D - Day in Normandy

Whether you are visiting a battlefield or just interested in learning more from the comfort of your own home, mini-guides offer a fresh, new and completely unprecedented visual feast of information, photographs, graphics, maps, uniforms and equipment - all in full color. Each mini-guide concludes with pratical information including suggested itineraries for touring the battlefields as well as monuments, museums and other related sites you can visit.

In the first few days of June 1944, the Allies began launching one of the most decisive operations of the Second World War: a massive landing on the Normandy coastline. It was a risky enterprise, seeking, as it did, to deliver a mortal blow to German forces in the west and also to support the efforts of the Soviet Red Army in the east. It was essential that the landings were a success. Defeat could spell disaster for the alliance and, just when morale was at its lowest ebb in Britain, would have had incalculable repercussions. Hitler too was well aware of the risks. For him the Normandy landings were to be decisive, his victory or his defeat on the coast of France would decide the outcome of the war. It was therefore crucial for the Wehrmacht to throw the Allies back into the sea within the first 24 hours.