It is fortunate indeed that author,[1] broadcast commentator, and academic Peter Caddick-Adams[2] writes a page-turner, because Sand and Steel has over eight hundred pages to turn. He is a superb writer who combines scholarly thoroughness with the skills of an accomplished narrator. His magisterial new work will be the gold standard for serious study of Operation Overlord for decades to come.

Sand and Steel comprises thirty-five chapters divided between Parts One, "Preparation," and Two, "Invasion."[3] The book's principal strengths are its author's lucid prose and deft transitions between explaining the reasoning behind the Allied planning and prosecution of Overlord and vivid accounts of the skill and courage of the airmen, commandos, paratroopers, and infantrymen at its cutting edge. All this with an empathy only a former regular infantry officer could bring to the task.

The book begins and ends with Charles de Gaulle, the French colonel who, in May 1940, twice stalled the German invasion of his country and was promoted to général de brigade for his heroism—a rank he held for the rest of his life. De Gaulle regarded himself as French civilization in exile, the only legitimate alternative to the collaborationist and anti-Semitic Vichy regime. Postwar D-Day commemorations were nonetheless bittersweet for him, reminders of his powerlessness during the German occupation. France's humiliation was indistinguishable from his own and it drove him to petulant Anglophobic behavior as president of the Fifth Republic, despite his genuine and deep gratitude to Winston Churchill and England (862–66).

The goal of Overlord was in the first instance only the liberation of France, but more fundamentally, it marked the commencement of the last act of World War II in Europe. In the book's opening pages, Caddick-Adams puts the events of the longest day in perspective, stressing that

None of this diminishes the significance of the cross-Channel invasion of France. Overlord's Anglo-American planners knew well that the Soviet Union had since 1941 endured most of the struggle against Germany. This fact informed and troubled their political and military debates about when and where to open a second front against Germany. The debacle of the Anglo-Canadian raid on Dieppe in 1942, the American defeat at the Kasserine Pass in 1943, and the stubborn German defense of Tunisia fed Churchill's scepticism about a cross-Channel invasion of France. He was, after all, among those in awe of the German army.[4] But he was also keenly aware that British resistance to such an invasion might move President Franklin Roosevelt to reconsider his Germany-first policy.[5] Hence, Churchill adopted a "don't argue the matter" policy as early May 1942 when he ordered Louis Mountbatten at Combined Operations HQ to work on the design for Mulberry harbors; the policy was soon applied to other engineering and logistical challenges involved in placing and sustaining overwhelming Allied strength ashore at any given point (118–25).

Planning for the invasion had begun the year before, with the establishment of the first Allied planning group under the (not yet appointed) Chief-of-Staff, Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC), which, after considering promising invasion points along the French coast, settled on Normandy as the best option. With Roosevelt's appointment of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in December 1943, COSSAC's ideas took on harder contours.

Caddick-Adams describes in detail the preparations for and strategic calculations behind the choice of the Normandy beaches and its concomitant logistical imperatives, as well as the delicate diplomacy involved in Eisenhower's choice of commanders for the American, British, and Canadian soldiers under his authority. These included such self-regarding personalities as Omar Bradley, Bernard Montgomery, and George Patton. He then discusses the minutiae of training the soldiers who would ultimately find themselves locked in combat in the hedgerows of the French countryside. Lessons drawn from "Spartan," a Canadian training exercise, had ramifications for American and British troops fighting a year later in Normandy, especially with regard to the experience of tactical air support of ground troops in North Africa (164–65). The inhabitants evacuated from the many British villages chosen for countless other pre-invasion exercises could testify to the intensity of the training:

Of course, the damage was nothing like that visited upon the towns and villages of Normandy after 6 June 1944 or the nightmare of violence suffered by invasion forces. This is where Caddick-Adams manages to write a form of military history that brilliantly evokes the human drama known to those who were actually present. Captain John G. Wilhelm Finke, one of the first officers to reach Omaha Beach, had sprained an ankle in the marshaling area; undeterred, he used a cane rather than a rifle "to very good effect to just whack [his men] until they moved" (666) out from behind the obstacles that gave them cover from machine-gun fire. Approaching Juno, the future novelist, Douglas Reeman, noted how tall waterspouts "shot towards the sky and then drifted away very slowly," while vivid blobs of tracer fire came "licking out from the shore in straight, lethal lines" (749). On Sword Beach, another future novelist, David Holbrook, recalled that

Once the invaders began to move inland, hugely bolstered by armor and artillery, many of their fears never materialized. The fearsome 21st Panzer Division, for example, among the best units in Erwin Rommel's Afrika Corps days, was poorly led in 1944 by Generalleutnant Edgar Feuchtinger, who was away enjoying a leave in Paris on D-Day. And, too, Ultra intercepts had yielded wildly inaccurate estimates of the unit's composition, which included only 112 (not 240) Mark IV tanks and not one of the much dreaded Tigers. Only three of the German heavy tank battalions ever found their way to Normandy (836).

Yet, even if the Allies were misinformed about this or that detail of what awaited them in France, the German command had little grasp of what they would face in June 1944 or, more critically, where the blow would land:

Sand and Steel brings to bear an extraordinary volume of primary and secondary material on both familiar and lesser known actions, all the while weaving the personal narratives of the men involved into an analysis of the operational context of their part in the longest day. As if that were not enough, Peter Caddick-Adams offers in passing sober assessments of D-Day's historiography, correcting inaccuracies and dispelling hallowed myths. All in all, an extraordinary achievement in the true sense of the word.