D-Day: The Unheard Tapes review — this stunning BBC docuseries is public service broadcasting at its finest

This stunning docuseries, stripped across three nights, is what public service broadcasting is supposed to be. It���s the ideal made real. If I were living in Britain, I’d be happy to pay the licence fee for these three hours of television alone.

Numerous first-hand accounts of the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944, are available in books and documentaries, yet they’ve rarely been presented as powerfully or movingly as they are here.

The series uses audio interviews recorded in the years after the Second World War. The tapes, sourced from archives around the world and mostly never heard before, were digitally remastered. They sound so crisp and clear, they could have been done yesterday.

A group of young actors, selected for their resemblance to the real people as they were at the time and dressed in clothes of the period, lip-sync seamlessly to their words.

The scope of the interviews isn’t limited to the British, American and Canadian soldiers who stormed the beaches Allied command had codenamed Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword.

We also hear from German machine gunners and wireless operators who manned the clifftop bunkers, French resistance fighters, and civilians for whom the arrival of the invasion forces in their villages heralded the beginning of the end of the Nazi tyranny, but also brought death and destruction.

The effect is extraordinarily intimate and immersive, bringing their experiences to life in a way not seen since Peter Jackson’s magnificent documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, which used meticulous colourisation and ingenious sound effects to bring us up close and personal on the frontline of the First World War.

The recollections are intercut with grainy re-enactments of the landings, which inevitably echo the visceral opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan, while a small group of well-chosen, well-deployed historians provide an overview of the military strategy behind Operation Overlord.

There are so many stories, so many unforgettable moments over the course of the three episodes that the best you can hope to do is highlight a fraction of them.

One of the first into the fray was Major John Howard, of the British army’s 6th Airborne Division, who led the troops whose job was to seize Benouville Bridge, subsequently renamed Pegasus Bridge, and halt the advance of German tanks.

In the early hours of June 6, ahead of the first wave on the beaches, gliders — flimsy craft made of wood and fabric and notoriously hard to control — carrying Howard and his men swooped down and crash-landed within 50 feet of the bridge.

Seated near Howard was Lieutenant Den Brotheridge. His wife was two weeks away from giving birth to their first child. Within seconds of landing, they were engaged in a gunfight with the Germans. Brotheridge became one of the first casualties of D-Day.

Private Wally Parr, who sat with Brotheridge as he was dying, says: “All the years of training he’d put in. He only lasted 20 seconds, 30 seconds.”

Private Wally Parr, who sat with Brotheridge as he was dying, says: “All the years of training he’d put in. He only lasted 20 seconds, 30 seconds.”

In the first few hours of D-Day, the most colossal loss of life was on Omaha beach, the most heavily guarded by machine gun nests and therefore the most dangerous.

Private Harry Parley from the US army’s 29th Infantry Division was among the first wave to land. “We were told they expected about 30pc casualties in the invasion,” we hear him say.

But a mere number couldn’t prepare the men, many of them seeing their first combat action, for what they were walking into, as machine gunners picked them off virtually at will. Of the 17 men on Parley’s landing craft, only five made it off the beach alive.

You’d expect the fear would all be on the side of those running into the bullets, but a German gunner talks of feeling terrified by the sight of the armada of Allied ships and boats approaching the beaches. He ended up retreating.

The number of D-Day veterans has been dwindling by the year. Soon, there will be none left. With another war raging in Europe and the kind of far-right forces these men did their duty to destroy on the rise again, our duty is to never forget them.

The third and final episode of D-Day: The Unheard Tapes airs on Tuesday, June 4, at 9pm on BBC2