
Inside The Only Surviving British Warship To Bombard The Normandy Coast
HMS Belfast is the last British warship left that fired on the Normandy coast on D-Day, and host Rob Bell spends this episode climbing through it deck by deck. He gets inside the gun turrets to feel the scale of the armament that hit the beaches, then works through the everyday texture of life aboard: the daily rum tot, the crew hammocks slung below deck, and the officers' cabins that show just how differently rank was treated on a warship this size. Bell also retraces the Battle of North Cape, where Belfast helped hunt down and sink the German battleship Scharnhorst in the freezing waters off Norway, using the ship's own layout to explain how that action unfolded. The result is part walkthrough, part battle history, anchored the whole way by the physical ship itself rather than archive footage alone, since Belfast survives today as a museum ship on the Thames.