BAND OF BROTHERS: On the Ground at BRECOURT MANOR!!! | History Traveler Episode 185

[Music] uh for the past few days we have been making our way through the normandy area and as you you travel through this country you'll see several little villages dotted throughout that look a lot like this one right here this is the village of the grand shimano and on the morning of d-day this would have served as the headquarters for the second battalion of the 506th parachute infantry regiment in the early to mid-morning hours the the guys here started to hear the firing of guns just to the south of us so colonel strayer uh tasked easy company with going out and silencing the guns at a place that is now legendary in 101st airborne history at bray court manor [Music] so [Music] so as i mentioned this is the village of le grand chamonn and whenever a lot of people visit breakwork manor they they forget that the guys from easy company actually started right here now as i mentioned colonel strayer had tasked the easy company with going and silencing these guns that had opened up on causeway number two and with the leadership of dick winters they advanced up the hedgerows in that direction right there now after dick winters made his way up and did a reconnaissance of the area and assessed the situation he ended up dividing his men up into two teams one was going to be led by him and one was going to be led by buck compton and they were going to make what is now a legendary assault on the four guns that were firing on causeway number two and on utah beach there at bray court manor so anyway we're going to head on up here uh to the manor and uh get get an up-close look of what happened there on june 6th uh i do need to add one quick thing though uh like all things when it comes to history we have to approach the story of break court with a measure of humility uh there will be sites on the internet who will claim to know the exact details of what happened here but the truth is there are just some of the details that we don't know the veterans of easy company themselves disagreed on some of the finer details there were some of the men who participated in this action who didn't want to comment on it because they legitimately had no recollection of the events uh keep in mind this was the the first day in a long war for these guys so anyway uh just keep that in mind as we move forward [Music] all right well uh right now before we go on to bray court manor itself i wanted to stop here at the monument now on a previous trip to normandy uh we had a video where we stopped here in this very location talked a little bit about the action here at bray court uh today we're actually going to go on to the property now i do need to mention something before we go in this is actually private property you can visit the memorial and you can see the the whole thing here uh but this is a working farm matter of fact it's still owned by the family that owned it in 1944 and it's not public property so there's no public access uh fortunately the owner guy by the name of charles de valliere is good friends with eric dorr from the gettysburg museum of history and he has graciously allowed us to access the property and show us a few things himself [Music] so [Music] andrew is coming here in this place if you you must go if you want you have the time yeah yes we have all kinds of time [Music] [Music] all right so right now i'm making my way up from uh le grand chambond where we started out and this right here is kind of the trench line or the ditch that the men from easy company would have used to advance on the guns which were positioned behind this hedgerow over here now there was a guy from headquarters company who got hit right here in this area was shot right between the eyes whenever he lifted his head up above the the ditch line we're going to talk about that in one of the american artifact videos but for right now i'm gonna see if i can jump down in this ditch all right so i just crossed the fence and uh fortunately it was not electrified and we're making our way down into this ditch and wow so ahead of me is lagrangemon where we started off and this is the hedgerow that compton and garnier and malarkey would have advanced along and uh there's a spot up ahead of me where this ditch line forms a bit of a dog leg and that's where petty and leave got would have set up their machine gun and uh winters along with joe toy and popeye nguyen and a guy named gerald lorraine would have gone up another hedgerow across the field to my left right now and charles was telling me that because of erosion uh the the ditch as we see it now is actually deeper than it would have been in 1944 but this right here is the route that the guys from easy would have taken and as they advanced well they would have hit a 90 degree turn and right up through here is where they would have advanced on gun number one and as you can see uh it's a little bit dense here so uh we're gonna have to hop back out into the field okay uh just got out of the trench now the men from easy company would have advanced right along this spot right here and just on the other side of this cow would have been the number one gun for brake court battery all right now this is where things get a little bit foggy uh this is the approximate location of the first 105 millimeter gun now some of the veterans said that it was here others said that it was on the other side of this brush line to my right and it's also approximately somewhere in here where uh popeye wind got hit in the butt as the assault on the number one gun was taking place and charles was telling me that in his latter years carwood lipton came back out to visit this place and said after they took out that first 105 he advanced along this brush line right here and went up a tree right here in this corner and this is sometimes been referred to as lipton's tree and he said that he did it so that he could get a better viewpoint and cover the guys who were continuing on down the trench and there was another guy from easy by the name of mike rainey who would have been down here at the