6 June at Dawn… They Landed

"That morning, the fleet had put to sea. It was impossible for him to count the ships, or even to estimate their number… Wallace stood at the top of the cliff, transfixed and exhilarated by this magnificent spectacle that no one had ever witnessed before and that no one, for certain, would ever witness again."

In this masterly work, David Howarth reconstructs the detailed account of some thirty eyewitnesses — soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians, British, American, German and French — and delivers an evocative narrative of the greatest amphibious landing in history. He focuses not only on the celebrated anecdotes but on the full range of experiences lived on D-Day, recounting the fighting between the paratroopers and the Germans in the Norman countryside, the ordeal of coming under fire for the first time, the agony on the landing beaches, the stupor of the German defenders, and all the confusion, exhilaration and horror of the battle.

He also examines the lesser-known roles in the offensive, such as the crews of DD tanks (amphibious armour) or Hobart's Funnies (engineer armour modified by Major General Sir Percy Hobart to carry out specific tasks), as well as the units tasked with creating roads and directing traffic on the beaches — soldiers who had to operate in sometimes dantesque conditions to prevent or ease the inevitable bottlenecks of men and materiel thrown in their thousands onto a few kilometres of beach more accustomed to the indolence of holidaymakers than to the fury of combat.