Well it seems absolutely amazing that it's 80 years ago that D-Day took place and I remember the first time I went to Normandy was in 2004 on the 60th anniversary and back then I didn't know an awful lot but since then I've done a huge amount of research into the Second World War and also the whole Normandy campaign and one of the things that's really struck me is just that the narrative of World War Two and that particularly applies to D-Day and the Normandy campaign has sort of become misaligned, it's become The stuff of really entrenched myths, which actually, when you start to peel away the layers, don't really stack up to anything. There's a level of nuance that's being missed, and I think it's really important to understand How wars are fought, and they're basically fought on three levels the top, you've got the strategic, Which is the overview, what you're trying to do.

 

People go off story made into TV shows or read books made into a story that is action packed that are lead normally by popular historian's like Dan Snow or James Holland or Tony Robinson most of which are not true or real historian's

 

You know, this is kind of Churchill and Hitler and Roosevelt and their war aims and their top generals. Then you've got the tactical level, and that is the cold face of war. So this is a bloke in his Sherman tank, this is a guy in his Spitfire, this infantryman in his foxhole, it's the actual fighting bit, it's the crashes and bangs and bullets and so on. In the middle, you've got the operational level. And the operational level is the bit that links the strategic to the tactical. And in its basic form, we're talking about the nuts and bolts of war, we're talking about economics, about supplies, we're talking about factories, we're talking about these trucks which are helping to support this tank. It's about medical supplies, it's about making sure that British people have got enough, you know, soldiers have got enough cups of tea, that Americans have got their Camel cigarettes and Hershey bars.

 

It's shipping, it's that big picture stuff. And actually it's this operational level that's been left out of the narrative. You know, whether it be documentaries on television, whether it be films, whether it be books particularly, people have tended to concentrate on that higher level, the high command, and the experience at the front, and not talked about the kind of the big chain. And when you do reinsert the operational level, everything changes. And what you realise is that the Allies are carrying out kind of big war, big chain behind everything that they do, whereas the Germans are fighting out, fighting kind of small war. And We focus so heavily on the actual fighting. I mean, it's amazing to think that of all the fighting that goes on, you know, of all the Allied armies in Normandy, only 14% are infantry and only 7% are actually the guys in the tanks.

 

And something like 45% are service troops. And that tells you everything you need to know, really, about the Allied way of fighting the war. It's a very, very different picture for the Germans, where you know, 70% of their troops are actually frontline troops and the rest are service troops. And the problem is that by 1944, the Germans just haven't got enough of anything. They haven't got enough fuel, they haven't got enough food, they haven't got enough supplies. What they are able to do, because they've got so little, it doesn't take them very much to organise themselves. You know, this is what's called the freedom of poverty. They're quite poor, so they have this freedom to manoeuvre, because if you haven't got very much, you haven't got many guns to organise, you haven't got any Luftwaffe in the sky, the Air Force is in the sky,

 

you haven't got any naval to organise, it's easy peasy to just get your troops and do something very swiftly. Whereas the Allies have got this big chain, this big tail, this big war approach. They've got offshore naval guns, they've got vast air forces above them, they've got guns behind them, they've got this supply network to keep feeding the front line, and of course that takes time to organise. This is, in a way, the constraints of wealth, the material wealth that the Allies have. And what this means is, It takes them a bit longer to get organised but it's also a much safer way of fighting. That operationally heavy, big war heavy approach to war is unquestionably the right way to go because ultimately it means the number of people at the coalface of war, the number of people actually fighting is comparatively small and ultimately that means you save lives.

 

So what you're doing is effectively you're using steel, not flesh. you're using industrialization, mechanization, big picture stuff to do a lot of the hard yards for you. And sometimes it's a bit ugly, sometimes it's a bit slow, it can be a bit methodical, but it does mean that not only are you winning battles, you're also winning the entire war. And surrounding me here, I've got trucks, a Sherman tank, a Jeep, and these are very much the weapons of that war, that big war that the Allies are carrying out. Well, I know that everyone says that the Tiger tank and the Panther, two German tanks, were kind of the best of the Second World War, but for me it's the Sherman wins it absolutely hands down.

