In 1940, our nation was fighting for its life.
Hitler's Germany was determined to invade our islands,
and all that stood in the way were the men and women of Britain.
Now a team of experts across France and Britain
are uncovering fresh evidence of their incredible struggle.
We're going to dig up secrets buried for 70 years...
to reveal stories of heroism
from Britain's most perilous year.
It's very easy to forget just what 1940 meant.
There's been no other year in our history
that's contained so much jeopardy,
and that required feats of untold heroism as we began to fight a war
on land, at sea and in the air.
Ordinary men and women, people like my own grandfather,
found themselves fighting for the very survival of their country as a free nation.
Evidence for what they achieved lies buried all around us.
What have you got there?
It's a gas mask!
And I want to encounter it for real.
Wow! This is extraordinary! This has been secret for so long.
So I'm joining the historians and archaeologists digging it up,
and, along the way, discovering some extraordinary stories of heroism and tragedy.
One of those heroes was Cobber Kain,
one of a tiny handful of RAF pilots stationed in France,
the last line of defence against the marauding Luftwaffe.
Cobber would become a household name and it all started with a dog fight four miles up
and ended deep in the heart of a French village.
I've come to the scene of that great duel, just 20 miles from the German border.
70 years ago, this was the front line,
but the only fighting was in the skies above here.
This is the tiny French village of Lubey. Back in the autumn of 1939, the war landed here with a bang.
It was here that Cobber Kain downed his first German aircraft.
So in order to try and find out what may be left of it, we're going to dig the road up.
The German plane we're looking for
crashed from a great height right into the middle of Lubey's main street.
70 years on, the mayor and residents of Lubey have got together with a group of aviation archaeologists
to try and uncover traces of that momentous day.
Leading the team is Steve Vizard who has over 30 years' experience in World War II aircraft recoveries.
This is extraordinary, isn't it, unprecedented, really?
At the time it was the highest recorded combat that had ever taken place,
and this thing was actually shot down from 27,000 feet.
So it's coming from 27,000 feet and then plunging through the road...
Almost vertically, yeah, almost vertically,
and the reports stated that it had actually penetrated ten feet under the ground, under the road.
One of the first RAF victories of the war, it brought British news cameras to Lubey
to record the burning wreckage of the downed enemy aircraft.
Soon these scenes of destruction would become all too familiar.
This crash is where the war started to become real.
Now, Steve, you've got a fantastic contemporary photograph taken at the time,
showing the crash site and lots of wreckage. That's the key feature that gives us the right perspective.
The windows are there, the shutters... Yeah, everything is still in place.
And I imagine that area there with the smoke coming out of it... That's obviously the crater.
It's not long before team member Gareth Jones finds the first piece of wreckage.
So that's a bit of our Dornier? That's a bit of our Dornier,
and this is probably one of the engine holes that's punched into the ground. That's extraordinary!
Isn't it just? Look at that. Is that...? It's one of the shells that didn't get fired at Cobber!
It says '34. Is that 1934? 1934, yep, it is indeed.
The Dornier 17 would play a key role in the German blitzkrieg.
Soon enough, German planes would be looming over Britain.
But back at our dig it's a historic day for the village in more ways than one.
And adding to the occasion is the presence of 88-year-old RAF fighter pilot Peter Ayerst.
Peter flew throughout the war and won the Distinguished Flying Cross,
but his first posting was here in France.
Now, Peter, you were out here in the autumn of 1939,
and you flew with Cobber Kain, the man that shot down this Dornier...
I flew with him many, many times. What kind of a man was he?
He was a great character. He was a New Zealander...
but a very good chap indeed and a very good pilot.
Yes. And he was very celebrated at the time, wasn't he?
Oh, yes. He became the first air ace, RAF ace, of the war.
In just a few months, Cobber Kain would shoot down at least 17 planes.
For his gallantry he was awarded the first Distinguished Flying Cross of World War II.
We've got a picture of him here, a photo of him, taken at the time here.
