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shocked local people by their contempt for civilian property; a Civil Affairs unit noted in Ouistreham: ‘Looting by troops pretty general. British prestige has fallen here today.’ Similarly, a Frenchwoman described the ransacking of her home in Colombières by Canadians: ‘It was an onslaught throughout the village. With wheelbarrows and trucks, the men stole, pillaged, sacked everything … There were disputes about who got what. They snatched clothing, boots, provision, even money from our strongbox. My father was unable to stop them. The furniture disappeared; they even stole my sewing machine.’ Looting remained a universal practice among Eisenhower’s armies throughout the campaign, almost unchecked by commanders. Meanwhile, Allied bombs and shells killed some 20,000 people in north-west France during the bitter attritional fighting that now began.

Eisenhower and his generals had always recognised that the ‘battle of the build-up’ in the weeks following D-Day would be as critical as the landings: if the Germans could concentrate forces in Normandy more swiftly than the Allies, the invaders might still be evicted – as Hitler hoped and demanded. Deception planners made a vital contribution, by their brilliantly sophisticated Operation Fortitude, which convinced the Germans of a continuing threat to the Pas de Calais, where important forces lingered for weeks. But, though Allied air force destruction of rail links and road bridges slowed the arrival of reinforcements, throughout June and July new formations rolled into Normandy, to be hurled piecemeal into the cauldron. The eleven-week campaign became by far the most costly of the western war, and Normandy the only battlefield where casualty rates at times briefly matched those of the Eastern Front. Though D-Day had huge symbolic significance and commands the fascination of posterity, the fighting that followed was much bloodier: for instance, while D Company of the British Ox & Bucks regiment triumphantly seized ‘Pegasus bridge’ across the Caen canal early on 6 June for the loss of only two killed and fourteen wounded, next day it suffered sixty casualties in an inconclusive little action at Escoville.

Montgomery had declared ambitious initial objectives for the British on the eastern flank, including seizure of the city of Caen. Unsurprisingly, however, momentum was lost on 6 June, as troops advancing inland from the beaches were delayed by a maze of German strongpoints and hastily deployed blocking forces. During the succeeding days, dogged fighting consolidated the beachhead and gained some ground, but German formations, notably including 12th SS Panzer Division, prevented a decisive breakthrough. Again and again British troops pushed forward, only to be checked by enemy tanks and infantry fighting with their accustomed energy.

‘The attack entailed crossing about one thousand yards of open cornfield which fell away from Cambes Wood,’ wrote an officer of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. ‘We had barely crossed the start-line when the enemy reacted fiercely, with well-sited machine-guns and intense mortar fire which enfiladed the companies as they moved forward. It was a situation almost reminiscent of some First World War battlefield … We could see the tracer bullets flicking off the corn.’ Private Robert Macduff of the Wiltshires said: ‘One of the scenes which will live forever in mind is the arms and legs on the roadside covered in maggots. The smell was vile. Someone had been killed, someone had gone forever … There but for the grace of God go I.’ Brigadier Frank Richardson, one of Montgomery’s ablest staff officers, wrote afterwards of the Germans, whom he admired boundlessly: ‘I have often wondered how we ever beat them.’

But the Wehrmacht was also capable of extraordinary blunders, and made many in Normandy, especially before its commanders grasped the significance of the Allies’ power to punish daylight movement. ‘Here we encountered one of the most terrible images of the war,’ wrote a German NCO near Brouay on 8 June. ‘The enemy had virtually cut to pieces units