D-Day: The Unheard Tapes review – TV so good it’s worth the BBC licence fee on its own | Television
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eeighty years ago this month, a young South Londoner named Wally Parr was drifting at night in a flimsy wooden glider several thousand feet above the English Channel. He was not alone. Stranded beside him in one of six such ships were his comrades from the British Army’s 6th Airborne Division. On the night before the D-day landings, they went behind enemy lines to capture a bridgehead from the Germans. Some would not see the dawn.
If the 181 men on these gliders were afraid, the adrenaline and delusion may have helped calm their nerves. “The thing that drives most men into combat,” reflected one, “is that even though they see people dying left right and centre, they always get the idea that it’s not going to be them.” These were the words of the late Pte Parr , who died in 2005, recorded during an interview after World War II. Here, those words are brought to life by lip-syncing in a sweet signature performance by Samuel Lawrence, a young actor dressed in 1940s civilian clothes.
This heart-wrenching three-part series commemorates what British, American and Canadian soldiers did on one day in June 1944, but also broadens its focus to include the accounts of French civilians and resistance fighters – as well as examining the experiences of young German gunners and wireless operators in their bunkers as they awaited the attention of some 150,000 arriving Allied troops. In each case, actors in period dress are used to revive audio interviews from decades ago.
It’s a huge success. Ever since The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson’s 2018 film They Shall Not Grow Old, which colorized black-and-white footage of squadrons in the trenches of World War I — and in doing so, got a century-old sacrifice up close and personal, like never before—the bar has been set high for television, making the sacrifice of the old soldiers emotionally resonant for 21st-century viewers. However, D-Day: The Unheard Tapes series director Mark Radiss, along with dubbers, film crews, historians and re-enactment crews, are doing just that. The simple, elegantly realized device of having the recorded words of late men performed by live actors rivals what epic Channel war dramas like Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan or Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk have done, namely ensure that age it won’t erase their memory.
As the glider, freed from the Halifax bomber that had pulled it skyward from Dorset, levels off, we hear that someone has opened the door to reveal the dark French fields below. “It was so quiet,” recalled Maj. John Howard. Sitting near him and Parr in the glider was Lieutenant Dan Brotheridge, whose wife was due to give birth two weeks after D-Day.
The silence was broken when the glider crashed. Major Howard recalls checking that his men were unharmed and then realizing they were only 50 yards from the Benouville Bridge, which they were tasked with capturing to stop any German tank advance. Seconds later, his men were involved in a firefight with Nazi troops, during which Lieutenant Brotheridge was shot dead – making him one of the first casualties of D-Day, which meant his daughter grew up without knowing her father. Wally Parr knelt over him as he died. “All the years of training he’s put in,” we hear Parr tell us. “He only lasted 20 seconds, 30 seconds.”
D-day: The Unheard Tapes is full of such beautifully realized vignettes – elucidating the sorrow and regret of war. As June 6 dawned over Normandy, we hear how thousands of American soldiers were 13 miles from Omaha Beach, bobbing in rough waters in the high-sided landing craft familiar to anyone who’s ever seen Saving Private Ryan.
Often seasick, pelted by incoming fire, some of these men speak of being ready to fight, others nervously express their fears of death – an understandable fear given that mass casualties were included in the plans for operation overlord. As one of the men, Pte Harry Parley of the US Army’s 29th Infantry Division, put it: “We were told they were expecting about 30% casualties in the invasion.”
How did it feel when you arrived in Omaha Beach? Parley, sympathetically played by Ethan McHale, tells us, “The ramp went down, your ass puckered up, you took a deep breath and you started praying.”
The chaos and carnage that was these Americans’ first experience in France is eloquently summed up in this exchange. “What were you told to expect?” an interviewer asks an African-American soldier? “Expect hell. They didn’t lie to us about that.”
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I’ve never for a second resented paying the license fee to the BBC, but I’ve hardly ever been as happy to do so as when I watched D-Day: The Unheard Tapes. This is one of the best pieces of public broadcasting I’ve seen in years.
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