Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.With every landmark anniversary, the second world war recedes further from living memory. And while some of the last surviving veterans of D-Day movingly shared their memories in a BBC film earlier this week, a new documentary marking the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings finds another way to lend immediacy to the testimonies of those no longer alive. D-Day: The Unheard Tapes is a three-part BBC series in which newly remastered audio recordings of postwar interviews with both Allied and German soldiers are lip-synced by actors, cast and costumed to resemble the speakers.The aim is to make these frontline accounts of the hellish beach slaughter, the fighting inland, bittersweet camaraderie and widespread brutality seem fresh and vital. The result, however, is rather uncanny — especially in rare moments when the audio crackles or echoes.It’s also likely to divide opinion. Where some will see an imaginative means of bringing us closer to the past, others will find a cheap gimmick. And while it may confront us more impactfully with emotions that audio alone cannot fully transmit, it also controversially leaves room for actors to alter the tone or embellish the words with their own performed gestures.Ultimately, the recordings are sufficiently raw and evocative to make the lip-syncing seem superfluous, if not distracting. Each story is individual and sheds light on a different area of a multipronged campaign. Just as arresting as the descriptions of carnage, of French towns reduced to rubble and bodies piling up across the bucolic Normandy landscape are the recollections of complex personal feelings: pangs of conscience, waves of sorrow and fleeting moments of relief.Throughout the three episodes the interviews are intercut with both harrowing archive scenes and ill-conceived re-enactment sequences that play out like a bootleg version of Saving Private Ryan. At other times, historians appear to add some background on military strategy and provide figures that contextualise the scale of the operation and the human toll.Yet the series ends with a stirring reminder that it’s not enough to learn these facts, we must learn from them. “The sheer bloody waste,” surmises soldier Wally Parr. “This period should teach us something.”★★★☆☆On BBC2 from June 2-4 at 9pm. Streaming on iPlayer from June 2
