D-Day – and the next days

"All countries have their own World War 2": our visit concentrates on visitors' country, yet includes all the Allied players – the British Commonwealth, the United States, the Free French, the Poles, the Russians on the Eastern Front. And rather than focus on the Landings alone, it explains the Battle of Normandy.

• We recall the Landings' scope and risk of failure
  

D-Day worked because Churchill's plan of "mystification" succeeded in keeping secret both the time and the place. The Allies then maintained their vulnerable toehold by another policy of subterfuge, which had Germany's elite 15th army remain a few hours' march from the beaches – waiting for an enemy that never came.

Hitler stated, and many historians agree, that a single division sent to Normandy in the first days would have thrown the Allies back into the sea. Western Europe would then have remained Nazi or have been dominated by Stalin's Russia.

• On to the beaches and cemeteries

• Americans will want to visit Pointe du Hoc, where U.S. marines scaled cliffs under machine-gun fire, and "Bloody Omaha", the beach where the landing almost failed. The American Military Cemetery, which is on high ground, looks west over both. Its rows and rows of crosses are extremely impressive.

• The German cemetery is a five-minute drive away. Dates of births and deaths on the tombstones show that many of the dead were adolescents.

• Visitors from the British Empire, Poles and French will choose the beaches to the west, where their troops fought. They are closer to Paris than is the American sector, which makes it possible to include the:

 ◊ Pegasus Bridge, about five miles north of Caen, where reinforcements arrived with skirling bagpipes...