Overlord

Overlord is Max Hastings’s history of the Allied invasion of Normandy and the fighting that followed the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944. It traces the enormous amphibious and airborne assault, the establishment of the beachhead and the difficult campaign through the bocage and around Caen before the German position finally collapsed.

Drawing on Allied and German testimony, Hastings challenges triumphalist accounts by comparing equipment, tactics, leadership and combat performance on both sides. Eisenhower and Montgomery appear within a narrative that gives equal weight to ordinary soldiers and to the limitations of the armies they commanded. First published in 1984, the work is nonfiction military history.