we have heard from the we've heard from the veterans and from the pundits, but we'd like your reaction. follow me on twitter. let me know what you think. thanks for watching. on june 6th, 1944, gallant men from another generation embarked on the largest land invasion ever attempted in war. i'm greta van susteren. 19 young shoeoldiers from this small town who lost their lives that day. the russians had the germans retreating on the eastern front,

so the time was right for the allies to strike hitler on the shores of occupied france. >> soldiers, you are about to embark upon the great crusade. >> d-day will always stand in history as a defining moment of the second world war. >> retired colonel is a military historian. >> there would be no stopping the allied might. in hindsight, it appeared he was correct. >> historian rick atkinson is the best selling author of the book "the guns at last light." >> the invasion plan known as operation over lord would land thousands of allied troops on

the beaches of normandy. utah and omaha were the american beaches. >> it was delayed until june 5th and then bad weather caused it to be delayed yet again one day. >> southern england and eastern england would have resembled almost a vast stockyard, an industrial parking lot filled with every imaginable weapon. >> all along the coast there were a couple of dozen encampments where the americans were staging. >> this was the landing craft that carried our soldiers to the beaches of normandy. >> the average american g.i. was 5'9", he weighed 144 pounds. we have just over a million

still alive. >> that is the cemetery. on the morning of june 6th, 1944, here are your orders. you will take to the bridge before daylight. >> on the early morning of june 6th, the first in the fight were paratroopers like tom blakey. >> it took four days. 500 casualties. >> we got in the landing craft. i think it was about 4:00, 4:30 in the morning. 200 yards from the beach, we started taking enemy fire and they were bouncing all around us. there were bullets that hit the landing craft. he said, keep your head down. we did. >> the area bombardment was a total failure.

there was no place to hide once they landed. >> the preinvasion bombing was supposed to make large craters on the beach to act as shelters. >> if there's no craters there, we put everybody back on and reset? we can't. >> they have to execute with what they find. >> there are very few photographs that survived the first wave to document what happened on the beach that morning. >> most of his film got wet and didn't make it out of the developing tank very well. >> he's a curator of arms. >> you've got no place to hide. >> the reason why they wanted to land at low tide was to minimize the effectiveness of the defenses the germans had put on the beaches. >> there were 3,000 obstacles on

omaha beach alone. >> guys were dying all over the place. you think you're running fast, but you're carrying about 80 pounds of equipment on. >> one of the worst episodes of d-day happened on omaha beach. >> this was the only national guard unit to go in on the first wave. what they faced was just a daunting task. >> tragically, 19 of them would lose their lives that day. >> how long before the families learned what happened? >> it would take until mid july before the first telegrams would start going through. >> their story inspired the major motion picture "saving private ryan." >> it is unlike anything ever captured on film before. >> omaha beach came very close to failing. >> it was also a challenge for our tanks. and even after 70 years, their

encrusted steel frames are still resting underwater at normandy. >> usually three or four of the five men in the tank are able to get out. a sherman tank, which weighs 33 tons, it would work fine on a river crossing or on a lake, but in rough seas it was inadequate. >> we looked up over the seawall and there was a row of wire about ten feet high rolled, and it just ran all the way down the beach and the hill was on fire smoking from the shells. and they yelled at the guys, put on your gas mask, so you could breathe. >> the first thing you noticed was the terrible, terrible noise because when artillery is coming

in and hitting within 50 yards of you, you're hearing really loud bangs. >> it was smoke all over the bluffs as we came in. plus, there was smoke from the boats that had been hit by artillery. the maximum range of any of the guns in the omaha area were the french 155 millimeter gpfs. they could be pretty far in and still reach the beach. >> four hours after the invasion began at 6:30 in the morning on june 6th, there were american soldiers on top of those bluffs at omaha beach. >> but hitler was convinced this was not the real invasion. >> the germans recognized after the invasions took place on june 6th that george patton was not

there in normandy and assumed that he was preparing, staging, for yet another large invasion. >> the effect is the germans freeze in place. they stay and don't send to the beach at normandy. >> coming up, did a birthday celebration cost hitler the battle on d-day.