 

This one, although they're American built, this is done in British colours, the boys are in their British battle dress, sort of denim battle dress, and you can see here this is the symbol of 8th Armoured Brigade, and this tank is done up in the colours of the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, and I'm particularly interested about them because I'm great mates with the son of the former commanding officer for much of the Normandy campaign and right through to the end of the war. I edited Stanley Christopherson's diaries and the Sherwood Rangers feature really heavily throughout my Normandy 44 book. So it's always a joy seeing this tank particularly and to see it in these colours. And the Sherwood Rangers Yomiuri are really interesting because actually they started off as a kind of pretty small beer TA unit in 1939.

They went off to war in 1939 on their horses on their charges off to Palestine, they then had them taken away, they did artillery for a little bit, they were at Tobruk, they were in Crete, they were eventually mechanised in time for the Battle of Alamein and there on they just started to become really, really good and one of the best armoured units in the whole British Army. And actually by the end of the war they were the single unit with more battle honours than any other unit at all ever in the history of the British Army, so they're pretty, pretty special And it's just fantastic to see this tank in these colours. The reason why the Sherman is so good, obviously, it may look big from this angle, but actually compared to the gun of a Tiger or Panther tank, it is quite small.

 

But you can't just look at it in terms of a big gun. Now, obviously, if a Sherman was on one end of a football pitch and a German Tiger or Panther at the other end, both of those tanks would probably win. However, this has lots of really big advantages. that a Panther and a Tiger don't have. And it's really important, because of that operational level, that big war approach to the conflict that the Allies had, that you see the Sherman tank in the round. So one of the points is that this is 30 tonnes. And it's really important, this can fit very easily into a Liberty ship. You've got to get them all the way across America, don't forget, to get them to France or to the Pacific or wherever.

 

These are really important because this is what hoists them from the quayside into your Liberty ship or your your landing craft or whatever it might be. So you need that, so you don't want them too big the other thing is that when you're going forward, as your enemy are retreating, they tend to sort of blow up bridges as they're retreating and falling back. So you need to get across those bridges. And in 1944, the most common way of getting across a bridge was to put a type, a class 40 bailey bridge across it. And as the name suggests, it could take 40 tons. So it's no good having a tiger tank, which weighs 56 tons or a Tiger II, which weighs 72, because it's not going to be able to cross that bridge.

 

Even when you've got five lads on this tank, it's full of ammunition, it's got extra ballast and protection on it with wood and the odd chicken and what have you, and extra fuel, it's still not going to be 40 tonnes. So there is this practical reason for it. The other thing about the Sherman tank is it is really, really simple for a tank. Now, Now, I'm now going to contradict that by saying that tanks are not simple beasts. You know, they've got lots and lots of different parts, incredibly complex, so you really want to keep them working in the field. And to keep them working in the field, you want to keep them as simple as you possibly can. And that's what this does with Belzon.

 

It's got a very simple gearbox, simple to replace, simple to repair, four forward, one back, manual, nice and easy to use. It's got a very simple engine at the back, it's got a variety of different engines actually, but you can hoist them out from the back here, the plate comes off very simply, and actually, you can replace an engine in one of these in about two hours. That's what craftsmen could do, engineers could do in the war. If you needed one, you'd take it back to just behind your lines, there would be workshops, mobile workshops. When the Allies were building all these Sherman tanks, they were also building tank wreckers, low loaders, winches, all sorts of stuff, cranes etc etc, bringing them all over to Normandy with these tanks, so it's not just the tanks, it's the long arm of support that goes with them, you undo a few bolts, you pull out the engine, put another one back in, you know it's obviously not as easy as that is it Jim, but it is basically as simple as that.

 

There's other little design features, so here you've got hardly any wheels, you know a PAMF has something like over 30 different wheels all interlocked on it, which is incredibly complicated. The suspension's behind. If anything goes wrong with the tracks or the wheels, you've got to take the whole system off. As you can see here, this is the suspension arms, and they're on the outside. So if any one of them goes wrong, you can just unbolt this, put another one in. They built 49,000 Sherman tanks and 74,000 Sherman hulls. By contrast, the Germans built 1,347 Tigers and 492 King Tigers. So in terms of productivity, this absolutely wipes the floor with any German tank by an absolute country mile. I think there were about 8,000 Pampers built.

