Peter Caddick-Adams, a former British army officer who taught at the UK Defense Academy signs a New history of the Landing. A historian, he became interested in the subject after discovering that “no one had seriously studied D-Day in all its complexity for decades”. His work pays tribute to all the men who fell during the preparation for this day and to the finesse of the preparatory work carried out over a year before the event.
You spent decades interviewing veterans, in order to draw a “microhistory” of D-Day. Did you want to humanize this story so that readers could identify more easily with simple combatants?
It was my tribute to this war generation. I think it’s only now that we realize how different their lives were from ours and how much it cost them. Having spent years of my life interviewing Battle of Normandy veterans of all nationalities, I felt that they had collectively passed the torch to me to tell their story to another generation. In my research, I discovered that there were even Koreans who wore Nazi uniforms! It was the history of the world in one day, which represented an entire era.
This article is taken from the “Special Issue Le Monde: 1944 – From the landings to the liberation of France”, May 2024, on sale at newsstands or online by visiting our store website.
You interviewed more than a thousand people involved on D-Day. Why did you give so much importance to the testimonies?
I had the chance to visit the beaches for the first time at the age of 14, in 1975, in the company of veterans, including Bill Millin (1922-2010), the Scotsman who played the bagpipes when he landed. Since then, I have collected their testimonies, first as a schoolboy, then as a professional soldier, later as an academic, and now as a writer. Most of them are dead now, but their words have haunted me for years. I hope I have done justice to what they told me.
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I had so much material that my book became the first part of a trilogy on the European war of 1944-1945. The second part dealt with the winter campaign in the Ardennes in 1944-1945, but I took up the stories of many of my French and British characters in my third volume (Victory in the West), which covers the story from January to May 1945, where I particularly enjoyed writing about the role of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny (1889-1952) and his French army in the liberation of Marseille and the Côte d ‘Azur, then in the fighting in the Colmar region, in Alsace, at the beginning of 1945.
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