This book is [Dimbleby's] best yet ... For all their popularity, many books about the world wars are immensely boring and inelegantly written. Dimbleby’s work is in a different league, told with such skill and judgment that, despite the harrowing subject, it is still a pleasure to read. As in all good narrative histories, it is the human details that linger in the mind.
Dimbleby tells the story of the titanic operation well, swooping from panoramic strategic overview to harrowing close-ups of the battlefield reality drawn from a rich fund of individual accounts ... One of the strengths of this book is the line it draws between the awful then of 1944 and the grim events of today.
