his excellent study of D-Day is clearly intended for the sixtieth-anniversary commemoration coming in June. Bastable covers the territory by means of eyewitness accounts, including those of elite combat soldiers, such as the paratroopers and rangers, and the mechanics who kept Allied air superiority as superior as it was and who, like the logisticians, have been unsung heroes of the operation. And that operation emerges in these pages as something only the World War II Anglo-American alliance could have carried out and as utterly essential for the Allied victory that undoubtedly shaped the future of civilization for the better.