It is the young men born into the false prosperity of the 1920s and brought
up in the bitter realities of the Depression of the 1930s that this book is
about. The literature they read as youngsters was anti-war and cynical,
portraying patriots as suckers, slackers and heroes. None of them wanted to be
part of another war. They wanted to be throwing baseballs, not handgrenades;
shooting.22s at rabbits, not M-1s at other young men. But when the test came,
when freedom had to be fought for or abandoned, they fought" (from the
Prologue). On the basis of 1,400 oral histories from the men who were there,
this account reveals how the intricate plan for the invasion of France in June
1944 had to be abandoned before the first shot was fired. The true story of
D-Day, as Stephen Ambrose relates it, is about the citizen soldiers - junior
officers and enlisted men - taking the initiative to act on their own to break
through Hitler's Atlantic Wall when they realised that nothing was as they had
been told it would be.
NOW HALF-PRICE!
