A Collection Of Photographs Shows The True Horror Of D-Day

Historian Brooke S. Blades, author of The Americans on D-Day and in Normandy: Rare Photographs from Wartime Archives, says: "Omaha Beach and other Normandy locations are sacred places to many today.

"The D-Day beaches were in large measure the primary gateways, the low doors in the Atlantic Wall that led, through heroism, suffering and sacrifice, to the liberation of Western Europe.

"To modern eyes, the landscapes associated with those events are memorialised and even sanitized to a point where the reality of those awful days in the summer of 1944 is increasingly hard to visualise.

"Even more regrettably, the people who occupied those landscapes and experienced those days have largely faded in person and public memory.

"This volume proposes to revitalize both landscape and person, at least for the Americans who were there and the civilians they encountered.

"The intent is to reduce the immense scope of the invasion of France to a human scale that is both understandable and moving for the reader."

Blades says he hopes the photographs will remind the world of the sacrifices made by these brave troops during one of the bloodiest periods of the Second World War.

He said: "This book is not dedicated to those photographers involved - richly deserving though they may be - but to their subjects and locations.

"Some of the images are reinterpreted or correctly identified as to location or subject for the first time.

"However, it is hoped that the reader will come to regard this volume as more than a collection of photographs, since the intent is to view them as interpretive documents to enhance a broader understanding of the 'soldiers, sailors and airmen' and others in Normandy."

Sadly D-Day was not the end of the bloodshed, and in the weeks following the bloody landing the Battle of Normandy saw more than 425,000 Allied and German troops killed, wounded or missing.