| Popis: |
The fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, 1994 saw a flood of books on the subject. None of the works is likely to approach in impact Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day, which first appeared in 1959 and a few years later as a Hollywood movie that fixed the image of the Allied landings in Normandy firmly in the popular mind: the British gliderborne attack on what is still called Pegasus Bridge; the widely scattered American airborne descents (with one unfortunate paratrooper ending up suspended by his chute from the church steeple at St. Mere-Eglise); the American Rangers scaling the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc to capture, expensively, empty gun emplacements; the shambles on Omaha and the fortuitously easy assault on Utah. It seems that successive anniversaries of June 6, 1944, simply replay these stories-in print, in speech and, of course, on film. Stephen Ambrose brings to the task of retelling the story of D-Day impressive credentials. From working as one of the editors of Eisenhower's wartime papers, he went on to write an excellent account of Ike's three years (1942-45) as an Allied supreme commander and then a two-volume biographical study of the general and president. As the head of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, Ambrose and a team of assistants have collected nearly fifteen hundred oral history interviews with veterans, which are the heart of this book. Ambrose, of course, puts these personal accounts into a larger context-Anglo-American debates on strategy, training and preparation in England, the whole incredibly complex business of mounting the largest aerial and amphibious assault in history is laid out for the reader. The heart of Ambrose's narrative, however, is June 6, and especially the American experience on that day, for the heroes of this story are |
