'The messy dirty bloody reality of Operation Overlord comes alive in Sword Hastings's
portrait of the individual soldiers who risked their lives on the beaches of Normandy. He
brings these men to life with sensitivity and beautiful prose' THE TIMES On 6 June 1944 when
the Allied armies landed on D-Day the Second World War had already lasted almost five years.
Yet many of the British and American troops who invaded Normandy were virgin soldiers never
before committed to battle. They quit England in summertime to face within hours a storm of
machine-gun and mortar fire. They witnessed scenes above all of sudden death such as no
exercise had prepared them for. In Sword veteran chronicler of war Max Hastings explores with
extraordinary vividness the actions of the Commando brigade and Montgomery's 3rd Infantry and
6th Airborne divisions on and around a single beach. He describes their frustrations hopes
loves and fears through the apparently interminable years training and preparing in England
then their triumphs and tragedies on the beach and beyond. Here are the airborne assaults on
the Caen Canal bridge and Merville Battery the battles on the shoreline and against the German
strongpoints inland narrated and explained with all the insights that Hastings' decades of
study veterans' interviews and new archive research enable him to deploy. The book offers a
searching analysis of why British troops did not reach Caen on 6 June as Montgomery had
promised Churchill that they would - and the story of the brigadier who was sacked for that
failure. There is also a host of personal portraits of key figures from Commando leader Lord
Lovat famously brave but supremely arrogant to Colonel Jim Eadie whose tanks of the
Staffordshire Yeomanry repulsed a panzer division in the last hours of 6 June and some of the
humbler participants to whom extraordinary things happened. This is the story of D-Day as you
have never read it before with the blend of narrative analysis and human insight that made
Max Hastings' last book Operation Biting like many of his earlier works a Sunday Times No. 1
bestseller.
