The Secret Invention That Made D-Day Possible | INTEL

this is the day for which three people long have waited this is d-day d-day it relied on courage and ingenuity as much as the success of the landing was known to the bravery of soldiers it was made possible by inventions and new machines but to me one engineering marvel stands out from the rest what happened here on this beach and the errors and days after landing made the whole invasion possible planning started in 1943 for d-day a massive invasion of France the Allies landed on five different beaches along an 80 kilometer stretch of the Normandy coastline Utah Omaha gold sword and Juno if it was to be successful the operation codenamed Overlord would depend on the speed with which reinforcements and supplies could reach Normandy initially this was going to be done by landing craft but they're all Navy worried that repeated landings would damage the bottoms of craft the process would also be too time-consuming because it relied on tides to supply the tens of thousands of soldiers landing and fighting their way inland the Allies knew they would need a port once you've done the initial attack without the supplies coming in and the men in the material you can't go any further so you can't develop your bridgehead and you can't afford to shoot a campaign so if you land troops on the beach the risk is that while you all your landing craft your ship is has beached and the tide goes out leaves the craft stranded and then you might have hours and hours until it can be refloated and that's time that could be spent heading back to the UK to get more troops more supplies more vehicles thousands of tons was needed to support the Battle of Normandy ammunition reinforcements medical supplies fuel each man would need 40 kilograms of supplies per day and after a failed raid in 1942 on Dieppe it was obvious that the German defenses were too good for an existing port to be captured so they would have to bring one with them they would have to build it in the UK ship it along the English Channel as troops were landing in Normandy and then constructed here put it back together on these peaches so that they can have supplies coming the first supplies coming through here on d-day plus one no easy task so what that meant was they'd have to build a floating bridge that would go a mile out to sea to where it was deep enough the big ships could come alongside even at low tide they had to build Briggs think cement bricks to stop any storm damage that sort of thing and also protect it from u-boats and the lake so no easy task to build that to protect ships and to allow supplies to come along constantly for the Battle of Normandy to make the invasion possible new technologies and engineering marvels were designed and produced tanks that could float main clearance vehicles tracked bridges an underwater fuel pipeline but one of the biggest challenges was making concrete float Prime Minister at Western Churchill took a personal interest in the project and made clear that he would accept no delay he sent a memo in 1942 that was to become famous piers for use on beaches they must float up and down with the tide don't argue the matter the difficulties will argue it for themselves the harbour project was given the codename marbury they were to be constructed off Normandy in just two weeks and to have the capacity of the Port of Dover took the entire UK construction industry effort to manufacture it the main component was a thing called the Phoenix case on which is effectively a floating concrete tank and these weight anywhere between 2,000 and 6,000 tons and to build more to 250,000 tons of concrete 31,000 tons of steel and so to build them they had to build them all around the UK and once the ports and harbours were full they didn't had to excavate riverbanks and building in dry docks there and once they made them they don't had to take them out and sink them that he couldn't float off it also meant the Germans couldn't see what they were doing if you talk to the people who are actually building them and because of the secrecy of d-day they they didn't know what they were doing and all they knew is that day after day they were pouring more and more concrete and building this reinforced concrete structure and no one knew what ash wood actually was that they were building on Normandy Beach the tidal range is around 6 meters this is how much the tide moves in just 15 minutes so the harbour definitely needed to float to make a floating Harbor that ships could come alongside could carry the weight of tanks and ammunition the Allies would need concrete and lots of it and remember to get the harbour from Britain to Normandy in had to float in total two hundred and seventy five thousand cubic meters of concrete were floated across the channel a total weight of nearly six hundred thousand tons and as well as that 31 thousand tons of steel the construction effort in the UK took 45,000 men eight months to complete but how dead they make concrete float is it all to do with the amount of water you displace so if you just you have something that weighs 2,000 tons you can displace 2,000 tonnes of water or more than 2,000 tonnes of water it will float so you can make anything float essentially it needs to be hollow you need to contain it because if you have something that's very denticles it's going to sink you've got to you know contain pockets of air so these were big tanks with compartments in and in each of the compartments they had pumps so they could raise and lower them onto the seabed when the Allies had been doing a reconnaissance at the beaches since about 1943 so they'd mapped out brought engineer divers they've mapped out the whole of the coastline are knew exactly what the coastline was like when each of the secret parts finally made it across the English Channel they were assembled to this plan bombard ins the first type of breakwater was a chain of floating steel rafts rhinos were para driven pontoons on which cargo was brought ashore from ships too big for the Inner Harbor Phoenix units these were floating concrete breakwaters or caissons that were sunk to create a protective wall for the Inner Harbor Leviathan this was a ship that would felled the concrete with water and sand to sink them you mean corn cobs these were old ships that were scuttled to add more protection to the harbor the breakwater was codenamed goose pre Liberty trot this was a line of boys with Liberty ships to safely come alongside next beatles floating pontoons and on top of them whales bridges all linked together to form a roadway at the end of these were spot appears where equipment and supplies were unloaded onto trucks ducks were of course the duck W amphibious vehicles and duck cushions were their assembly points finally there was the planter the code name for the officer in charge of the sinking arrangements for the concrete caissons and the headquarters was where you would find the naval officer in charge so