That is a very good photograph of him.
Did he discuss the crash with you at all, the shooting down of this particular aircraft? Er, yes.
He discussed it with all the other pilots, actually.
We were all interested to hear whether he got much opposition from the German aircraft and so on.
For a sort of couple of dizzy moments in that period,
he was sort of like the David Beckham of his day.
He was in all the newspapers, radio interviews, Movietone footage shown at the cinemas.
The thing with this is it's the history, the story behind... Yeah. ..Is absolutely paramount.
And really if we only end up with a couple of carrier bags full of small parts,
the story really makes this one.
That's not a stone. That's definitely not a stone.
Has he been punching the ground?
They seem to have come across something big.
Steve, that looks like a great big lump. It is a biggish lump, but we need... Straight down.
This really is the skeleton of the aeroplane, isn't it?
From 27,000 feet, straight in. Straight in.
So our picture builds. The picture builds, yes. Yeah, brilliant. We're going to carry on. Right.
The engines are the heaviest part of the plane and are always buried the deepest.
What's that?
That's a piece of cylinder head.
Cylinder head? So this is absolutely off the engine.
But as the British public celebrated the shooting down of this aircraft,
they will have had no idea of the horrific war that lay ahead.
Look at that! That's actually still articulated.
It's in lovely condition, really. That's still bolted together! Yeah.
So we're still a way off...
Well, it is...it is pointing to an engine being under the sewer as we were told.
Sadly, today, it appears that a sewer pipe laid in the 1970s
was placed right on top of one of the Dornier's engines.
Frustratingly, our excavation can go no further.
But it's a good start for our aviation archaeologists,
and we've found some sizeable pieces from one of the most historic crash sites of the Second World War.
The village raises a toast to Peter and Cobber Kain.
APPLAUSE
They were both part of a small band of RAF pilots sent to defend the skies about Lubey
in the early months of World War II.
Sante!
However, the war itself was about to change.
On May 10th 1940, Hitler's forces swept into the Low Countries
with fast-moving troops, supported by dive-bombers.
And to many it seemed the war might be over before it had begun.
By circling to the north, they had caught the Allies unaware,
and entirely bypassed the famous Maginot Line of huge defensive forts on the French-German border...
except one.
Do you know, I've always wanted to come to the Maginot Line,
and this is it, or part of it, this funny, almost alien-looking lump of iron.
This is the fort of Villy-La-Ferte, perhaps the flagship fort,
that came to came to define for the French what the Maginot Line was all about.
They really had pinned all their hopes on this line of fortifications working
to hold the Germans out.
Oh, look at this.
It's heavy, isn't it? I've just put my hand through a shell hole! That's amazing!
I'm being shown around by local French historian Jean-Pierre,
who reveals that most of this fort is hidden underground.
So let's go downstairs now. Look at this.
Wow! That's amazing.
That is amazing! I had no idea it would be that deep.
My God!
Standing on top there are few clues of just how vast this place is.
It's an underground city.
But what makes it so atmospheric is that it's been left untouched since the Germans arrived here in 1940.
So 35 metres down and here we are... Here we are! ..At the bottom!
For the 100 or so French soldiers stationed here at Villy-La-Ferte, this underground fortress was home.
This is where they lived, worked, slept and ate.
This is the kitchen. Oh, that is...
Look at that. That's really interesting, isn't it? I'm amazed this is still here.
Everything has been left exactly as it was.
Pots on the stove, once used to feed hungry soldiers, slowly rust away.
A casserole dish in the oven still waiting for the next meal.
It's like a ghost ship, as if the men have just walked out.
Villy-La-Ferte was the only Maginot fort to see action during the blitzkrieg of May 1940.
The Germans shelled the fort in preparation for a full-frontal attack.
They expected a bloodbath.
Proper bit of exploration, this! Careful! Oh, my goodness me, there's the gun! That's the gun...
that's come out of its mount.
Wow!
Look at that!
So this is the cupola, this is this great dome that would lift up and down... That's it.
