Publisher's Synopsis
It was the day that changed the course of a war, and also a century. Meticulous in their planning, brilliant in their execution, the landings of 6 June 1944 constitute the largest seaborne assault ever attempted. As dawn rose, and the first of the 150,000 Allied troops reached the Normandy beaches, D-Day heralded the beginning of the end of the Second World War.
In this brilliantly readable account, acclaimed historian David Stafford describes the countdown to the Normandy landings from a multitude of angles, from the perspectives of Churchill and Eisenhower to those of the ordinary people whose courage and dedication made it all possible.
Written with the pace of a thriller, Ten Days to D-Day switches from country to country, from character to character: the English Wren working on coded signals; the French Resistance worker and his clandestine network; the Norwegian freedom fighter imprisoned in a Gestapo cell; the American paratrooper waiting for action; the Jew hiding in a Paris garret; the German soldier on the French coast who is convinced that invasion is a long way off; the Canadian rifleman due to land in the first assault wave. Stafford chronicles the actions of Churchill, Hitler, Rommel, Eisenhower and de Gaulle in those crucial days - and shows the vital work of the deception agents who fed false information to the Nazi hierarchy.
Researched from contemporary letters, diaries and official records, Ten Days to D-Day is history as it happened, a book that brings these tumultuous events brilliantly to life. It is a story of nations but, above all, it is an account of the lives of individual men and women on the brink of an epic moment in history.
