D-Day
by Martin Gilbert
Wiley & Sons, 240 pp., $19.95

Omaha Beach
D-Day, June 6, 1944
by Joseph Balkoski
Stackpole, 410 pp., $26.95

Ten Days to D-Day
Citizens and Soldiers on the Eve of the Invasion
by David Stafford
Little Brown, 400 pp., $26.95

D-Day
The Greatest Invasion--A People's History
by Dan van der Vat
Bloomsbury, 176 pp., $40

The D-Day Atlas
Anatomy of the Normandy Campaign
by Charles Messenger
Thames & Hudson, 176 pp., $34.95

The D-Day Experience
From the Invasion to the Liberation of Paris
by Richard Holmes
Andrews McMeel, 64 pp., $39.95

WITH THE BIAS OF HINDSIGHT, success on D-Day, June 6, 1944, now seems inevitable--a simple matter of momentum. The Germans had been driven out of North Africa, Sicily, and the southern half of Italy, and lost all the initiative in World War II. Hitler had made two egregious mistakes: the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the reckless declaration of war against the United States six months later. The German army was over-stretched, weary, and dispirited, and its senior officers already plotting to assassinate Hitler. Old men and boys were all that was left to guard the Atlantic Coast from an Allied assault. The German U-Boat threat at sea had collapsed, partly because of one of the greatest Allied achievements of the war, the cracking of the German code, Ultra. The Luftwaffe was a shadow of its old self. The German homeland was under massive bombing attack, day and night.

All of this suggests that when Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, wrote a statement to be given to the

Ike knew nothing of the kind. The night before D-Day, he said, "I hope to God I know what I'm doing." The success of the invasion--success that made it a turning point in history--was not inevitable. It was contingent on many factors, perhaps the most important was the deception of the Germans. The British and American scheme known as Operation Fortitude worked, persuading Germans a huge army commanded by General George Patton was left behind in England on D-Day, ready to stage the real assault on the continent on a later day at a different site. The belief the landings on five beaches of Normandy were merely a feint was firmly held by Hitler and the German high command for weeks after D-Day. They feared a larger attack near Calais, 150 miles away, at the shortest point for crossing the English Channel, or maybe in Belgium or the Netherlands, or even in Norway. As a result, nineteen German divisions and more than 500,000 men were deployed near Calais, and more than 372,000 were kept in Norway to ward off a fictitious joint Anglo-Soviet operation.

For that matter, what if Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox and the best of the German generals, had had his way? He was assigned to erect the coastal defense, the Atlantic Wall, from France to the Low Countries. His plan for a barrier might well have impeded an invasion, if only he'd been given the resources to build it. Even the scaled-back version of his wall led to thousands of Allied deaths on D-Day. Rommel also failed to gain command of four Panzer divisions that, if rushed to Normandy, might have made D-Day a victory for the Germans. And what if Rommel had been in Normandy on June 6 rather than on a brief holiday in Germany? Or what if Hitler's secret weapon, the V-1 and V-2 rockets, had been available earlier? The first of these flying bombs was launched against England a week after D-Day, too late to change the course of the war. And what if the best-kept secret in war since the Trojan horse--the actual date and location of D-Day--had leaked, as it almost did? Finally, what if Winston Churchill had let his qualms about invading France prevail?