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A re-enactment of Royal Marine commandos storming the beaches in Normandy, as
seen in D-Day: The Unheard Tapes. Photograph: BBC

View image in fullscreen
A re-enactment of Royal Marine commandos storming the beaches in Normandy, as
seen in D-Day: The Unheard Tapes. Photograph: BBC
TV reviewTelevision

Review


D-DAY: THE UNHEARD TAPES REVIEW – TV SO GOOD IT’S WORTH THE BBC LICENCE FEE ON
ITS OWN

This commemoration of the Normandy landings uses actors lip-syncing over period
interviews to stunning effect. It poignantly keeps these soldiers’ memories
alive


Stuart Jeffries
Sun 2 Jun 2024 23.00 CEST
Share



Eighty years ago this month a young bloke from south London called Wally Parr
was floating through the night in a flimsy wooden glider a few thousand feet
over the Channel. He wasn’t alone. Jammed alongside him in one of six such craft
were his mates from the British army’s 6th Airborne Division. On the night
before the D-day landings, they were heading behind enemy lines to capture a
bridge from the Germans. Some wouldn’t see the dawn.

If the 181 men on these gliders were afraid, adrenaline and delusion may have
helped still their nerves. “The thing that keeps most men going in battle,”
reflects one, “is despite seeing people die left right and centre, they always
get this idea that it’s not going to be them.” These were words of the late Pte
Parr, who died in 2005, recorded during an interview after the second world war.
Here, those words are brought to life by being lip-synced in a sweetly
characterful performance by Samuel Lawrence, a young actor dressed in 1940s
civvies.



This heartbreaking three-part series commemorates what British, American and
Canadian soldiers did one day in June 1944, but also widens its focus to include
the testimonies of French civilians and resistance fighters – as well as
considering the experiences of young German gunners and wireless operators in
their bunkers as they awaited the attentions of about 150,000 incoming allied
troops. In each case, actors in period dress are used to bring decades-old audio
interviews to life.

It’s an overwhelming success. Ever since Lord of the Rings director Peter
Jackson’s 2018 film They Shall Not Grow Old, which colourised black and white
footage of squaddies in the first world war trenches – and thereby made
century-old sacrifice up close and personal as never before – the bar has been
set high for TV making old soldiers’ sacrifice emotionally resonant to
21st-century viewers. The series director of D-Day: The Unheard Tapes, Mark
Radice, along with the lip-syncers, film crews, historians and re-enactment
groups, do just that, however. The simple, elegantly realised device of having
late men’s recorded words performed by living actors rivals what epic dramatic
Channel-set wartime films such as Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan or
Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk did, namely ensuring that age shall not wither their
memory.

As the glider, released from the Halifax bomber that had towed it skyward from
Dorset, levelled out, we hear that someone opened the door to reveal the
darkling French fields below. “It was so quiet,” recalls Maj John Howard.
Sitting nearby him and Parr in the glider was Lt Den Brotheridge, whose wife was
due to give birth two weeks after D-day.

The silence was interrupted as the glider crash landed. Maj Howard recalled
checking that his men were uninjured and then realised they were only 50 yards
from the Benouville Bridge they had been tasked with seizing to halt any advance
by German tanks. Seconds later, his men were in a gunfight with Nazi troops,
during which Lt Brotheridge was shot – making him one of D-day’s first
casualties, and meaning his daughter grew up never knowing her dad. Wally Parr
knelt over him as he died. “All the years of training he’d put in,” we hear Parr
tell us. “He only lasted 20 seconds, 30 seconds.”

D-day: The Unheard Tapes brims with such beautifully realised vignettes – making
clear the sorrow and pity of war. As 6 June dawned over Normandy, we hear how
thousands of US troops were 13 miles off Omaha Beach bobbing in choppy waters in
high-sided landing crafts, familiar to anyone who has ever seen Saving Private
Ryan.

Often seasick, strafed with incoming fire, some of the these men talk about
being keyed up to fight, others nervously voicing their fears about dying – an
understandable fear, given mass deaths had been factored into the plans for
Operation Overlord. As one of the men, Pte Harry Parley from the US army’s 29th
Infantry Division, puts it: “We were told they expected about 30% casualties in
the invasion.”

What did it feel like when you arrived at Omaha Beach? Parley, sympathetically
interpreted by Ethan McHale, tells us: “The ramp went down, your asshole
puckered up, you took a deep breath and you started to pray.”

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

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Not for a second have I ever been resentful about paying the BBC licence fee,
but I’ve hardly ever been as happy to do so as when watching D-Day: The Unheard
Tapes. It’s one of the best pieces of public service broadcasting I’ve seen in
years.

D-Day: The Unheard Tapes aired on BBC Two and is available on iPlayer.

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