This book is the result of some 24 interviews, conducted between September and December, 1983, in Canada, England, France and Germany. At that time I had just completed some twenty years of work on Dwight Eisenhower, during which period I examined something over two million documents. In my next book I wanted to work from an entirely different kind of source material. I have always been impressed by the work of the American military writer S. L. A. Marshall, especially by his use of post-combat interviews to determine what actually happened on the battlefield.

My thought was, Why not do a post-combat interview forty years after the event? Even taking into account all the tricks that memory plays, I felt that for many of the participants, D-Day was the great day of their lives, stamped forever in their memories. I knew that was the case with Eisenhower, who went on to two full terms as President, but who always looked back on D-Day as his greatest day, and could remember the most surprising details. I also wanted to come down from the dizzying heights of the Supreme Commander and the President to the company level, where the action is. Further, I wanted a company that was unusual and that played a crucial role, Pegasus Bridge was an obvious choice.

So I set out. My recorded interviews with John Howard took twenty hours, spread over a period of some weeks. I got almost ten hours of tape from Jim Wallwork. My shortest interview was two hours.

Listening to the old veterans was fascinating. D-Day had indeed burned itself indelibly into their minds, and they very much enjoyed having an interested audience for their stories.

My major problem, it turned out, was the sequence and timing of events: I sometimes got six, eight, or ten individual descriptions of the same incident.