D-DAY ADVENTURE

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29264, 23 July 1960, Page 3

D-DAY ADVENTURE

The Longest Day. By Cornelias Ryan. Gollancz. 256 pp. Illustrated with maps and index. In, the last two or three years some excellent accounts of various actions and campaigns of the Second World War have appeared. All these books, the results of careful and long research into Allied and enemy war diaries and documents and the questioning of participants, have been written objectively and without the jingoism many people, particularly re--turned servicemen, find undesirable. “The Longest Day," by an experienced journalist, Cornelius Ryan, is one of these. "The Longest Day,” an account of the first day's fighting in the invasion of Europe on June 6, 1944, is not a war history, but

the story of many of the people—soldiers, sailors, airmen and' civilians—who fought or were caught up in the confusion of the battle. The extent of Mr Ryan’s research has been tremendous. He has studied records, from Von Rundstedt’s war diary to the signal logs of the British and American units which made the landings. ‘ He gives an excellent account of the preparations for D-Day—-the planning, the assembly of the ships and barges to carry the troops across the Channel to France, and the dramatic decision byathe Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower, to launch the attack in spite of a forecast for good weather on the beaches in France for a brief two or three hours. Ryan depicts this fateful conference brilliantly. On the German side he traces accurately the preparations to withstand the attack, and describes the men responsible for them—Rommel, Speidel, Pemsel, and Blumentritt. The extraordinary failure of the Germans not only to discover where the landings would take place—although they knew the text of the code message the 8.8. C. passed to the underground—but also to appreciate the significance of the invasion, even when it had been under way for some hours, is a revelation.

Ryan builds up the tension in his account of the fighting so well that the fate of the invasion seems almost to be left in doubt until the last page. An Irishman, Ryan first worked for Reuter and then as war correspondent for the “Daily Telegraph.” He flew with the R.A.F. and U.S.A.F. on 14 bombing raids, covered the D-Day landings, and the later stages of the campaign in the Far East. After the war he covered the atom-bomb tests at Bikini for the “Daily Telegraph” before he settled in America.