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the germans knew the allied invasion of france was coming. it was only a matter of time, but the germans could not defend the whole coastline equally giving the allies the upper hand. >> they had us in their sights. >> it was pretty harrowing. as the bullets cracked by, you could hear them. you cringed when they did. >> he was in the alpine retreat. in fact, he was sleeping.

>> he is the author of 17 books on german military history. >> just as hitler was sleeping, romel was back in germany trying to get an audience. there's a personal issue as well, celebrating his wife's birthday. >> romel had a surprise for his wife. new shoes from paris. that morning, there was a bigger surprise for the germans. hitler denied repeated requests to reposition their troops. hitler was sure the invasion would be commanded by general patton. it wouldn't be until two months later that the june 6th d-day

was the real invasion. >> we could look at hitler's career as an amazing story. the country was nowhere in 1933. it was disarmed and a mess. hitler blamed all of germany's problems on a small group of jews. >> hitler took his most charismatic general, who had quite a bit of experience fighting allies in africa, and put him in charge of building a wall. >> the allies would be stopped. >> it wasn't just normandy. it was brittany.

it was the bay of biskay. it's the entire french coast. >> on the beaches, thousands of lethal wooden barriers were tapped with explosives and hidden beneath the high tide. >> that's why so many of their obstacles were designed to be effective while submerged. >> general eisenhower's plan to invade at high tide was scrapped. at low tide, the g.i.s had few places to take cover. >> when you looked through the murk of the early morning and saw the landing craft coming at

you, you were ready to fight. >> it was a daunting task to land on that beach because it was well defended, though most people don't realize the number of german soldiers on the beach itself was relatively small. that's why we were able to overwhelm them. >> why didn't the german air force mount to a sizable defense? the reason is because of a concerted effort of the allies really to destroy any aircraft within the region. >> there were many accounts of germans who were captured in normandy that would be taken back to prison camps in england. they were struck by how scrawney they seemed. >> some of these p.o.w.s didn't

even speak german. >> these germans wanted to surrender. cover me. i didn't know exactly what that meant, but that's what john wayne had been using so i figured it had to be good. >> he was part of the invasions of sicily, italy, and the french riviera. >> i looked him right in the eye and said did you ever think you would be taken prisoner by a jew and i turned around to my men and said, take them away. we had so many millions of us that were ready to give up their lives as i was to, not with any enthusiasm, but recognizing this was a distinct possibility. >> they were waiting for us and we surprised them. they didn't think that we would

come in the bad weather, but we did. >> hell nobody could beat us. we knew it. up next, the german spies who double crossed hitler about d-day. five seconds. three, two, one. standing by for capture. the most innovative software on the planet... dragon is captured. is connecting today's leading companies to places beyond it. siemens. answers. was killed june 28,2005 in afghanistan. my husband's death was the hardest thing i've ever faced. the special operations warrior foundation stepped in to help. now you can help, too. purchase new cherry 5-hour energy now through july thirty-first and a portion of each sale benefits special operations warrior foundation to help families of fallen heroes.

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as we look back on d-day, a story that was top secret at the time was a plan to deceive hitler known as operation fortitude. it's goal, to double-cross the germans by using their own spies. >> we wanted to dissipate german forces around the european theater. an entire fake army was created on the coast of scotland. they created these rubber tanks.

in very high winds, they would lift off the ground and begin to float away. >> they were part of an intricate scheme to trick hitler. >> if d-day failed, the war would have gone on longer. >> ben mcintyre recounts in his book -- >> the effort was extraordinary, fake troop maneuvers. you couldn't simple present hitler with a document that said, we are going to invade. that would be too obvious. the only way to do it was by tiny little bits of information that when the germans assembled the jigsaw would create a picture that was completely false. >> it was the man behind 007 ian

flemming who created the schemes of world war ii. >> the idea was to try to convince the germans that sicily was not going to be invaded, even though it was the obvious target. >> they went to the morgue, placed him somewhere where the germans would find him with documents. >> they put him in a torpedo tube and used the compressed air and launched him out. >> it was one of the biggest deception plans of the war, operation fortitude. >> we created these false radio transmissions that german

