In this short celebratory program for the 70th anniversary of the D- Day landings, engineer Rob Bell looks as the ways in which tanks were adapted to cope with the exigencies of landing on the beaches in the wake of the disaster at Dieppe two years previously, when a raid on German positions failed dismally due to lack of planning.

On his travels he encounters a series of boffins whose reconstructions help viewers, as well as Bell, understand precisely what kind of innovations were made. With the help of computer- generated graphics we learn about the ingenuity of the engineers at that time who made scarce resources go a long way.

While admiring what the engineers did all those years ago, the program remained strangely passionless, almost as if the D-Day landings were viewed as a triumph of science devoid of any human element. We got little sense of the organizational know-how that went into planning the operation; nor did we learn much about the emotions felt by those involved - neither the generals nor (more importantly) the tank-drivers). History is more than just fact; it involves people as well.