The Longest Day

"Yes. Cornelius Ryan was a war correspondent who had the benefit of witnessing the battle at the time and then interviewing key people. It was pretty useful to be writing then, because the main players were still alive. He could interview division commanders and the people who made really significant decisions, as well as a lot of guys who were there. A lot of people know about The Longest Day because it became a very expensive (and long) movie but it’s actually a pretty short book. You can read it in the time it takes you to get across the English Channel on the ferry. So if anybody is going to the Normandy beaches, they can just take The Longest Day . It’s the ultimate primer on D-Day and you can read it while sipping a beer or cup of tea in the bar on the cross-channel ferry. Cornelius Ryan interviewed hundreds of people for the book. It’s almost history as pointillism. He had access to an enormous amount of information. He sent out questionnaires. If you look at the Ryan archive, it shows you all the material that he gathered for The Longest Day , and it’s really impressive. But he had the discipline, as a really experienced and concise journalist, to say, ‘Okay, I could write a 600- or 700-page book, but I’m not going to.’ It’s short and precise. It’s condensed everything down to the essence of what was dramatic but also important. The story is really well told. Historians would argue, after further review and much more research, that there may be some mistakes or a misinterpretation here or there. There are many areas where you could argue that things were perhaps different or could be interpreted differently. But as an introduction to D-Day that gives you the overall picture, that captures the drama and the enormity of it, and the heroism, and covers the German side as well as the Allied side, there’s nothing better. And I don’t think there ever will be. You try and take a different angle. If you can find people who are still alive that haven’t spoken before or, in archive material, if you can find new stuff that hasn’t been used before, that’s what you’re aiming for. With The Bedford Boys , it was told from the point of view of a small unit—a company of less than 200 men—who fought on D-Day, but it was also told from the point of view of the families and loved ones of those men back in the US. In the book, I cut between Britain, Normandy, and Bedford, a small community in the heart of Virginia. It’ll be a chapter with the guys in Europe getting the training and ready to go and then I come back to the US. I develop the story pretty well in parts of it, so that you understand the cost to one community of that sacrifice on D-Day. So if you’re an American and you were to go and visit Normandy, The Bedford Boys is a recommendation that a lot of people would give you, as a book to read to understand D-Day on a very personal level. It’s not the massive broad picture that Cornelius Ryan presents very well. Although I tell the overall story of the day, I do it very much from the point of view of this unit of men from Bedford, Virginia. There were 34 of them on D-Day, and 19 of them were killed in the first hour or so of the invasion. That’s why Bedford, Virginia is the place where they have the National D-Day Memorial in the US, because it’s been estimated it’s the community that, per capita, had the highest loss of any Allied community on D-Day. So that book was quite a new approach. I don’t think anybody had ever told the story of a battle from the point of view of the wives, the kids and the parents back home. If I don’t do anything else in my life, it will be one thing that I will look back on and think, ‘Well, that was interesting.’ I don’t know whether any books are a favourite but I think it meant something to quite a few people in Bedford, Virginia, and it told the D-Day story in a new way. Therefore, hopefully, a couple of people will read it long after I’m gone. I’m not being falsely modest. It did feel like new ground was being broken. I also did another book about D-Day called The First Wave which was just an unashamed ‘Greatest Hits’ approach. I just picked my favorite guys from the Canadians, the Brits, the Americans and even a Frenchman. I decided, ‘I’m just going to tell this incredible story but tell it up close and personal from the point of view of my eight stars and really go to town.’ There wasn’t a lot that was enormously new but the angle there was somewhat innovative in that I took the combat leaders who were in action first, who had the most critical missions. They landed first—either from the air or the sea—and if they didn’t succeed in the first minutes or hours of D-Day, then the whole operation would have failed. So it was an interesting approach and I got to hero worship some really cool guys. There’s nothing wrong with hero worship when it comes to people who were prepared to die to save everything that we care about."