intelligence thinks there's a large group still planning to land in norway. >> we wanted them to believe we had more troops than we actually had. we wanted them to believe the invasion was coming later than it would. >> british intelligence hired a look alike to impersonate montgomery. >> they knew he was going to lead the ground forces for the attack. >> german spies spotted him less than two weeks before d-day. >> it would persuade the high command that nothing was happening soon. >> in double-cross, mcintyre describes the dangerous game the british played. >> the british approach was if you have an enemy spy, the best

thing to do with them is to turn them into a double agent and deploy them as a weapon of war. >> every one of them was caught by the british and flipped. >> robertson developed the double-cross system of spies. >> they could actually in his own phrase get inside hitler's head and persuade him to believe something that was the reverse of the truth. the five essential double agents were probably the oddest military unit ever assembled. a bisexual playgirl, a dodgy businessman, et cetera. they were sending copious information. >> decades before e-mail, spies used a pen. >> secreting was the most advanced technology for passing

information back and forth. >> germans were sent hundreds of secret letters written with invisible ink, all of them false. >> he had great creditability with the germans. >> peter is a former cia agent. >> he convinced him he had an entire network of agents. >> the network was imaginary and he was awarded the iron cross. >> the double-cross agents went in different directions after the war. some publicized what they had done. in later life, he liked to maintain he had been the model for james bond and some of his

extraordinary bravery and courage under fire is reminiscent of james bond. some never told what they had done. still ahead, some unusual weapons and spy gadgets that helped turn the tide of the war. it's about people. we are volvo of sweden. -[ laughing ] -yeah! ♪ it was the best day ♪ it was the best day yeah! ♪ it was the best day ♪ 'cause of you we make a great pair. -[echoing] great pair. -huh? progressive and the great outdoors!

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president obama is on his way home after a surprise visit to afghanistan this memorial day weekend. the president telling the troops our country's longest war is coming to a close at the end of the year. nearly 2100 of our troops were killed during the nearly 13 year war. nearly a thousand were wounded in hostile action. a nationwide manhunt is now underway for the man seen in this surveillance video.

you can see him walking into the museum. he gets out an assault rifle, opens fire, and quickly walks away. so far no one claiming responsibility for the shootings. back to fox news reports. for all your headlines, log on to foxnews.com. during world war ii, the predecessor to the cia was the oss. just like today's spies, they had clever gadgets to deceive or kill our enemy in unusual ways. >> as an air force intelligence officer, my job was basically to plan targets. we would intercept german radio

conversations that were not in code. >> if the war had gone on for another year, you could have had hundreds of thousands or even millions more dead. intelligence plays a role in shortening the war, which means less people are dying during it. >> deception devices used in intelligence played a key role in outfoxing the enemy to save lives. >> the dummy paratroopers were very effective for what they were intended to do. >> the germans are getting reports of, well, they're dummies. i just saw something blow it, so it can't just be a dummy. what that led to is confusing the german high command.

>> during the normandy operations, there was a large drop of about 500 of these essentially cloth dummies without any features to create a lot of confusion and create the impression that there was a parachute drop in an area where there wasn't going to be one. they were rigged up with explosives and noise makers. the rubber ones are called oscar. >> the intent behind deception operation is to present the commander with more information than he can effectively digest. when that happens, it's very hard to make the decision as to what to react to first. >> once the paratroopers landed on the battlefield, other concealed gadgets helped them find their way. >> around my neck, i had a silk scarf and a cave map.

