6 June 44 – The Light of Dawn (2014)
IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 45 minutes, and nothing more.
Genre: Documentary.
Verdict: Impressive.
On that day 7,000 ships, 11,000 airplanes, and 1,200,000 men converged on a 45-mile stretch of the French coast. More than 7,000 vehicles soon joined the throng. What an organisational achievement.
In such an enormous and unprecedented undertaking what could go wrong did go wrong. The sea and weather interfered. The tide came earlier and heavier than anticipated and caused havoc all along the strand. Scores of those soldiers drowned in the resulting surf. Machinery broke down; nervous men made mistakes; unexpected obstacles emerged; the bluff at Omaha beach was more than ten feet higher than estimated. Ships collided. Aircraft engines failed. Earlier in the pre-dawn darkness half the 20,000 airborne troops missed the drop zones, many were killed, lost, captured, and ineffective. Maps were misread and Field Marshall Sir Bernard Montgomery took a month to reach his first day’s objective, Caen. A few days later storms in the English Channel disrupted supply.
This documentary features a trove of archival film that I have not seen before. Among the footage is one odd and oddly moving sequence of a uniformed, bespectacled, battered, lone Wehrmacht soldier playing a Brahms requiem on an organ in a bombed-out Normandy church at 1 hour and 23 minutes. Solace of a kind, perhaps.
The narrative is cool, detached, and factual. None of that juvenile breathless ‘Now it can be told’ recitation of trivia from the History Channel and its ilk.
Despite its outstanding high quality it evidently did not have a commercial release. That would explain the voids on the IMDb entry. There are no ratings because raters did not see it. I came across it on You Tube.