Churchill and Roosevelt deserved their nations’ gratitude for delaying D-Day until 1944, when their own resources had become so large, and those of Hitler were so shrunken. Allied losses in the ensuing continental campaign were a fraction of what they must have been had an invasion taken place earlier.

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On 27 September 1940, the Tripartite Pact was signed in Berlin between Germany, Italy and Japan, which promised mutual assistance if any of the parties was attacked by a nation not engaged in the European war. This was a move designed to deter the United States from exerting further pressure on Japan, and it failed. The

Farther east, large numbers of Ukrainians and citizens of the Baltic states enlisted in the Wehrmacht, disliking Stalin’s Soviet Union more than the Nazis.

The towering reality was that the BEF got away. Some 338,000 men were brought back to England, 229,000 of them British, the remainder French and Belgian.

On D-Day, thirty months after Pearl Harbor, half the U.S. Army’s 8 million men had yet to deploy overseas, and many more had still to see action.

Allied soldiers shocked local people by their contempt for civilian property; a Civil Affairs unit noted in Ouistreham: “Looting by troops pretty general. British prestige has fallen here today.” Similarly, a Frenchwoman described the ransacking of her home in Colombières by Canadians: “It was an onslaught throughout the village. With wheelbarrows

THE CONQUEST of France and the Low Countries cost Germany almost 43,000 killed, 117,000 wounded; France lost around 50,000 dead, Britain 11,000; the Germans took 1.5 million prisoners.

Though D-Day