D-Day: The Unheard Tapes review: An emotional, visceral, first-hand account of events we should never forget

Perhaps he should be made to sit down in front of D-Day: The Unheard Tapes (BBC2, Sun-Tues, 9pm) as a form of penance.

Not because the documentary was poor – far from it. More that it might have made him realise that this was an event that was worth commemorating in full.

The three programmes dealt with the run-up to D-Day, the events of June 6, 1944 itself, and then the subsequent Battle of Normandy, as the Allies fought the German defenders to reach the major targets of Caen and Cherbourg.

It used archive tapes giving the first-hand experiences of soldiers from both sides, civilians and French resistance fighters, bringing them vitally alive by having actors lip-sync the words – actors, we were told, cast to look like the speakers at the time of D-Day.

A gimmick? No, because the actors brought the words vibrantly to life, capturing the pain, the trauma and horror of the event.

Given context by historians detailing the events of that June, it was a masterly approach to a subject which has been the subject of countless books, programmes and films in the last 80 years, giving it fresh, shocking impact.

The scale of the invasion was vast – thousands of ships brought tens of thousands of men to northern France, the US dropped 13,000 paratroopers behind enemy lines the night before D-Day alone – but The Unheard Tapes brought the events down to the personal, the individual.

And it's the little things which make the biggest impact.

So much comes down to the smells and the sounds and the feelings of that day, and the days after.

One Royal Marine remembers “self-heating soup” in the landing craft for breakfast, and the overwhelming desire to be sick as it bobs up and down in the Channel before the invasion.

US infantryman Harry Parley recalls the stink of the grease from the troopship kitchen and remembers the German bullets hitting sand with a sucking sound, “as if the beach was trying to suck everything up”.

While one of the German defenders, Raimund Werner, remembers the hiss of the shells from the Navy bombardment over his head.

And everywhere there is death.

US Private Chuck Thomas remembers crawling over bodies as he makes his way up the beach. Major John Howard – who led the assault on the famous Pegasus Bridge – recalls his second-in-command, Lt Den Brotheridge, being shot shortly after landing in France: “He only lasted 20, 30 seconds.”

Tragically, Brotheridge's wife is pregnant, and their baby is born two weeks later.

The horror of the invasion is all too present. Historian James Bulgin makes the point early on that the Allied commanders knew thousands would die – they just had to weigh the losses against the potential victory.

“The strategists and commanders knew they were sending a percentage of these men to their deaths,” he says, “because that's the only way that the invasion could have happened. They just hoped that they had done whatever they could to mitigate the numbers.”

Besides the first-hand accounts of the fighting, The Unheard Tapes reminds you of things that can easily be forgotten.

After D-Day, for example, Allied troops faced weeks of intense fighting across Normandy, fighting that was among the most brutal seen during the war, as the soldiers got bogged down in the Bocage – the hedgerow-studded landscape of northern France.

It reminds you of the sacrifices African-American troops made, sacrifices all too often discounted in a still-segregated army.

And it reminds you of the suffering of the French themselves, particularly during the bombing of Caen, when the city was virtually flattened in the Allied attempt to drive out the Germans.

It's an emotional, intense watch – as it should be. Part of the commemorations should be about reminding us who awful, how horrific it was, and that we should be determined to avoid repeating it.

Wally Parr, who fought at Pegasus Bridge alongside Howard, is given the last word.

“One thing that comes out of it all, looking back, is the sheer bloody waste,” he says. “Let's face it, you could put it down to any war there ever was – a small one, a big one, what have you – the sheer bloody waste.

“Experience should teach us something.”