This book collects oral histories from men of three United States regiments that participated in the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. The 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment resisted the advance of an SS Panzer Grenadier division. The 116th Infantry Regiment received the highest number of casualties on Omaha Beach of any Allied unit on D-Day. And the 22nd Infantry Regiment came ashore on Utah Beach quite easily before getting embroiled in a series of savage fights to cross the marshland behind the beach and to capture the German heavy batteries to the north. Each participant's story is woven into the larger picture of the assault, allowing the author to go beyond the largely personal viewpoints yielded by traditional oral history while avoiding the impersonal nature of studies of grand strategy. In addition to the interviews and memoirs, the author has also discovered fresh documentary evidence from archives in the U.S.A., Britain, and France The author unearths new stories and questions from D-Day, such as the massacre of soldiers from the 507th. This new material includes a focus on the regimental level, which is all but ignored by historians, and reveals misperceptions about the landings. Finally, the book challenges the orthodoxy established in the immediate post-war period that the operation was a remarkable success from a planning perspective, analysing mistakes that could have been fatal to the Allied cause.