if you got behind enemy lines and didn't know the roads, you could always look to an escape map. >> gadgets like these pencils did more than write. >> the explosives are becoming more advanced during the second world war. you can shape them into anything you want to. a thing that could kill many, many people. >> like this harmless piece of coal used by the french resistance. >> it's an explosive shaped to look like a piece of coal. you can disrupt transportation by blowing up a railroad line or disrupt production by blowing up a factory. >> they use weapons like a pistol hidden in a man's pipe or a glove. >> then there was a spy tool you

couldn't see at all. >> the low tech method was the only thing available to a lot of intelligence operatives. dear mom, it's hot here in france in june and write in between the lines in secret codes. once the letter was passed, they would use whatever chemical was necessary to reveal the message from spy to handler. >> people are fascinated by the gadgetry. that's why "q" plays such a huge role in "james bond." >> it would take you millions of years to just break the code. the british created a government code in cipher school where they brought many of their top mathematicians, the ultra intelligence, allowed us to reroute our convoys around the

german submarines to keep the british in the war. >> we broke the japanese code. >> magic intelligence, that was our code name for it. whenniz we were planning d-day, knew where our defenses were going to be. >> the oss, the original cia. >> it was founded by bill donovan. they found out about german atomic energy programs. they found out about japanese troop movements. they found out about german industrial capabilities. >> all of this supports the war effort. the more you can shorten the

war, the more lives you're saving. just ahead, spying on your en enemy with a birds eye view. [ male announcer] surprise -- you're having triplets.

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can be delivered directly to your door with nexium direct. talk to your doctor to see if nexium is right for you. there is risk of bone fracture and low magnesium levels. side effects may include headache, abdominal pain, and diarrhea. if you have persistent diarrhea, contact your doctor right away. other serious stomach conditions may exist. avoid if you take clopidogrel. for 24 hour support, automatic refills, and free home delivery, enroll at purplepill.com. it's the nexium you know, now delivered. spying on our enemy from the sky has now become routine with space satellites and drones. but several years ago, 3d images was something brand new.

>> tens of thousands of troops assaulting beaches did require huge preparation. you needed to have a detailed analysis of the enemy defenses and the terrain, for example, what were the beaches like. >> he's t >> it started from the very early days of the war when it was realized air reconnaissance played a key role. >> the germans pioneered spying from the air and believe it or not, attached a camera to a honing pigeon. >> the camera around the pigeon's neck, so as the pigeon flew, the camera would be taking pictures. >> we knew what the germans had waiting for our boys at

normandy. >> there were pictures. if you don't know where the defenses are, you're unlikely to succeed. >> but it also required a special aircraft. >> the top picture, here it shows a spit fire and camouflage blue paint called camo tint. it made it almost invisible at an altitude of 30,000 feet in the sky. it was the fastest aircraft in the world in those days. so they flew all over the coastline from northern norway all the way down to spain. the germans built their defenses along the coast, and these were huge gun batteries, trenches, machine gun posts. we needed to know what they

were. >> we had maps. we had aerial photographs of the entire area. we knew practically where every blade of grass was because we studied it so hard and so long. >> the maps showed all german defenses on the atlantic wall. the secret of getting all your intelligence from the photography was the photography was taken in 3d, or stereo as we called it. it gave you 60% overlap of each photograph taken. when you merge those two photos, that gave you a perfectly formed three dimensional image. it was 60% overlap of the photos that gave you that. the terrain will have

undulations. why is it there? what does it mean? how important is it to the military operation? women were great at this analysis and had great patience for looking at the minutia on the photograph. >> women started taking on all sorts of jobs traditionally employed by women. women made a huge market in the field of photographic interpretation for many different reasons. >> most of the photographic interpreters were officers in

those days and most of them were women. 5 million frames of imagery were produced preparing for d-day. many were given to the units going to the shore. if it weren't for the photography and the intelligence, many more people would have died on d-day. >> gerald weinstein still has his father's collection from world war ii. >> my dad went to the air force photographing school near denver, colorado. the group he was assigned to flew in b-24s. when the germans had a high priority target that they knew the allies would be bombing, they protected by laying a smoke

screen produced by smoke generators, and the targets here were the goring aircraft factory. >> but not every location got bombed by the u.s. air force, particularly sites that contained precious art and architecture like the city of venice. >> venice was a protected area. >> he never imagined he would be part of it. >> my father and a group of his officers were in a field in france. one of them stepped on a land mine. with the aid of a french civilian, my father went into the mine field and rescued the rest of his group who were in there and pulled them to safety. as a result received the

