George Bruce

Second Front Now! George Bruce

The Normandy landings in World War Two were the largest seaborne invasion in history.

But how was D-Day planned?

And how did Soviet and American demands for a cross-Channel operation result in deadlock with Great Britain at the height of the Second World War?

This enthralling history of the road to D-day should essential reading for fans of Anthony Beevor, Max Hastings and Alex Kershaw.

Second Front Now! examines the most contentious political and military issue of the Second World War: namely, whether, where and when a second front should be launched in northern Europe, and the conflicts between the three superpowers - Great Britain, the United States and Soviet Russia - that it involved.

Upon it depended the future direction of world history, the Anglo-American alliance, the fate of Great Britain and millions of people in occupied Europe, as well as the lives of several hundred thousand soldiers.

Were Winston Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff right in decisively rejecting the demands first of Stalin in 1941 and then, in 1942, of America's General Marshall, that Britain should launch an invasion of Hitler's Fortress Europe to relieve the embattled Red Army? And why did the influential press baron and Cabinet Minister Lord Beaverbrook side with the Russians and the American military leaders?

George Bruce turns to the original documents to answer these and other questions. He quotes extensively from the official papers that report verbatim the discussions and arguments between Churchill and his War Cabinet, the Chiefs of Staff and their American counterparts, together with Stalin's letters on the subject, to provide an insight into the thinking of Britain's wartime political and military leaders about the decision not to invade until mid-1944.

This engrossing account also describes the detailed planning and the composition of the forces proposed for Operation Overlord, taking the reader right up to the morning of 6 June 1944 and the Allied invasion of Normandy.

Second Front Now!: The Road to D-Day is a highly readable and historically valuable book which reveals a great deal about the motives and characters not only of Britain's leaders but also of those of the United States and the Soviet Union.