..To allow everything to fire.
Again, I'm just amazed at how much is actually up here.
Look at that! Through the gap, which shouldn't really be there,
you can see what they were trying to defend.
It's not until you get back on top of this fort, though,
that you get a real sense of the scale of the German onslaught.
Look at this. This great big turret, hundreds of tons of iron and steel,
bodily lifted from its mounting down there. And look at this.
These great big scars, shell scars, almost like a knife through butter.
When the Germans finally broke through the doors, they weren't met with a hail of gunfire,
but rather with an eerie silence.
The ventilation system had been so badly damaged
that the defenders, 100 or so men, below me had suffocated.
The Germans found their bodies piled three or four high in the tunnel right at the base of the fort.
Despite valiant resistance, in May 1940, the Low Countries were quickly overwhelmed
by the ferocity of the German onslaught.
But it wasn't long before they met the British Expeditionary Force.
You know the beginning of the TV series Dad's Army
when all the German arrows sweep across the map of Europe
and push all the British ones back into the sea?
Well, in May and June of 1940 that is pretty much what happened.
But it all came to a head in what then, for the British public, was a little-known French fishing port
called Dunkirk.
British troops had been pushed into a pocket surrounding the French port
which was now under constant German shellfire and air attack.
I want to know what it was like, so I've come to meet Richard Sampson
who was a 20-year-old gunner when he found himself in Dunkirk.
I'd never heard of the town of Dunkirk.
I knew Calais and places like that,
but Dunkirk was a strange place to me.
The scene was absolute chaos...
the broken vehicles of a defeated army.
The town itself was burning, buildings were down,
there was dead soldiers, civilians, horses...a lot of British soldiers lying around...
It was...it was absolute chaos.
With the war in France lost, across the Channel at Dover Castle,
the British military launched Operation Dynamo,
a daring plan to rescue as many men as they could.
Well, this is where the British Army in France was heading to,
the sand dunes and the beaches of Dunkirk.
And what a sight...
..would have greeted them.
Hundreds of thousand of men all converging on this very spot.
And behind me there would have been thousands of men dug in to the sand dunes,
trying to find whatever shelter they could, because the real threat was coming from the air,
from the Luftwaffe who dominated the skies,
and they were busy bombing and strafing on an hourly basis. It was relentless.
I think the worst time...
We'd never experienced the Stuka bomber, we'd never experienced anything like it before in our lives,
and that's the only time you really felt fear.
It was early afternoon, I think, when we got there,
and one time the Stukas came over... and I...
I remember kneeling... down in the sand...
and...I'm not a religious man...
but I did look up and...
..I said, "For Christ's sake, help me, I'm in trouble!"
This is where we got the smaller readings with the little detector chap,
so let's hope the bigger ones go off.
Our aviation archaeologists are still in France
and have been tipped off about a crashed Stuka.
HIGH-PITCHED CONTINUOUS BEEP That's pretty good, isn't it?
The team's metal detectors are picking up huge readings.
If it is a Stuka, there's lots of it.
What about when you lift it up? Is it still going? It's still there. Still going, still going...
Starting to drop off there. That's good. That's very, very good.
HIGH-PITCHED CONTINUOUS BEEP Wow! There's something here.
There's a lot of stuff there, isn't there?
METALLIC BANGING
What's that? That sounds a bit more like it.
The team are looking for proof that it is indeed a Stuka or Ju 87,
and they've found a vital clue - it's a bomb rack.
It is a rack, isn't it? It is, isn't it? A bomb steady.
That's a steady, so...that should be a bit better, shouldn't it?
There you go. 87 - Stuka.
So we've proved everything that we needed to do now, I think, and we better get a digger.
The Stuka was designed to strike terror into men like Richard Sampson
sheltering on the beaches of Dunkirk.
With its wailing sirens, it was unmistakeable and came to symbolise the German blitzkrieg.
In 1940, it seemed that nothing could stop the Stukas.
Give me an idea of what we're hoping to see out of this one.
