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“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…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.” Read more...
The best books on World War II Battles
Alex Kershaw, Historian
If you have any interest in World War II, you’ve probably already read journalist Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day or at least watched the epic movie based on it (starring John Wayne, Richard Burton etc). Not only was Cornelius Ryan at D-Day himself, but he tells the stories of the men who lived through it, based on more than 1,000 interviews. The book was first published in 1959.
