McDonald Publishing and the Imperial War Museum teamed up back in the late 1960s and early 1970s to publish this tight series of illustrated paperbacks on the history of World War I, World War II (and a few other conflicts of the 20th century), which were picked up by Ballantine in the United States. They were all divided into subjects: battles, campaigns, weapons, war leaders, politics in action, human conflict, and regalia, by color bands on the bottom, enjoying common editing and artwork, and a fairly common collection of well-known historians. They cost $1 at the time (a good deal of money) and a lot more now (being out of print).
The series as a whole is slightly outdated by the disclosures from Allied codebreaking, and suffered from being whipped together in a hurry, but they remain then and now a fine introduction to conflict in the 20th century -- if you can find them.
The campaign for the Normandy bridgehead remains extremely controversial, for reasons I have never quite fathomed. There is a great deal of finger-pointing, character assassination, and backbiting in the postwar Allied accounts of this desperate struggle, which ignore the determination and skill of the German defenders, the difficulties the Allies faced in coping with terrain and weather, and the fact that they ultimately won a staggeringly important and major victory. Too many historians and armchair generals seem eager to villainize Bradley, Patton, Eisenhower, and Montgomery (particularly in America).
My personal take on Montgomery is that he would have been better served if he made an effort to get along with his American colleagues, which he did not, and that his postwar memoirs (an exercise in self-congratulation) did him more harm than his wartime generalship. If he'd simply admitted his mistakes, and not said, "Everything went according to plan," Americans would like him better.
That having been said, Brigadier Hubert Essame wrote this book with the skilled eye of a military historian and a brigadier who commanded troops in the Normandy bocage, and his writing is fast-moving and knowledgeable. There are weaknesses in the book: he focuses heavily on the British 2nd Army, the book was written before the ULTRA revelations, and the book is mostly about the "big picture," with arrows on good maps, photographs of generals studying maps, and more photographs of weary Allied troops struggling through bocage country. One photographs is repeated twice, to my amusement...another triumph for the art department.
The introduction makes the point that the Allied campaign in Normandy was one of the most favorable periods of Anglo-American history, and I regard this as true. Much of the back-biting and arguments made at staff conferences were for the record, and then the officers moved on to the serious topic of winning the war, which they did, and did rather well. The Normandy campaign was an important part of doing so, and this book gives a good first impression of how the victory over Germany was achieved.
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