On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Landings, France Télévisions is offering two new episodes from the “Apocalypse” collection on Wednesday, dedicated to the landings in Normandy and Provence, narrated by Mathieu Kassovitz.
“Operation Overlord”, “D-Day”, “Operation Neptune”… There is no shortage of code names to describe the largest amphibious military operation in history. On the night of June 5 to 6, 1944, 5,000 ships carrying 133,000 American, British, Canadian, Australian, French and Polish soldiers crossed the Channel to attack the Normandy coast. Disinformation maneuvers and the weather fooled the Germans, who were taken by surprise by this extraordinary attack.
Apocalypse – The landingswritten and directed by the documentary duo Isabelle Clarke and Daniel Costelle, retrace in two episodes the preparations for this operation and the day of this major offensive. Isabelle Clarke explains to franceinfo how they were able to carry out this work to tell little-known episodes of the Landings.
Franceinfo: How did you work to produce these two episodes of the documentary series Apocalypse?
Isabelle Clarke: NOTwe have harvest 300 hours of films. Ua large, slightly shapeless mass, which we sculpt over the months and which we constantly refine, in order to find the right word and simplicity. We are the first viewers, with Mathieu Kassovitz, our narrator, so if there are things that he does not understand, that are not clear, we sharpen the point. These two 52-minute films took us two years. It’s really a lot of teamwork. There are librarians to whom we submit a list of what we would like to find. About halfway through the editing, the texts are sent to our two historical advisors: Ivan Cadeau for the military part and Alya Aglan for the purely historical part.
Once editing is complete, during the post-production period which lasts six months, we restore the images using the latest technologies, and restore the colors, partly with artificial intelligence. The 700 plans included in the two documentaries are documented and validated by a historian on the color of the tanks, the uniforms, the decoration…
Where do the images used come from, some of which are previously unpublished?
In the past, directors toured the film libraries. Today, with dematerialization, we have correspondents all over the world. We always work with the same people, with national and regional film libraries. We also launched a major call for images with La Presse de la Manche. People often take their cameras to film moments of happiness, so we have a lot of images from the Liberation, we also had some from resistance fighters in the Vercors. It’s always a real pleasure when new films arrive, like those of this famous dress rehearsal for the D-Day landings, at the end of April 1944, which lasted eight days at Slapton Sands, a beach in the southwest of England.
This quest allowed you to put into images this relatively little-known episode of the Landings: a rehearsal organized in England in April 1944. What happened during this “Operation Tiger”?
The images were classified secret, because these rehearsals, which were entirely filmed, were a terrible fiasco. There were more than 1,000 deaths. American and English soldiers killed in part by the Germans who had intercepted their radio frequency and who were able to launch a surprise attack by sea on board torpedo boats, but also because of numerous failures on site. The instructors fired live ammunition during the exercises, in order to put these fighters in the real conditions of the Landings. The weather was bad, there was a lot of fog [artificiel] and it turned into a tragedy.
To the point of calling into question the operation of June 6, 1944…
At the same time, the Allies lost the D-Day plans, which were aboard a barge sunk by the Germans. American General Eisenhower once considered canceling Operation Overlord. But underwater searches made it possible to find these plans. There was definitely a succession of trials, blunders and adjustments needed before the big day.
The June 6 Landings are the largest amphibious operation of all time, it was an incredible challenge and, inevitably, there were many mistakes. This is the reason why this sad episode remained forgotten for a long time. The documents were not declassified until 1984, so we had access to the raw footage, as no film had been edited before.
Your documentary also recalls a previous landing attempt, in 1942…
We may have forgotten it, but there had already been a repetition: the great landing of Dieppe, in 1942. Many combatants had died and the General Staff understood that it was absolutely necessary not to land near ‘a port, that it was necessary to find beaches and then make a floating body in order to bring in reinforcements and equipment.
The disaster of the Dieppe landings in 1942
The documentary “Apocalypse-The Landings” retraces both the preparations for Operation “Overlord” and the progress of the landing on June 6, 1944.
(CC&C – Mediawan Group/ France Télévisions)
What are the moments that struck you the most in the multitude of images brought together to tell this part of the story?
This obviously tragic dress rehearsal, which I didn’t know existed. But what touched me most were all these young men who went off to fight, who were only children. We talk a lot about courage and fear, but the right word seems to me to be “sacrifice”. It is truly a sacrificed generation, a waste. There is also a speech by Eisenhower that struck me, when he said: “We will prove to the whole world that democracies can be a formidable war machine.”
The two-part documentary Apocalypse – The landings, directed by Isabelle Clarke and Daniel Costelle, is broadcast Wednesday June 5 at 9:10 p.m. on France 2 and on the platform france.tv.