SOURCE: “The Culprits of Market-Garden,” in Times Literary Supplement, December 30, 1994, p. 27.

In the following excerpt, d'Este concludes that D-Day, June 6, 1944 is “enormously readable and will undoubtedly become a standard work of its genre,” despite its overemphasis on the American role in the Normandy invasion.

The summer of 1994 marked the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversaries of two famous and very different battles of the Second World War. On June 6, the world's attention was focused on Normandy, where in 1944 the turning point of the war occurred when Allied forces launched their long-awaited cross-Channel invasion on Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha, and Utah beaches.

There is a dramatic contrast between D-Day and September 17, 1944, the date the Allies launched Operation Market-Garden, the greatest airborne and glider operation in history, and a bold strategic gamble aimed at ending the war in the same year by gaining an Allied bridgehead north of the Rhine. D-Day...