D-Day Lost Evidence

By Chris Going and Alun Jones

On the night of June 5, 1944, the greatest armada the world has seen sailed into the stormy waters of the English Channel, its goal was no less than the liberation of Occupied Europe and the defeat of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0859790975
• ISBN13: 9780859790970
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Crecy Publishing
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 10.1" x 0.5" x 7.5"

Customer Reviews

An entralling visual window into a great moment of history

Obviously, opinions about books - and reviews of them - are highly subjective, and two different people can look at the same work and come away with honest, but diametrically opposed views of the book's merits. I found Going and Jones' presentation of the aerial reconnaissance photographs of the D-Day invasion to be strongly compelling. In a very real sense, in my opinion, readers are transported back to a "you are there" moment, looking far down upon men desperately fighting for their lives, unaware of the observation. Those tiny dots are individual soldiers. Tanks and combat engineering vehicles are slightly larger dark blocks. We see smoke drifting across the land, the white wakes of landing craft making their runs to the beaches, shell and bomb craters scarring the fields, discarded parachutes ... all from a literally bird's eye view, albeit a very high flying bird. There is an immediacy to these aerial reconnaissance images that I personally found enthralling. I do not claim that this is a book for everyone, not even for every military history enthusiast, but I do know that for some of us, such photographs provide a powerful link to this momentous event. As for the criticisms expressed in another review ... yes, it would have been good to have some larger-sized photographs, although I am not convinced that the limitations imposed by original image resolution would have supported greater enlargement in any meaningful way, but might have instead yielded merely larger blurs, perhaps even more difficult to visually interpret. The authors state quite clearly that they have already passed these images through modern computer enhancements, so apparently what we face are limits stemming from the originals. For me, what Going and Jones have done is to present us with an enthralling window into an important and dramatic moment of history.