James Holland
@WW2Headquarters·114K subscribers·233 videos
In the Footsteps of D-Day Tank Commander and Poet Keith Douglas | with James Holland & Al Murray
Posted
June 5, 2025
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30:04Now PlayingThis "lost episode" from our WW2 Walking the Ground Normandy series sees James Holland and Al Murray in Sherwood Rangers territory, on the front line of the Allied advance immediately after D-Day, around Audrieu, Hill 102 and Tilly-sur-Seulles.
It opens at Audrieu near where 24 Canadian and 2 British POWs were massacred in the grounds of Chateau D'Audrieu by the 12 SS Recce Battalion. From there, James and Al retrace some of the fierce inland fighting that followed the D-Day beach landings on June 6th 1944 as the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, part of the 8th Armoured Brigade, fought alongside the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division and 12th Canadian Armoured Regiment (Three Rivers Regiment) against Panzer Lehr and 12th SS forces.
At the heart of the film is Captain Keith Douglas, a tank commander in the Sherwood Rangers, a poet, and one of the war’s most brilliant literary voices who was killed in this fighting on 9 June 1944. James and Al trace his final moments using battlefield sketches by Padre Leslie Skinner, chaplain to the Sherwood Rangers. Made shortly after he had buried the fallen, Skinner's sketches record the landscape where Douglas died — marking tank wrecks, terrain features, and makeshift graves, to ensure bodies could later be recovered and properly reburied in official war cemeteries.
Douglas’s great friend, Captain John Bethel Fox, was killed five days after him. James and Al end the journey at Tilly-sur-Seulles War Cemetery, paying their respects to both men and reflecting on the tragedy of the many young lives cut short in one of the most significant and hard-fought campaigns of the Second World War.
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