this is what mulberry B looked like [Music] but our mouths off the beach of gold Neath the Rockets dead leave there we told our block ships into place and we built the harbor there mid-shot and shall we built it well as history doesn't read while brave man died in the swirl inside the shoes [Music] by the sex of June everything was ready and harbors were floated across the channel by a team of a hundred and thirty two tugs both harbors were operating from a week after d-day and when at maximum capacity a truck or vehicle was being unloaded every minute and 16 seconds d-day took place on the 6th of June and on the afternoon of the 6th of June 170 tugs pulled 1.5 million tons of Harbor across the first caisson was sunk on June the 9th and by the 18th they had two harbors up and running and open and taking supplies and materials so it was a you know quite a quick quite a quick operation the pier heads went up and down on cables so they went yeah placed on the seabed and as the tide went up and down the pier heads went up and down so they could use it at all conditions the road there were 16 kilometers of steel roadway that twisted to cope with the wave action of the waves so it's really very very sophisticated and push technology to its limit my ear was constructed off Omaha Beach to supply US forces more would be nicknamed Port Winston was built at Gold Beach and arrow Marsh to supply British and Canadian troops but Mowbray a was destroyed in a storm on the 19th of June and in the days following some ammunition supplies in Normandy ran low [Music] two years of careful planning and hard labor two years of skill and sweat as true that the Americans managed to do without their mobile harboring and but in some of that was through quite desperate measures like I think they even cut holes in the side of ships sometimes to unload them and welcome back up Port Winston remained fully operational for six months after the landings in June 1944 this Beach had become the busiest port in the world first two weeks after d-day British beaches allowed the unloading of more than 120,000 tons 50,000 vehicles and 285,000 men all within the shelter of gooseberries after the 20th of June the harbor itself mulberry B was unloading six thousand seven hundred and fifty tons a day in total it was used to land over 2.5 million troops five hundred thousand vehicles and four million tons of supplies the use of mulberry be began to decrease only when the Allies captured the Port of Antwerp but some of the technologies that made it possible are still used today could we still use the equipment bridging and mock normally uses equipment bridging which is a much smaller version of it if they be use floating pontoons for bridging so a lot of the developers here that have carried on in Iraq in the first Gulf War they built a floating pontoon to offload ships taken up from trade so the railroad ferries that again is a very similar principle and that went up and down with the tide but as well as the harbors what's inside this tent was equally as important so the rubber harbors is one piece of the puzzle of the plan of d-day and there was other ways that supplies could come ashore one of them was the the landing craft and this lct mark 3 is being conserved and restored by the National Museum of the Royal Navy and yet play them these put a massive part on DD [Music] these are a pillar of bringing supplies and the logistics effort long after d-day itself and what you find is it's all about increasing levels of capacity so you put in the mulberry harbour and then you can use different types of ships you can use conventional merchant ships which require their cargoes to be craned out of their hold and put ashore and that's great that increases your shipping capacity but once the mulberry is there they don't stop using these because the army ashore is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and its appetite is absolutely voracious so all the while you've got things coming into the mulberry you've also got hundreds of these crafts and bigger ones running relentlessly backwards and forwards and dropping stuff on the beaches it's all in use all the time and the whole thing doesn't work properly without all of it when you think of DD landing craft you usually think of those small ships that were filled with soldiers landing on the beaches and then running into battle but this one you can tell us a lot bigger and it's good to carry it up to ten tanks or truckloads of supplies and it could land almost anything onto the beaches of Normandy to resupply those soldiers fighting see for me the most impressive bit is the whole it's the big picture I think it's really dangerous when we go down those rabbit holes and say this one thing made d-day work it doesn't work like that the way d-day works is it's this huge interlocking puzzle of individually tailored solutions to a huge number of problems it's looking at every single potential threat and neutralizing it before you even started the operation that's the miracle for me I don't think there was a point in the campaign when the Allies sort of that said we've got Sony troops so many pieces of lies we can just slack off a bit now it was the the Allied armies constantly needed huge quantities of fuel of ammunition and all the other things like food so every single possible way of increasing the quantity that was flowing over there was so important they couldn't have done it without engineering I mean the the hope the whole thing was a combination of both military engineers who were it was serving but also the construction engineers who were supporting them we'll all flat out constructing this stuff and of course a lot of the civil engineers had joined up and we're in the Royal Engineers and so it couldn't you really a combined effort and without military engineering you you're not going to succeed anywhere without the engineering marvel of the mulberry harbour who knows what the outcome of the Battle of Normandy and Europe would have been but no one doubts its contribution and what's left of it on Normandy Beach as a reminder that the sacrifice of soldiers on and after d-day might have been for nothing if it wasn't for technology engineering and ingenuity thanks for watching this episode of Intel if this is your first time finding the series then there's plenty more episodes like this one and if you want more content on d-day we've got tons of stuff on our website including an article that goes a bit more in depth into the mulberry harbors and I'll link to that one is in description

Channel: BFBS Creative

Views: 8,717

Rating: 4.9146342 out of 5

Keywords: D-day 75, mulberry harbour, harbour, concrete, port Winston, mulberry b, mulberry a, dday, intel, documentary, The Secret Invention That Made D-Day Possible, engineering, engineer, Gold Beach, Arromanches, supplies, resupply, logistics, bfbs, bfbs productions, simon thornton

Id: QBqC3DFoMus

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 27 2020