A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

British cover of Normandy '44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France. Note the shorter subtitle.     © 2019 Griffon Merlin Ltd On June 4, 2019, Grove Atlantic's Atlantic Press Monthly published James Holland's Normandy '44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France (published by Griffon Merlin Ltd in Britain as  Normandy '44: D-Day and the Battle for France ), a new history of what the late Stephen E. Ambrose called "the climactic battle of World War II." The timing of the book's publication was. as the British expression puts it, "bang on." Two days after the book hit bookstore shelves or was sent to customers who bought it on Amazon and other online stores as pre-orders, most of the West (including the U.S., Canada,  France, Great Britain, and their former enemy, Germany) observed the 75th Anniversary of D-Day and the beginning of the end for Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Holland, who produces, writes, and narrates BBC ...

© 2014 HarperCollins (Reissue cover) In 1984, Simon & Schuster published the first edition of Max Hastings' Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy, a book that re-examined the Allied invasion of northern France on June 6, 1944 and the bitter campaign that lasted two-and-a-half months and culminated with the liberation of Paris on August 25, 1944. Based on extensive research, hundreds of interviews with veterans and other eyewitnesses, and benefitting from new insights gleaned from the declassification of the "Ultra secret  - the long-concealed fact that the Allies had broken the Germans' "unbreakable" Enigma cypher codes - Hastings' book sought to look beyond the legends and myths that had surrounded Operation Overlord and explain how the Allies defeated the German Wehrmacht in Normandy despite a "quality gap" in weapons (except artillery and aircraft), training, tactics, and overall soldiering skills that favored the Germans. At the ...