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Thank you. Hello and welcome to Battleground 44 with me, Patrick Bishop.

This is the series, of course, in which we look at what was going on in the Second World War 80 years ago.

Well, in June 1944, the long-awaited Allied invasion of North West Europe was finally underway. The clamour for a second front to relieve the pressure

on the Red Army in the East had been going on since 1942, coming not only from the Soviets,

but from the Americans who were increasingly exasperated by Britain's

understandably cautious attitude to launching a military operation of historical proportions.

Failure had taught Churchill and his generals the need for extreme prudence, but finally they could

delay no longer. Despite all the preparations, the

landings were still fraught with danger and the possibility of total disaster was very real.

Many things did go wrong on D-Day, notably on the airborne side of the plan. Many American

paratroopers were dropped in the wrong place due to high winds, inexperienced pilots,

and diversions to avoid the German flak batteries. Today, we're going to talk about something that

went right. Spectacularly so. That is the British airborne forces capture of the bridges over

the Concanal and the River Orne, vital objectives that had to be seized if the left flank of the bridges over the Concanel and the River Horn, vital objectives that had to be seized

if the left flank of the proposed Allied bridgehead was to be secured from German counter-attack.

Now, we've talked about this before with Saul when we were discussing his new book, Sky Warriors,

which is a history of the British Airborne Forces in World War II. It's a great story,

and today I'm going to revisit it with my guest Tim Butcher, who has a personal connection to

the story. We're also going to range beyond it to discuss the place that D-Day has in our

...