The
script differs from that broadcast, owing to exigences of time.
Track
One: Sea-surf FX, Drum-beat - Vee For Victory. Marche Lorraine
This is Classical Break,
and I'm Rupert Kirkham. You've just heard the Marche
Lorraine
by Louis Ganne. Today's programme celebrates the heroism of the
Allied troops, sailors and airmen who formed the massive forces of
land, sea and air engaged in the biggest amphibious operation in
military history. D-Day, the Sixth of June, 1944, opened the last
eleven months of the Second World War in Europe: the achievement in
breaching the long-prepared North Atlantic fortifications via 5
Normandy beaches, codenamed Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha and Utah was
shared by the crews of 532 warships and 360 coastal craft of the
Royal Navy, 89 American warships, 49
warships and smaller craft manned by Dutch, French, Norwegian, Greek
and Polish exiles, and 155,000 Allied troops, over whose voyage and
advance on landing, thousands of fighter- and bomber- sorties were
flown by men of the RAF, USAAF and Fleet Air Arm; some hours before
the landings, hundreds of transport aircraft had dropped 23,000
paratroopers in behind the German defences by 'brolly”, 'chute or
glider.
Over 4,000 British and
American landing-craft were employed in bringing the invasion-force
from their troopships to the beaches...
The balance of an army of
3 million men were left behind in England, waiting on the results of
gaining a foothold in France. The free flow of vital supplies had to
be kept up; a fuel-pipeline – Pluto - was being laid across the Channel
seabed, and huge artificial harbours – code-named Mulberry - were
to be towed to France and used by freighters until Cherbourg were
captured.
On the day, the heaviest
losses were taken by the paratroopers and air-force crews during the
hours of darkness, owing to the Luftwaffe Night-hunters,
flak-defences and infantry units, and by American Rangers on Omaha
beach, at the head of which stood high cliffs that had to be rushed
and scaled in the face of mines and heavy fire. 3,000 men became
casualties on Omaha beach alone.
Perhaps the most
terrifying and convincing film-representation of Omaha is found in
Steven Spielberg's Saving
Private Ryan.
Men died or were badly injured by withering machine-gun-fire, mines
and shells, while still in their landing-craft; men drowned; when the
ramps came down, men dropped in the shallows; men fell at every step
of the way up the beach; yet those left climbed ladders to reach the
German barbed wire, pill-boxes and come to conclusions hand-to-hand
or by grenade and flame-thrower with brave or ruthless opposite
numbers.
In a far cry from his
work on such features as ET,
the Indiana
Jones-franchise
and Jurassic
Park,
the American film-composer, John Williams'. carefully somnambulistic
music for this terrible confrontation between weaponry and young men
– and History
- invokes the spirit of Lincoln, via Copland, with sombre, brazen
textures and angular pentatonic fanfares and harmonies.
Track 2: Omaha Beach,
from Saving Private Ryan, John Williams
Of course, if the Germans
had not expected the invasion to occur in the Pas-de-Calais-area
rather than Normandy; if they had been able to mount pre-emptive
heavy bombing-raids on the bases at which men and material had been
amassed, and on the major ports at which the fleet had been gathered,
or if the Luftwaffe
had met force with force
over the beaches...casualty-figures should have been far higher than
even those
suffered by airborne
forces and by those who had landed on Omaha beach.
The lack of opposition
from the air astonished most who took part in D-Day. Some of the
best Luftwaffe units were based in France, in spite of withdrawals to
Germany and the Eastern Front. Throughout the day, a single sortie
was flown over Sword Beach by two German Focke-Wulf 190 interceptors
The pair made a single sweep at low level that the forlorn pilots had
been convinced must end in their deaths. They cut a swathe through
Allied troops before leaving only more quickly than they had arrived.
The first many German
ground-units knew of D-Day was the frontal vision of a vast fleet of
ships – and they didn't have sight of it for long before they were
ducking under heavy naval bombardment or trying to fire back.
The preparations for
D-Day had been long-drawn-out, reaching a height of activity in the
late Spring and early Summer. Something of the mood in Britain can
be gathered from two films straddling the period, A
Canterbury Tale and
Henry
The Fifth.
The one weds the themes of pilgrimage, English cultural tradition
and the Anglo-American relationship, the other, the oft-played and
digested moral of British heroism and victory
against the odds. The
names and art of Chaucer and Shakespeare were well-invoked. By the
mid-1940s, thanks to readiness and modern methods of surveillance,
the game of invasion had become an overwhelming hazard; no matter how
many soldiers, aircraft, tanks and warships were thrown into the
assault, a coast and deep defensive lines remained an unknowable
obstacle; covering fire from however many ships and aircraft perhaps
drawn from other fronts or other activities, might still encounter an
impassable wall of enemy resistance. The Allies had to win their
goal – and know how to follow it up. Overwhelming weight of
numbers and equipment had suffered great reverses in Sicily and on
mainland Italy, owing to strategic inco-ordination, friendly fire and
brave defence. The channel's small breadth rendered the
invasion-fleet highly conspicuous from first to last. From the
commanding officers to the other ranks, shrewd, individual courage
from conviction had to be the modern military's strongest resource. A
Canterbury Tale
was released in Canterbury on May the 11th,
1944, Henry
The Fifth,
in London, on the 22nd
of November, 1944.
