Sublime

Our grandfathers had pushed back the onslaught of fascism. Just what the fuck were we doing?

Their campaigns and battles are always called triumphant, while Cæsar and Cromwell wept for many humiliations.

William Hawkins,

The Company’s flagship had in fact become a grounded and gutted hulk; her commander was dead, her crew decimated, and her hull was

nearly swamped by the following waves

The landings went according to plan at Utah, Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches, and by evening the lodgments were secure. But at Omaha, the American V Corps hung by a thread.

The classics were their comic books; they’d grown up on Plutarch’s Lives—“the bible for heroes,” as Emerson declared—and came of age with their heads buried in the adventures of Odysseus and Richard the Lionheart and Sigurd the Dragonslayer. They understood that in ancient Greece, entire wars could pivot on the performance of one or two extraordina

As the ill-fated amphibious assault by British and Canadian commandos on the French port of Dieppe in August 1942 proved, Hitler’s West Wall was a tough nut to crack.

Foster became determined to show how much discontinuity there was in the story. He took on the immense challenge of writing history as though he didn’t know what would happen next – because that’s how the people living through these events had experienced them.