THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER '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.
