The People's D-Day
Simon Elmes
Radio Producer
This week, Radio 4 Extra commemorates the 70th anniversary of D-Day with another chance to hear the selection of landmark documentaries, dramas and discussions, first heard on Radio 4 in 2004.
In this post - an edited version of an article first published in 2004 - Simon Elmes, the Executive Producer of The People's D-Day, reflects on how ordinary people contributed to the Normandy invasion.
From the man who spent months making giant hinges not knowing what they were for (they were used to make Mulberry Harbours), to the young Welsh schoolboy who couldn't believe his eyes in late May 1944 when the huge convoys of trains rode down the railway tracks on which he used to flatten pennies: D-Day affected everyone.
It was a logistical endeavour of epic proportions. How were they going to get fuel across to France for the tanks, lorries and armoured cars? Build a floating pipeline across the Channel - that's how. Where were they going to moor all the vessels ready to sail in a single armada? At rapidly constructed special wharves and docks around Southampton and Portsmouth. How did they manage to do all this without the Germans getting wind of it? Operation Fortitude was the answer: A carefully planned campaign of deception featuring plywood aircraft, an imaginary army and inflatable tanks.
No wonder BBC reporter Frank Gillard, travelling through southern England on 4 June 1944, wrote in his memorable despatch:
‘England has become one vast ordnance dump and field park. I've driven through it today for the best part of a hundred miles. The roads are crammed with military traffic and lined often enough on both sides with vehicles of all kinds, just pulled-off and parked on the verges. Vast, really vast numbers of them. And great mountains of stores - weapons and ammunition, rations, bridging equipment, tyres, timber - millions of tons. And right in the middle of it all, just as I turned for home, I passed a field where 22 men in khaki shirts and battledress trousers and heavy hobnailed boots were having a quiet knock-up game of cricket. They made me think of Francis Drake and Plymouth Hoe.’
Frank Gillard, BBC War Correspondent, May 1944
The People's D-Day tells the stories of some of the men and women who contributed to and experienced the build up to D-Day first-hand. Not so much the vast battalions of servicemen who led the assault on occupied France, but the people who helped make it happen. Like those that made the detailed maps of Normandy by criss-crossing the enemy skies in unarmed reconnaissance aircraft to photograph the terrain. Or the then BBC engineer, Trevor Hill, who played the specially delivered disc announcing that D-Day had begun… several hours before the actual assault had started. Or of the woman who mistook her soldier husband for the coalman when he arrived unexpectedly the night before D-Day.
At the time, The People's D-Day was a unique collaboration by teams from BBC production departments in London and Bristol, who reacted to an unprecedented response to a BBC Radio 4 appeal that brought nearly 1000 fascinating individual stories of having lived through the momentous events of June 1944. Theirs is the story of 6 June 1944. The story of The People's D-Day is the warp and weft of those lives that watched and helped it happen.
Simon Elmes
Creative Director, Features & Documentaries, BBC.
Discover the full collection of Radio 4 Extra D-Day programmes