You never know what you're doing to find, but hopefully, here
there could be the substantial remains of the front end of the aeroplane. Wow!
We don't expect to find huge amounts, you know, of the back or of the wings
because with the aeroplane all the external undercarriage would have been ripped off,
but we hope we're going to find the engine and some remains of the cockpit.
Look at that! That's terrific!
It hasn't taken the team long to find some bullets
and the rusted back of one of the aircraft's machine-guns.
But we're looking for bigger stuff, and that means a bigger machine.
We should rip through it a bit more now, shouldn't we? Yeah.
It's a big old lump, isn't it?
The Stuka's a big aeroplane. I think there's going to be a big pile of wreckage here, definitely.
At long last, I'm about to come face to face with one of Hitler's most feared war machines.
This is part of the Stuka's cockpit canopy,
the large Perspex hood under which the aircraft's pilot and gunner would sit.
There are bits of it everywhere.
We're clearly on top of quite a large chunk of debris here, aren't we?
Well, we are. This is looking quite good now. Yeah.
We've got some very big pieces showing up down here now.
We've never actually had this opportunity of seeing a Stuka site like this ever before.
That is extraordinary, isn't it? It's a great big lump.
And you can see just what this crash has done. Everything's mangled and buckled...
It's a violent event, isn't it? It is. It certainly shows that violent impact, doesn't it? Yeah.
It wasn't just soldiers, though, who faced the terror of the Stuka dive-bombers.
In the chaos of the fighting in France,
Stukas also targeted fleeing civilian refugees.
But at our dig it's a chance for former RAF fighter pilot Peter Ayerst
to tell me just how the RAF did tackle the Stukas.
We're seeing it in this condition on the ground. You'll have seen many Stukas in the air.
Oh, yes. What do you remember of them?
Well, first of all, they weren't terribly fast,
but they were good in the dive because they had special dive brakes
which slowed them from gaining too much speed,
so they were able to make the bombing more accurate.
When they were in that dive they were almost...not quite vertical,
but it was a very steep dive, but, of course, by slowing up like that,
it made them much easier targets for the British fighters.
What's becoming evident is that, despite exploding on impact,
much more of the Stuka has survived than Steve had first anticipated.
There's a couple of instruments there out of the cockpit.
One of them which still has the glass intact...well, nearly intact.
Some of the finds are technical like this circuit-breaker
or the speedometer. Others are more personal like the first-aid kit
which contains burnt bandages and the remains of a hypodermic syringe
You've done this all before.
And whilst I've dug up numerous things from Romans to Saxons, this is kind of new for me.
This is your first Junkers 87? Well, certainly, yeah. Yeah. But you know...
I'm amazed at what's here.
This is what remains of the Stuka's cockpit, a tangled mass of wires and twisted metal.
We're getting much closer to the engine.
Look at that! Good Lord!
Now that's what you call an aircraft wreck, isn't it? Yes. I bet that weighs something!
Is that the engine?
The engine was so deep, it gives you some idea of just how fast the Stuka must have been going
when it finally hit the ground.
Well done, Steve. Well... Well done, guys.
Oh, nicely done! Our final piece of the jigsaw puzzle, really, isn't it, I suppose.
The engine and key parts of the wreckage will be cleaned before going to a local museum -
striking mementoes of our most perilous year.
And in many ways an extraordinary thought. Here we all are...
another generation, several generations removed from you, Peter, but this is part of your life,
this is your youth represented here in many ways. Yes.
This is 1940 sitting on this grassy field. Absolutely.
At the end of May 1940, the British Army was trapped in a shrinking pocket around Dunkirk,
and their future looked bleak.
Operation Dynamo was in full swing
and the Royal Navy was evacuating thousands of troops from Dunkirk harbour.
Thousands more waited on the beaches close by,
with many swimming or wading to the larger vessels lying offshore.
There's no getting away from the fact that Dunkirk is a very moving place to come to,
but for me it's much more personal,
because amongst the many thousands of men waiting to be evacuated was my own grandfather.
