Thanks for joining us this hour.

Really happy to have you here.

We've got an interesting show for you tonight.

I'm particularly glad that you're here for it.

We're going to start a ways back, as we sometimes do.

When Allied soldiers came ashore on the coast of France

on the beaches of Normandy for the D-Day invasion,

they opened up a new Western front against the Nazis in Europe.

And that, of course, was a shock to the Germans, right?

This operation overlord, the D-Day invasion invasion it relied on the element of surprise.

And the Germans really were shocked.

They had been occupying France for four years at that point.

They had installed a collaborationist regime that they assembled

from pro-Fascist and pro-Nazi forces inside France and so the

collaborationists and the Nazis together were ruling France and they had been for years.

Now there was a French resistance to the Nazi rule and to the collaborationists, but the Nazis and their puppets were definitely in charge.

They were actually heading into year five

of being in charge.

They were really settled in in France. And then here comes this shock arrival, this invasion, hundreds of thousands,

ultimately millions of Allied troops landing on the beaches and the cliffs of the

northwest of France. and they are clearly

planning to take it all back. The D-Day invasion, the Allied invasion started on

...