waters in high-sided landing craft 13 miles from Omaha Beach. Be familiar with this situation.
The men were frequently seasick and facing incoming fire, some of them spoke of the excitement of battle, others nervously expressed their fear of death – considering the mass death that had been factored into the plans for Operation Overlord , this fear is understandable. As one of them, Pte Harry Parley of the U.S. Army’s 29th Infantry Division, said: “We were told they expected about 30 percent casualties from the invasion.”
How did it feel when you arrived at Omaha Beach? Ethan McHale sympathetically paraphrases Parley, telling us, “The ramp goes down, your asshole puckers, you take a deep breath, and you start praying.”
The chaos and carnage these Americans first experienced in France is eloquently summed up in this exchange. “What did they tell you to expect?” the interviewer asked the African American soldier? “Expect hell. They didn’t lie to us about this.
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I’ve never been unhappy about paying the BBC license fee, but I’ve never been as happy to do so as I was to watch D-Day: The Unheard Tapes. This is one of the best public service broadcasts I’ve seen in years.
