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D-Day, 6th June 1944, was the climactic battle of the Second World War. Allied triumph was anything but inevitable – there was everything to play for and everything to lose. The story of the actual landings has been told and re-told many times, but no one has actually revealed the part that fate, human error, political infighting, deception and double agents played in the crucial ten days before the landings. David Stafford’s compelling narrative, climaxing on the eve of D-Day, gives a day-by-day account of the untold human story behind this momentous event from both the Allied and Nazi perspectives. Stafford focuses on twelve very different human narratives – not only those of Hitler, Eisenhower, Montgomery, Churchill and Rommel, but of an American paratrooper; a Canadian infantryman; a French Jew in hiding, awaiting Liberation but helpless to do anything; and SOE agents fighting to keep their identity secret. TEN DAYS TO D-DAY recounts the entirety of events in the countdown that could have taken a fatefully different direction so many times along the way, revealing how narrow the margin was between victory and defeat.
David Stafford, a historian tenured at the University of Edinburgh, is a critically acclaimed chronicler of World War II and is the author of CHURCHILL AND SECRET SERVICE and ROOSEVELT AND CHURCHILL.