And one of the things I've got that survives from the time is this...
it's his pocket Bible.
Inside, the names of his children which he'd inscribed in it in 1939...
are all smudged, the ink has run.
But he and many like him must have looked out to sea as I'm doing now and thought,
"Will I ever see any of these people again?"
So many troops were trapped here that the Navy used anything it could to bring them home -
from paddle steamers to rowing boats, all would play their part.
But not every ship made it home as the beaches of Dunkirk bear witness.
One such casualty was the Crested Eagle, a pre-war pleasure cruiser
which took day-trippers from London's Tower Bridge to Southend in Essex.
This is the Crested Eagle today.
On May 29th 1940, she had just pulled away from Dunkirk
when a bomb smashed through her crowded deck.
Ruptured engine oil from her tanks ignited, turning her into a blazing inferno
where 300 men drowned or were burnt alive.
But despite the risks, men like Richard Sampson were determined to get home.
I saw the little ships and the Navy and I thought then that I could swim,
so I was quite confident that I could reach them.
We waded out, there were bodies lying on the seabed
which we were stumbling over, and others who were floating and we had to push them aside,
and, eventually, we got within a couple of hundred yards of the boat,
and the sailor said, "Make your bloody mind up! Hurry up! We haven't got all night!"
And then he grabbed us by the scruff of the neck, more or less, and dragged us onboard.
338,000 troops were rescued, including over 100,000 French soldiers,
but they had left almost all of their equipment behind.
BEEPING
70 years on, I'm curious to find out just how much may survive here under the beaches of Dunkirk.
So I've come to meet French historian Paul Deveaux,
who's spent years searching for evidence of the catastrophe.
Bonjour! Bonjour. Ca va?
Bonjour! Bonjour, monsieur.
So this is obviously a good spot, Paul?
Ah!
Look at that! A spoon.
PAUL SPEAKS FRENCH
1939! Oui.
1938, Mappin & Webb.
Well, they're still in business, aren't they?
What have we got there? PAUL SPEAKS FRENCH
Oh, the...? Let's have a look.
This is for cleaning buttons? Oui. Yeah.
Perfect! There, that's exactly how it would work...
exactly how it would work. Anglais? Anglais, oui.
A razor?
Anglais? Aussi Anglais, oui, oui.
The working on the shaft area's almost as good as the day it was made.
BEEPING The finds seem to be all around us.
K38.
1938.
And there, the point where the firing pin has gone into the cap.
The only thing they could really shoot at would have been the Luftwaffe flying above.
Not particularly effective, but it would probably make you feel better
to think you were getting your own back somehow.
Ah! What is...?
Is that a boot? No. A gas mask! That's a gas mask!
Anglais? Anglais. THEY SPEAK FRENCH
The preservation on that is fantastic.
That is absolutely extraordinary. And the glass is in there as well.
Just really tells the story of what's left on this beach.
I mean...70 years on and things like that still come up.
Amazing.
It's difficult sometimes to imagine it here on a day like this,
but when you look around you and you get this sense of everything that's been dropped,
and just finding those bits and pieces, things that really tell a human story,
that to me is what the archaeology of this beach is all about.
It's not just the bits and pieces that relate to the war... bullets and that sort of thing,
but everyday things, razors that we found...
..just human life left behind...
..in a hurry.
While most of the Army made it home from France, nearly 60,000 would not.
Many of them lie buried here in the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery at Dunkirk.
Well, by 4th June, it was all over.
And the last signal that was sent from the beaches here at Dunkirk back to Dover said very simply,
"British Expeditionary Force evacuated."
And I'm pleased to say that my grandfather was amongst them.
He finally made it back to Ramsgate and continued to serve for the rest of the war.
But he...well, he was one of the lucky ones.
But the war was far from over.
Britain stood alone, struggling for its very survival.
The fight would now shift from the fields of France to the skies above our homes.
The Battle of Britain was about to begin.
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