Book Review No. 1 is Giles Milton's Soldier, Sailor, Frogman, Spy: How the Allies Won on D-Day. Mr Milton had access to Cornelius Ryan's files, and some of the stories help square some of the scenes present in The Longest Day on screen with their absence or at best passing reference to in the book of the same title.
I'll recommend only that people pick up the book and read it through. OVERLORD was a project of such magnitude that there ought be no end to the retelling of stories. I'll only tease a few things. Soldier, Sailor begins with Eva Eifler, a German girl conscripted into the Luftwaffe Ladies' Auxiliary to transcribe radio reports, who reported for her graveyard shift the rainy evening of 5 June, 1944 anticipating, owing to the weather, a quiet evening. Around midnight, though, the radio reports kept coming and coming and the anxiety level in her office kept rising. Toward the end, when the German air force had been invisible most of the day, British troops and French civilians heard airplanes, and interpreted them as Boche avion! The Germans, a few of whom had managed to get close to the Channel in the gaps between the beach-heads (it is worth making a visit to Normandie, dear reader: on a clear day you might be able to pick out Pointe du Hoc from Ouistreham) knew better. Those planes had the piano-key striping and the Germans became fearful before the French relaxed.
What, then, of the infamous bespoke shoes that gave Erwin Rommel cause to be away on 6 June? They didn't fit. Was the Field Marshal not aware of his wife's shoe size? Was she vain? Or might some as yet unknown Parisian cobbler have cocked a snook at the Herrenvolk by getting the order wrong? Let there always be more stories to tell.
(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)
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