D-Day

ON THE MORNING of May 5, 1944, 146 Allied generals, admirals, officers and staff members filed past military policemen into the chilly auditorium of St. Paul's School in London. German bombs had blown out 700 of the school's windows; its students had been evacuated to the countryside. The military men sat on hard benches with overcoats buttoned, blankets on laps. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, standing before a 30-foot-wide plaster relief map of the coast of Normandy, announced that if anyone saw a problem with the plan the group was about to hear, he should speak up. "I have no sympathy with anyone," he said, "whatever his station, who will not brook criticism." Then the "wiry, elfin" British Gen. Bernard L. Montgomery began, "in his reedy voice, each word as sharply creased as his trousers," to describe the invasion intended to mortally wound Hitler's Third Reich. This is the dramatic opening of Rick Atkinson's "D-Day," a new addition to what may qualify as a mini-trend in publishing: the adaptation of adult nonfiction titles for younger readers. Excellent recent examples include James Swanson's "The President Has Been Shot!" and Neal Bascomb's "The Nazi Hunters." For "D-Day," Atkinson condenses the opening section of "The Guns at Last Light," the third volume of his award-winning Liberation Trilogy, to create this vivid and detailed depiction of the invasion of Normandy. Even before the first chapter ends, Atkinson confronts one of the major challenges of writing history for this age group - providing context without killing the story's momentum. Having set up the scene of the meeting at St. Paul's, he summarizes the events of the war since September 1939, and then jumps back to the preparations for D-Day. From there, short chapters give glimpses of the training, the men (the average American soldier was 5-foot-8, 144 pounds), the mountains of supplies amassed on the British coast (2.6 million small arms, 800,000 pints of blood) and the efforts the Allies took to camouflage the buildup from German planes and spies. The narrative picks up speed when it hits the night of June 5, as thousands of glider troops and paratroopers rub charcoal and cocoa on their faces before the short flight over the English Channel. Atkinson excels in conveying the unglamorous chaos of combat, with men "slipping on the vomit-slick floor" of their planes or drowning in the muddy water of flooded fields, or tossed to the ground like toys when their flimsy gliders disintegrated upon landing. Then comes sunrise on June 6, D-Day. Atkinson describes a French boy waking up to see the largest amphibious landing ever attempted ("more ships than sea," the boy recalled). Seasick soldiers jump from landing craft into churning green water. They wade toward beaches defended by a murderous mix of mines, machine guns and artillery. The action isn't presented through the eyes of individual leaders or specific soldiers. Instead, the main character is the invasion itself, the epic size of it, the stunning numbers of ships and planes and soldiers, the heroism of the men and the many, many ways to die. Atkinson's attention moves from one beach to the next as he describes the strategic significance and special horrors of each battle. AT JUST 200 OR SO PAGES, with photos on nearly every spread, "D-Day" has the look of a book for young readers. But it isn't written like one. Much of the text is taken unchanged from Atkinson's adult trilogy. "The accidental beach proved pleasingly benign," he writes, and elsewhere, "the amber orb of a full moon rose through a thinning overcast off the port bow." This high tone works well because it respects the intelligence of its audience. The best children's books are never written for readers of a specific age, anyway. When I visit schools to talk about my own books, many students express enthusiasm for rich and challenging non-fiction. Maybe they're just being nice, but we're talking about middle schoolers here. There seems to be genuine interest in true stories, dramatic, unsettling, fast-paced stories, and I'm confident that even students battered by textbooks into believing that history is boring can still be won over. The thing is, you can't just tell kids that history is cool; you have to prove it, and Atkinson does. STEVE SHEINKIN is the author, most recently, of "Bomb: The Race to Build - and Steal - the World's Most Dangerous Weapon," and "The Port Chicago 50."

Adapted from Atkinson's adult history of the latter part of WWII, The Guns at Last Light (2013), this is a brisk, busy, gutsy look at modern warfare's most famous offensive. It begins, rather cunningly, with orientational front matter: country-by-country chains of command, a time line, and quick bios of key players. Then the authors dive into the planning behind Operation Overlord, so extensive that it began to feel like an overrehearsed play. Readers will feel the tension as world leaders fret about weather conditions and speculate upon casualties. The June 6 invasion plays out in short chapters crammed with detail and festooned with helmet icons offering important definitions. There are no main characters per se; rather, we are given short introductions to everyone from commanders to frontline grunts for example, Edward Cannonball Krause, who liberated the first French town. The layout is nothing splashy, but the ample, sobering photographs are well chosen and extensive, and unusual back matter (clothing issued to new GIs, pay rates, etc.) rounds off this substantial and readable package. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Atkinson's three-volume adult history of America's involvement in WWII Europe was a massive and popular undertaking, lending this adaptation an attention-grabbing gravitas.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2010 Booklist