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one of the most celebrated missions on the d-day was the bravery of the u.s. army rangers. but the guns were missing and later destroyed. greg went to normandy to investigate the story of another german battery that was captured on june 9th and remained forgotten until a map was discovered. >> these are the boys of pointe du hoc. these are the men who took the cliffs. >> the scaling of the cliffs at pointe du hoc and the rangers

that conducted this amazing feet of arms, the main purpose for this was to neutralize the large anti-ship guns on the cliffs. >> they had these big casements. nothing's in them. >> jack burke trained in scotland to climb those steep cliffs. but when rough seas forced his boat to land, he went to pointe du hoc. german artillery fire was coming from the atlantic wall. >> they knocked those guns out. where was all that artillery coming from? not the pointe. >> gary stern purchased french land where he believes the artillery fire was coming from.

his book "the coverup at omaha beach" chronicles how -- the map. >> it contained a very detailed area. the area was marked with a cross hatching somebody had put in with a pencil or pen. >> you came here and there was nothing here? >> nothing here apart from rolling countryside. >> these guns were active. >> absolutely. >> until the rangers got here on the 9th of june, they were firing on the allies. >> just a few miles from pointe

du hoc -- >> the bomb plot showed that. there were a number of bombs dropped and probably none of them hit the guns. >> it had a very high priority on the artillery registration point maps. so it was well known in the highhigh er echelons. >> military historians still have little knowledge of the batteries existence or why it was buried under six feet of soil. >> it was all farmland in normandy. it had been farmland for thousands of years.

>> i don't necessarily want to enshrine every german fortification. >> what are we looking at here? >> it is called a 622. completely bombproof. it couldn't be shelled into. >> how did it take so long for people to remember it was here? >> it was buried straight after the battle. the local townspeople didn't see it being constructed. >> so this is poured concrete and very thick concrete. >> it's very thick. it's three meters thick with steel reinforcing. >> it's a network of reinforced concrete bunkers, artillery positions, headquarters positions. >> the rangers got orders to

attack on june 9th. >> after pointe du hoc was secure, we were told we were going to have to attack a battery. >> it was well defended. the infantry outnumbered us two to one. the germans were in very good positions. >> i have since found out that the air corps knew about it, the british knew about it. everybody knew about it except us. >> it is clear from the maps i have studied and the reports of operations. maisy is clearly a number of one of the objectives. >> we found the skeleton of a german officer who had been wounded and died in battle. >> an indicator that there was a lot of ferocious fighting going

on from both sides. >> it was hand to hand, gun to gun from position to position. >> this is what it looks like from the german soldiers perspective. a machine gun blasting away at u.s. army rangers. it took 5.5 hours to take this whole complex. >> maisy was a tough nut to crack. it was a huge, huge installat n installation. >> if it hadn't been targeted earlier, those three days of shelling would have saved many lives. >> pointe du hoc wasn't and didn't turn out to be the target that it was supposed to be. maisy did turn out to be the target that they should have attacked, clearly.

so was somebody embarrassed by that? >> a lot of guys were wounded here. they went away with full knowledge of this battle here. >> general rand officers this explanation. >> it was attacked and captured by three companies of a small little ranger battalion that didn't have a public information officer or anything like that, so there was no one to tout what we had established there. the american forces put bulldozers in there and plowed those things under as much dirt as possible so they couldn't be used again. they did everything they could to destroy and cover them up. >> there are so many heroic stories that could be told from d-day. the u.s. army rangers are only one shining example of those who

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>> u am chris wallace. chilling internet video and a new crime scene in the california shooting rampage. >> it is apparent he was severely mentally disturbed. >> son of a hollywood director, whose familiar alerted police to threat being videos he posted online. we will go to santa barbara where authorities are gathering evidence. >> frustration open right and left with rebound's response to the v.a. scandal. >> notallies prove -- if the aimses prove to be true, it is dishonorable and disgraceful and