World history is pitted with world wars. Last century was conceited enough to call its pair the First and Second. One of the turning-points of that Second was the Anglo-American landing in Normandy on 6 June 1944, of which the 60th anniversary falls next year.
David Stafford, a leading 20th-century historian (once a professor at Toronto), has got in early with a fine book on what the run-up to the landing felt like, both to the much-publicised high command and to far more junior combatants and civilians. He notes that the opposing generals, Eisenhower and Rommel, were both appointed on the same day, 15 January. He treats in some detail the ghastly quarrel between de Gaulle, on one side, and Churchill and Roosevelt on the other, that threatened to emasculate French resistance help to the landing, which turned out to be critical.
He keeps cross-cutting his visits to the staff stratosphere with accounts from a Wren cipher clerk working in a South Downs tunnel near Portsmouth, a Franco-Jewish communist in hiding in Paris, an imprisoned Norwegian newspaper editor, a private in the United States 82nd airborne division, a student at Caen, a private at Nantes, and a subaltern in the Regina Rifles.
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