Gr 9 Up-This fine adaptation of Atkinson's adult The Guns at Last Light is a readable, and even suspenseful, account of the final preparations for and successful execution of the D-Day invasion. The author gives readers a comprehensive overview of the operation, using primary-source excerpts to personalize the action, from the planning of the highest commanders, to the bravery shown by individual men who went ashore on June 6, 1944. He describes the stages of the invasion, including the transport of troops, air support and airborne operations, and ground operations conducted under withering German resistance. The author separates the five Allied landing forces into individual chapters, which allows for plenty of detail and continuity of narrative about their missions, and the varying amounts of German defenses and resistance they encountered. Although a brief epilogue summarizes the remainder of the war in Western Europe and Germany's defeat, the book focuses on the invasion and the bravery and sacrifices of the men who fought. The text is supplemented by solid area and battle maps, captioned period photos, and an informative appendix with accessible data about equipment and weapons, medical care, troops and their battle gear, and general statistics about the war. This book matches the quality of Earle Rice Jr.'s Normandy (Chelsea House, 2002) but is intended for a slightly older readership, making it an excellent choice for high school World War II buffs and report writers.-Mary Mueller, Rolla Public Schools, MO (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

THE GATHERING MAY 5, 1944 IN THIS ROOM, the greatest Anglo-American military leaders of World War II gathered to rehearse the deathblow intended to destroy Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. It was the 1,720th day of the war. Admirals, generals, field marshals, logisticians, and staff by the score climbed from their limousines and marched into a Gothic building of St. Paul's School. American military policemen--known as Snowdrops for their white helmets, white pistol belts, white leggings, and white gloves--looked closely at the 146 engraved invitations and security passes distributed a month earlier. Then six uniformed ushers escorted the guests, later described as "big men with the air of fame about them," into the Model Room, a cold auditorium with black columns and hard, narrow benches reputedly designed to keep young schoolboys awake. The students of St. Paul's School had long been evacuated to rural England--German bombs had shattered seven hundred windows across the school's campus. Top-secret charts and maps now lined the Model Room. Since January, the school had served as headquarters for the British 21st Army Group, and here the detailed planning for Operation OVERLORD, the Allied invasion of France, had gelled. As the senior officers found their benches in rows B through J, some spread blankets across their laps or cinched their overcoats against the chill. Row A, fourteen armchairs arranged elbow to elbow, was reserved for the highest of the mighty, and now these men began to take their seats. The prime minister of England, Winston Churchill, dressed in a black coat and holding his usual Havana cigar, entered with U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose title, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, signaled his leadership over all of the Allied forces in Europe. Neither cheers nor applause greeted them, but the assembly stood as one when King George VI strolled down the aisle to sit on Eisenhower's right. Churchill bowed to his monarch, then resumed puffing his cigar. As they waited to begin at the stroke of ten A.M., these big men with their air of importance had reason to rejoice in their joint victories and to hope for greater victories still to come in this war. Since September 1939, war had raged across Europe, eventually spreading to North Africa and as far east as Moscow, capital of the Soviet Union. Germany, a country humiliated after World War I, had seen the rise of Adolf Hitler, a dictator who had dreams of conquering the continent. Beginning with Poland, his armies had crushed one nation after another, destroying cities and killing or enslaving millions of people. His collaborators in the Axis alliance, particularly Japan and Italy, pushed their own campaigns of aggression in Asia and Africa. Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, and Japan's attack in December of that year on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, led to a grand alliance determined to stop the Axis. The United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union were the major Allied powers, but they were supported by dozens of other countries. At an enormous cost in blood, Soviet armies pushed the German invaders back through eastern Europe, mile by mile. German casualties there exceeded three million, and in 1944 nearly two-thirds of Hitler's combat power remained tied up in the east. The United States and Britain, meanwhile, had defeated German and Italian forces in North Africa. They then moved north across the Mediterranean Sea to conquer much of Italy, which surrendered and abandoned the Axis. The Third Reich, as Hitler called his empire, was ever more vulnerable to air attack. Allied planes flying from Britain, Italy, and Africa dropped thousands of tons of bombs on Germany and on German forces along various battle fronts. City by city, factory by factory, Germany was a country increasingly in flames. Although they paid a staggering cost in airplanes and flight crews, the U.S. Army Air Forces, Britain's Royal Air Force, and the Canadian Air Force had won mastery of the European skies, even as Allied navies controlled the seas. By the late spring of 1944, the Allies were ready to attempt something that had long seemed impossible: to invade what the Germans called "Fortress Europe" and begin the final campaign that would free citizens who had been enslaved since Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. The hour of liberation had nearly arrived. Copyright © 2014 by Rick Atkinson Excerpted from D-Day: The Invasion of Normandy 1944 by Rick Atkinson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.