Here is the rousing
Prelude
to A Canterbury Tale, music
by the Polish emigre, Allan Gray.
It quotes Angelus
Ad Virginem, as
a pilgrims' hymn,
at
the outset. The verses from Chaucer's Prologue To The Canterbury
Tales are read beautifully by Esmonde Knight – who took the part of
Fluellin in Henry
The Fifth, and, who, in A Canterbury Tale, plays
two roles, those of a sergeant and a village idiot! How the phrase
in the high chorus haunts the mind after seeing this beautiful
black-and-white film of rural and Canterburian South-east
England ..
Track 3: A Canterbury
Tale, Prelude, Gray
From
Sir Laurence Olivier's Henry
The Fifth,
accompanied by the galvanic music of Sir William Walton, Speech
Before Harfleur - part
of a re-recorded sequence in which the actor adds Chorus' commentary
at the conclusion. From the same source follows soldier William's
reflections on the cause for which the commoner fights, “But
if the cause be not good”.again
voiced by Olivier, and Henry's second great speech – urging on his
men to stand to at Agincourt – “This
day is called The Feast of Crispian”.
Track 4: Speech Before
Harfleur
Track 5: But if the
Cause be not good
Track 6: This Day Is
Called
The assembling of Brahms'
Requiem
occupied him so long that it only began in the shocking fate of his
short lived friend and advocate, Robert Schumann. It came to be a
requiem for his beloved mother as well. It is A
German Requiem;
in settings of Lutheran biblical texts; it seeks to console the
living, rather than to sing a mass over the dead. Nowhere is the
name of Christ invoked. Brahms was not only nominally a Lutheran, he
was an agnostic or atheist who saw life in all its grandeur,
complexity, and ethical significance, but who was unable to believe
in the saviour of the New Testament. “Such
a great man,”
Dvorak once said,
“and he believes in nothing!”
Reactions to the long, slow, patient and hugely learned Requiem
have ranged from ecstasy to the decrying of its bourgeois
wearisomeness. Its immense span ends in its beginning, with the
music of the opening providing the close: grief is never assuaged,
never forgotten, but over the course of seven movements, one has a
sterling spiritual experience of circularity, of psychologically
acute and compassionate ariosi and Handelian heights of choral and
orchestral counterpoint that symbolize the positive moods and actions
of social and cultural tradition and survival. Consistent musical
logic and lyrical beauty in severe style are put at the service of
sincere grief and fellow-feeling. The spirit is far from the
Protestant work-ethic that may underlie the composer's development.
This is not workfare-music any more than it is the
music of any church-sect
or of Nazi strength through joy.
“Such a great man,
and he believes in nothing...”
Is that true?
If Beethoven gave the
free world its Vee-For-Victory signal, we invoke Brahms as the 19th
Century German nationalist who accorded a wreathed portrait of Bismarck a
place of honour on his wall, but who would certainly have loathed the
Kultur
of Nazism, even if still almost unaware of its abysmally evil
crimes. Let's hear “Herr,
Lehre doch mich”,
the third movement, in honour of the men who drove and ran up to
death, or who stood to in the defensive wall.
“Lord, make me to know mine end”
Darkness appears to surround the lonely baritone voice. This
extract from a complete recording of the German Requiem in English,
conducted by Arturo Toscanini, who had himself flagrantly opposed
Fascism and emigrated, was made in 1943. Some American servicemen
may have heard it.. The individual is borne up at length by the
contrapuntal chorus of what may comfort him, by the example of his
righteous fellow-sufferers – all rest in the hand of God. This
piece may have struck Dvorak to the heart; a prominent falling phrase
from it turns up in his powerful 'Cello Concerto of many years later.
Track 7: lll Herr,
Lehre Doch Mich from Ein Deutches Requiem, Brahms
From the Piano Sonata no
2, Concord Sonata, by Charles Ives, the second movement, The
Alcotts – a
home
to
New England Transcendentalism in the 19th
Century.
Transcendentalism is the word, as so often with this composer, for
whom concord was to be reached-after by mortal man. An astonishing,
elegiac and uneasily beautiful piece. Note the Beethovenian gesture
from long before Vee-for-Victory was thought of. Beethoven was a
Transcendentalist before Transcendentalism was thought of.
Track 8: The Alcotts
from Piano Sonata No 2, Concord, Ives
For
three months before D-Day,The Glenn Miller Band – renamed the
American Band of The Allied Expeditionary Force kept up a gruelling
schedule of concerts in the South of England. Here's their cover of
Summertime,from
Gershwin's pre-war opera,
Porgy and Bess. The
arrangement exhibits to the full Glenn Miller's trademark
micromanagement of scoring and expressiveness – of contrasts
between orchestral sections and bold use of mutes. How peace must
have been longed-for.
Track 9: Summertime,
Gershwin
This
was Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I'm Rupert Kirkham. We
hope you have enjoyed our programme in commemoration of D-Day,
dedicated to all who took part in this massive but heroic action –
or who faced it; to the men on both sides, many of whom have lain in
peace in the same cemeteries these 70 years. We thank Mike Burrows
for researching and writing it. He keeps in mind Sapper James
Kenyon, who worked on the Mulberry temporary harbours used in the
days after the landings.
We end with The Day Thou Gavest.
Last Post and
Sunset. Goodbye.
Track 11: The Day
Thou Gavest & Last Post & Sunset
