Neil Barber

Important to Remember

As I read The Pegasus and Orne Bridges by Neil Barber the seventieth anniversary of the D-Day landings are taking place. Just after midnight in the early minutes of 6th June 1940 the British Prime Minister and Normandy Veterans are at Pegasus Bridge with fireworks going off around him. Seventy years earlier some of those veterans were young men who captured the bridge the first of many successes that would take place that day. Today those men were driven to the bridge seventy years earlier they had either parachuted in or in the back of a glider.

This book is a gripping description of the Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and the 7th Battalion of the Parachute Regiment capture of the bridges over the Caen Canal and the River Orne. This book describes in detail the planning of the operations and their successful execution of those plans in what is a wonderfully readable account of that day.

One of the most important things in this book is that there are historical explanations of what was happening throughout the book which neatly dovetail with the words of the soldiers and officers on the ground of that day. This really gives a lot of resonance to their story rather than a bland account by a historian.

Pen & Sword Military Publishers really do cover Military History so well as they not only print books about the big battles and dates in war but also some of the stories that could easily be forgotten so easily as the men that participated in the various theatres of war are very few and their number dwindles by the year.

This book uses the words of the officers and men along with war time pictures and right now I can hear the voices of those men. My interest in this part of history is not just that I am a qualified historian but my own grandfather was a paratrooper who knew and trained many of the men that served their country and adopted country so well on 6th June 1944. This is a wonderful book that really should be in every library.

This book is a wonderful testament to those who fought to take and defend the bridges over the Caen Canal and the Orne River we owe them a debt of gratitude. This really is an important book to read and cherish.… (plus d'informations)