The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice

“The Bedford Boys…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.” Read more...

The best books on World War II Battles

Alex Kershaw, Historian