D-Day: Piercing the Atlantic Wall - Hardcover

D-Day is a brilliant collection of German and Allied eyewitness accounts of what it was really like to parachute by night into Normandy, to defend the beaches from within the German bunker, to splash fearfully ashore under machine-gun and artillery fire, to be a victim of the relentless Allied air attacks or to struggle from a burning tank brewed-up by the deadly 88s. Many books have been written about the Normandy landings, but Robert J Kershaw brings a new perspective by drawing heavily on German and Allied sources little used in the standard accounts. The actual landings and the subsequent few days of battle to consolidate them often resolved themselves into a multitude of desperate small-scale struggles - for the next few yards of beach, to cross the next field, or to reach the next hedgerow. By looking at the battles at precisely this level, Robert Kershaw is able to develop new insights into the failures and successes of both sides, and to show why the battle for Normandy developed into the long and bitter struggle that has become so well known. He features extracts from the German telephone log for Omaha Beach, bringing the landings to life. He analyses the failure by both sides appropriately to balance tank and infantry forces in the difficult Normandy terrain, and examines why the Allies, with local superiority in the early days, were unable to break out earlier, or form a larger bridgehead. He shows how the D-Day struggle was not concluded in a single 'longest' day but was in fact a 10-day battle for the Normandy foreshore to decide whether the Allied lodgement would hold, or the Germans push the invaders into the sea.

Robert Kershaw joined the Parachute Regiment in 1972 after graduating in History at Reading University, reaching the rank of Colonel. In between Regimental service he attended the Fuhrungsakademie - the German Staff College - at Hamburg and later spent a number of years with NATO and the Bundeswehr. He has seen active service during a number of tours of Northern Ireland, with the US VII Corps during the Gulf War and in Bosnia.