I fell asleep to a Mark Felton production, the phone must have been cycling through various WWII YouTube’s as I slept, woke up to this excellent documentary.
Outstanding colorized combat footage from both sides, one hour and forty minutes long.
When I was growing up, I heard mention that my next door neighbor was in some bad fighting in WWII. He never mentioned being in the service, so I never asked him about it. He died 20 years or so ago and it was just a couple years ago that I learned a little of what he went thru. He was on one of the first, if not the first landing craft to hit Omaha beach. Everyone on the landing craft was killed as soon as they hit the beach, except him. You've heard of the men that had to climb the cliffs and the fire they were under, well, he was one of them. You also read about men that had no units to left, and just joined up with whoever made it off the beach, again, he was one of them.
I dont know what other battles he was in, but the men in our community said it was some of the worse.
There is another WWII vet in our community and he was with Pattons armored divisions. He told me he came up thru Italy, with Patton and was with him till the end of the war.
Thanks for posting. I just finished watching and it is a fresh perspective with actual footage that I never really grasped before. Highly recommended 👍🏻
At 1hr 24min…. Churchill arriving in a captured Fieseler Storch with RAF rondelles. Ya I know we had nothing comparable but the British Prime Minister arriving in a war zone in a distinctively German airplane? Remarkable.
1hr 30min…. RAF Typhoons going in almost vertical to strike the Falais gap.
17min…. Footage of my childhood home Blackpool, thirteen years before my arrival 🙂
There were several combat vets in the small, rural town in which I grew up, but there was one there who had a unique combat experience.
He was a waist gunner on a B17. In late 1943 on their 22 mission over Germany, his plane was shot down. He parachuted out, was captured, beaten up (The Germans resented the airmen who bombed their cities), and sent to a Stalag. He spent the rest of the war there, and said there was nothing "fun" about being there. He said he was lucky to be alive.
He was also credited with shooting down two German fighters .
It was not combat on D-Day, but those USAAF pilots and crews were being shot at every day.
My uncle was one of those guys who hit the beach during the Normandy invasion. His landing craft was hit by artillery fire offshore, and he swam through burning fuel to get there. He was horribly scarred from his neck to his waist for the rest of his life. Ironically, that might have also saved his life, as most of his original unit was wiped out at the battle of the bulge while he was in a field hospital, recovering from his wounds.