I was in touch for several years in the 1990s with Bob Slaughter, who was probably the best known of D-Day veterans. At the time, he was the animating spirit behind the creation of the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia, and I wanted to do something to memorialize a beloved uncle who fought from Normandy to the Bulge, and beyond.

Inevitably, Bob had been recruited by Steven Spielberg to serve as a technical advisor on his film Saving Private Ryan. After I’d seen it – with its harrowing first 25 minutes depicting the landing on Omaha Beach – I asked Bob if the scene was realistic. I’ll never forget his answer.

He said that nothing could possibly capture the full horror of it, but that this was as close as anybody would ever come. I thought of this again when I read Alex Kershaw’s new book The First Wave: The D-Day Warriors Who Led the Way to Victory in World War II.

The literature of D-Day and the Normandy killing ground is huge and constantly growing. (To me, the best book overall is Antony Beevor’s.) But Kershaw’s focus is entirely on the individual – American, British and Canadian – and the day itself: the largest amphibious invasion there ever was, or ever will be, in human history.

Perhaps the most arresting statistic about D-Day is that only about fifteen percent of the men who fought that day had ever been in combat before. Compounding the terror of their first experience, as Kershaw relates it, was that they went ashore believing that the massive naval and aerial bombardment which preceded the landing had decimated the German defenses. In the event, it had done nothing of the kind.

Although there have been other books that have striven to make D-Day comprehensible in human terms, I’ve not encountered an accomplishment to rival Kershaw’s. If you’re going to read one book around this 75th anniversary, his is the one to choose.

© 2019 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. A new edition of Nick’s classic book for clients, Simple Wealth, Inevitable Wealth, was published in April, and is available only on www.nickmurray.com.