So after the beautifully planned, adrenalin-charged successes of the initial landings, British units, in their attacks on German defenders who had recovered their nerve and established themselves in excellent positions, tended to be, in the euphemistic jargon of the time, "distinctly sticky".

In addition to his talents as an historian, Beevor has the advantage of having been a professional soldier, and it shows in his capacity to understand and describe what happened in the small-scale actions that cumulatively determined the outcome of the campaign. He focuses in particular on the extraordinary inability of British armour, in spite of four years experience in the Western Desert, to co-operate effectively with their infantry, which, combined with the formidable qualitative superiority of German tanks, led to disaster after disaster. Veteran divisions from the Eighth Army, brought in to stiffen the highly trained but inexperienced units from Britain, simply went to pieces when confronted by the totally different conditions of the Normandy bocage. And no amount of training on the gentle Yorkshire dales could prepare green troops for the ghastly experiences that confronted them when they saw their mates have their heads blown off by shellfire or had to scrape their remains out of brewed-up tanks with mess-tins and spoons.

Finally, Beevor deals with an element ignored by most historians of the campaign: the luckless civilians who were caught up in it. The "liberation" of French villages and towns usually involved their total destruction. Caen was obliterated as totally - and as pointlessly - as Dresden would be a year later, its population being reduced from 60,000 to 17,000. Altogether 20,000 French civilians were killed during the Normandy campaign, a little over half the number lost by the liberating armies. Beevor describes their suffering with all the detail and compassion that he devotes to that of the combatant armies. It is this compassion that marks him out as a truly outstanding historian of war.