TORONTO - When Bob Ross looks back on his harrowing tour of duty in Normandy, France in July 1944 he doesn't linger with sorrow over the loss of his right leg.
The 87-year-old veteran says he feels for the countless others whose horrors he witnessed throughout the Second World War — the sudden deaths of fellow infantry men, the injured Allied soldiers he met in a string of field hospitals, and the sombre padre from his regiment, whose tunic was soaked with the blood of dead bodies, as he waded through wheat fields to offer final prayers.
"Ever since then I've never opened my mouth because there's always someone worse off," says Ross, who is among dozens of Canadian, U.S. and Russian veterans who appear in "D-Day to Victory," a six-part documentary series for History Television.
During his time with the 10th Canadian Infantry Brigade, Ross survived the Royal Air Force's punishing carpet bombing in Caen, meant to soften up German defences. But it was not long afterwards that the private found himself under a rain of shells in a small town near Falaise.
"All I could see were bodies flying past me and heads and broken rifles and trenching tools," Ross said of the onslaught.
Ross had thrown himself to the ground and when he looked up, he saw his ankle and foot had been severed from his leg. A narrow strip of skin was all that kept it attached to a bloody stump.
It would be hours before medical help arrived, and Ross says he spent the time trying to cut the leg off with the rocks and stones that lay around him.
Looking back on the event, Ross peppers his story with jokes and humorous asides, but notes he easily could have bled to death had it not been for the way he was struck.
"I was so lucky," he says, noting that hot metal from the shell likely cauterized the veins and stopped the bleeding.
"D-Day to Victory" begins Wednesday with two back-to-back episodes that outline the Allied landing on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944, continues with the protracted battle for Caen, and carries through the Battle of the Bulge.
The Canadian-U.K. co-production resumes with two back-to-back episodes on Thursday and Friday.
The veterans' stories are interspersed with archival footage and a rare display of the power wielded by actual weapons used during the Second World War.
Series producer Janice Tufford says spectacular explosions were staged at CFB Gagetown, where historical battle sites were recreated and then blown up for the cameras.
Builders crafted replica concrete pillboxes and bunkers from the beaches of Normandy, recreated the streets of Berlin as they would have appeared, and erected fake French church steeples similar to those destroyed by bombardments.
The sets were then blown up using era-specific weapons including grenades, flame throwers, Schmeisser submachine guns and Katyusha rockets.
"I had a sense that this would be a very unusual project in terms of how it was going to make the experience of the last surviving Second World War veterans really come alive," says Tufford.
"We've all seen a lot of documentaries and heard a lot about the last year of the Second World War (and we asked): 'How will this one be different?'"
Still, it's the first-hand accounts from veterans that form the heart of the documentary, she says.
"These guys, they leave us every day and there are fewer and fewer of them with us," says Tufford.
"In some instances I think they saw it as an opportunity to tell their stories maybe for the last time as well, so all of that combined to make for some very powerful and poignant interviews."
She says interviews that didn't make it into the series have been stored at a companion website and have also been given to the Memory Project, an online oral history archive.
"We all kind of had a sense that we were caretakers of these last memories and that they should have a place in history," she says.
Tufford notes she was touched by many of the stories she heard — among them that of a Jewish American veteran who liberated a young Polish boy from a German work camp and reconnected with him years later in Atlanta.
Then there's the incredible survival tale of Hal Baumgarten, who was a 19-year-old infantryman from the Bronx who stormed Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944.
He was shot several times in the face and head, then was struck by a landmine, but lived to tell his story. His perseverance inspired the opening scene in Steven Spielberg's film "Saving Private Ryan."
Ross, who returned to his home in Niagara Falls, Ont., after losing his leg, says he looks back fondly on the camaraderie he shared with his fellow soldiers, and despite all he's sacrificed, says he wishes he could have done more.
"I was so glad to get out but I still think back (and) wish I could have stayed longer with the regiment," he says.
History Television also marks Remembrance Day with the special "Breathing Fire: Secret Weapon of the Somme" on Wednesday, "Dambusters Fly Again" on Thursday, and "Vimy Ridge: Heaven to Hell," "Storming Juno" and "Passchendaele" on Friday.