Peter Caddick-Adams is one of the very finest historians of the Second World War-a man who has been studying this conflict and D-Day, and the Normandy campaign in particular, for decades. Sand and Steel: A New History of D-Day by Peter Caddick-Adams And yet we could afford it.” I think he was a genius-one of the finest writers of the 20th century. “On the beach lay, expended, sufficient men and mechanism for a small war,” he wrote. He was out at sea on D-Day itself, but came ashore on 7 June, onto Omaha Beach, and his descriptions of what he saw are just brilliant in their vividness. Brave Men covers North Africa and Italy as well as before D-Day in England, and the campaign that followed. His observations, his eye for bringing to life small moments and incidents in a way that resonates with all who read-and continue to read-him is masterful. Rightly, he was beloved during the war for his missives from the front and reading his words today one is immediately taken right back to those years and seeing what he saw with vivid clarity and humanity. He was a people person and it was the young Americans taking part in this great crusade that interested him most. For the Allies, it was the beginning of the liberation of Europe from the tyranny of Nazism and a pivotal moment in world history. Reading these five books, one gets as close as it’s possible to get to understanding what happened on that day of days.Įrnie Pyle created a type of journalism and writing that had never been written before and certainly not in war reporting. His way was to write conversational prose, recounting simply what he saw, what he felt, and telling the story from the bottom up. Today, those beaches-and Normandy as a whole-are places of tranquil peace and beauty, but back on 6 June 1944 they were the scene of the largest amphibious invasion ever mounted, and one of barely imaginable violence and carnage. But what constitutes “best”? The best work of history? The best memoir of what it was like to be there on that extraordinary day, whether attacker or defender? Or best overview that tells the reader everything he or she needs to know about what happened, how it happened, and why? In this list, I’m attempting to cover all bases: there is balanced analysis but also plenty of human drama, too-after all, it is trying to imagine what it must have been like, whether jumping out of an airplane, or landing craft, or defending a bunker, or flying overhead, or out at sea, or being a civilian caught up in the middle of the invasion, that draws most people to the subject. There are, of course, a very large number of books that have been written about D-Day, but equally, there are unquestionably some that really do stand out above the rest.
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