But these are just such small numbers by comparison to the Sherman tank. And this is its great thing. It's really reliable. It's easy to maintain. It does a really good job. And then actually, although it might have a comparatively smaller gun, a lower velocity gun, and its velocity that really counts with anti-tank guns, because it's the speed with which the projectile can be forced through the air that really counts. Despite that, this is very quick firing. You can fire way more many shells per minute from a Sherman tank than you can from a Tiger or a Panther. The turret moves much more quickly than a Tiger or a Panther. It also has a gyro on it, which is the only tank in the war that does, which means that when you're on the move, it's much more accurate than any other tank.

 

And so what Allied tank crews are working out by 1944, by the time they're in Normandy, is that actually what you can do is when you see a Panther, what you do is you just slam, slam, slam, lots of shells straight at its turret. What then happens is the German crew inside then duck down. The moment you duck down and you put your head below the parapet, your visibility is much, much less. The Panther then moves, or you and your Sherman tank manoeuvre yourself so that you can then hit the Panther in its more vulnerable areas, on the tracks, on its side, up the backside, and that's how you destroy it. And actually, Sergeant Dring and his crew, on the 27th of June 1944, were operating just south of a little village called Roray, which was about 15-20 miles inland from the beaches, and they came up against a series of Panther tanks and Tigers, and Panzermk IVs, which was a kind of German equivalent of this, and Sergeant Dring alone and his crew managed to destroy one Tiger, two Pampers and two Panzermk IVs in that one day alone, using a gun the same size as this, using a tank exactly the same as this. So this idea that the Sherman tank was inferior to the Panther and Tigers is not necessarily true. The other thing I'd like to say is that Normandy is really a war that needs to be understood on three levels. It does involve the war at sea. It does involve naval forces and merchant shipping and landing craft and thousands of them. It also really involves air power, and air power is absolutely crucial to the Allied victory.
Before D-Day, in ensuring that the Germans can't get to Normandy any time quick by destroying bridges, blowing up marshaling yards, destroying railways and roads and so on, so making it as hard as the Germans to move their forces from around France and Germany and elsewhere and the Low Countries up to the Normandy battlefront. So that's really important. It's also really important in knocking out installations, German communication networks before D-Day actually happens. And once D-Day actually does happen, it's then also vital for shooting up German columns, anything that moves in daylight, Allied air power, or JABOs as the Germans called them, that's short for Jagdbomber, in other words, fighter bomber, Allied air force are just pouncing on them, absolutely hammering them. So, it's all very well having Tiger tanks and Panther tanks, which are big and vast and have a big scary gun and lots of armour and look terrifying if you're an Allied soldier coming up against them.
But if you can't maintain them in the field, they're next to useless. What happens when they run out of fuel? what happens when they need a new gasket, or new spark plugs, or some other minor part, or even just a little bit of link chain to the tracks going around the wheels. If you haven't got that supply network to support them, they're only as good as they work in one go. So, these are the problems facing the Germans, and they're ones that ultimately they can't get over. And it's often been depicted that the British and Canadian armies, particularly, were banging their heads against a brick wall of German panzer divisions. And it has to be said, there was never a greater concentration of panzer divisions in the whole of the Second World War than what was facing the British and the Canadians in Normandy.
But in actual fact, it's more the other way around. It was more that the panzer divisions were facing a brick wall of British and Canadian armies. And what happened was the British and Canadians just chewed up the Germans and chewed up those Panzer divisions, those absolutely best units that the Germans had, ground them down until they got to a point where they could no longer really stand it. And credit where credit's due, the Americans were doing exactly the same. They weren't facing quite as many Panzer divisions further away to the west in Normandy, but they were facing a lot of German divisions and again they just chewed them up at great cost to their own lives of their own soldiers. But the Americans were doing exactly the same thing as the British and the Canadians, using steel, not flesh, as much as possible.
And it was incredibly efficient for the day and incredibly effective. And what one has to remember is, despite all the criticism about Allied equipment and weaponry and about the slow pace of the Normandy campaign, those are, for me, just armchair historians who frankly want their heads examining because they're way, way, way off the mark. Normandy was an incredible victory for the Allies, achieved almost two weeks earlier than presumed before the campaign took place. And it was won a through the unbelievable courage of the people who were taking part, but also because of this big war picture that the Allies were so good at carrying out.