bottom of the tree so those two guys were going to be covering the advance on down this trench line to the numbers two and three guns uh now it's also been said that lipton's tree was in the hedgerow behind me where we we popped out in the field so it's possible that lipton's memory might have been slightly off as far as the exact location of the tree because honestly this does seem like a pretty exposed spot right here but really what is most important is what he and rainey did that day to cover the guys from easy as they were advancing on guns two and three [Music] this is uh the sketch dick winters made in his d-day diary when he sat down at karen tan and uh wrote about what had happened here and it shows la grande chamom which is up that way shows how they came down the hedgerows now he he divided the men into two groups the first one led by lieutenant buck compton the second one by winners and they came up the trenches we were just in and then they came up to this hedgerow and it shows the guns the way they were positioned now you know actually you know in in reality they're a little closer to that um hedgerow it's a little off scale but he's showing one gun kind of pointing the opposite direction and the four guns pointing this way towards utah beach and they were really covering causeway number two there were only there were only four ways into the mainland from utah beach because the germans had flooded the fields so everything was underwater except for four causeways and those are the four ways tanks could get up here so the germans smartly had trained their guns on those four causeways and the bray court battery was focused on causeway number two which goes to utah beach now this gun seems to be pointing a little bit different now we're not sure if that was just a mistake you know he's jotting this down from memory he's seeing things in a different perspective you know when you're in combat you're seeing just what's in front of you and it also shows the mg 42s that were back here that were covering the rear so this is dick winter's map and um other historians have gone off this i mean this is a pretty pretty vivid map done really soon after it happened but i want to also say that dick winters came back here many years later with carwood lipton stephen ambrose and a few other men and they drew a more detailed map and in that one all the guns are pointing the same way so we believe they were probably pointed towards causeway number two and utah beach and they were certainly the shells firing from these guns landed towards utah beach because there's reports saying that after these guns were silenced no more artillery fell on utah beach all right so charles actually has an aerial reconnaissance photo that was taken in 1944 so uh right up in here is where the monument is currently located uh this is the grand chamand this is the ditch that we came up uh right here is that corner where we popped out in and right here is the approximate location of gun number two [Music] all right so we don't know with a hundred percent certainty uh the exact spot where the number two gun was but it was right here in this area and we also have a bray court cow hanging out with us today [Music] all right so we are walking down the trench line from the number two gun position uh something else that is worth noting so so the trenches and the guns are right here kind of in this direction back here all along this tree line would have been several german machine gun positions that were basically designed to protect the guns so you can imagine how crazy it was whenever tom malarkey ran out into this field to try and capture what he thought was a luger [Music] okay so this area right here is approximately where the number three gun was located this would have been the last one that easy company took before ron spears and some of the guys from dog company came in and took over and moved into the fourth gun now there's a pretty interesting story out there and i'm hesitant to share it because the accounts are a little bit hazy so so don't take this for gospel but easy company was not the first ones to encounter the guns here at brecord that was actually dog company they had come through and whether they tried to move in on the guns or whether it was a patrol we don't really know but what we do know is that there was machine gun fire from this position and dog companies sustained a lot of casualties uh one paratrooper uh saw the lieutenant with his his hands uh covering his face and crying back at uh like the headquarters area and it's hypothesized that the guys from dog company whenever spear says hey can we take this last gun uh that what they were doing was was trying to um i guess kind of get revenge or kind of even the score for the guys that they had lost earlier in the day [Music] all right and this is the approximate area where the number four gun would have been and that wrapped up the assault on bray court battery which of course was made famous by the series band of brothers dick winters was awarded the distinguished service cross for his role in the attack on this battery and the leadership that he exhibited on d-day but man to be able to walk this place and kind of follow in the footsteps of of these men is something else i'm so thankful to charles that he allowed us to come out and do this so that we could share it with others but uh yeah kind of at a loss for words but that was very court battery [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The History Underground

Views: 272,757

Keywords: history, wwii, ww2, ww2 documentary, normandy, d day, d-day, d day invasion, d day landings, ww2-d-day invasion of normandy, easy company, band of brothers, dick winters, brecourt manor, brecourt manor band of brothers, brecourt manor assault, brecourt manor assault explained, brecourt manor today, brecourt manor explained, brecourt manor gun battery, carwood lipton, erik dorr, brecourt manor call of duty, brecourt manor hell let loose, normandy travel

Id: 4na2ZdvAcmc

Length: 17min 50sec (1070 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 02 2022