D-Day

For those who don't remember, it was 70 years ago today.  A crucial battle in WWII.  The Anglo Americans loaded a huge army onto landing craft, motored across the English channel, and seized a defended beachhead and held it against Nazi counter attack.  This victory doubled the Nazi military problem.  It placed the Anglo American army on Germany's west side while the Red army was pounding on the east side. 
  D-Day could have failed.  Had the weather worsened, had the Germans deployed their forces better, had a number of other things gone wrong, the invasion force might have been thrown back into the sea.  Eisenhower was sufficiently worried to pen a press release accepting full responsibility in the event of defeat.  He never released it, but it shows he, the supreme commander with the best grasp of the situation, had his doubts. 
  If D-day had failed, it would have been a year or more before the losses could have been made good and the invasion tried again.  If  the delay had run on past August 1945, we would have nuked Berlin instead of Hiroshima.  Or the Russians would have cracked open the eastern front and invaded Germany pretty much single handed.  By this time in the war, Russian industry was up to speed and turning out weapons as good as the German's and in vastly larger quantities.  The Russians had a much larger and highly dedicated population to furnish soldiers to the front.  Had this happened, the cold war Iron Curtain would have started in Holland, instead of Eastern Germany.
   

The Guns at Last Light

Rick Atkinson.  This third history book carries the story from D-Day to defeat of Germany.  It's thick, it's well written and reads nicely.  It is the story of the US Army in WWII.  Allies, air forces, navies, Soviets, war production, Ultra, etc you have to go somewhere else.  It covers all the side shows in the European theater that most histories ignore.  Here is the story of the second landing in France, the Colmar pocket, Market Garden, and the Huertzgen Forest.  Now that all the participants are safely dead, it is possible to explore the political wrangling that was kept quiet for so long.  As Atkinson tells it, Montgomery spent the war being insufferable, and Eisenhower spent the war suffering him in the interests of keeping the Allies allied.  Also impressive is the sheer size of the war effort.  The number of men sent into combat and the mountains of materiel (stuff) produced and shipped overseas to sustain the massive forces in the field is incredible even by the standards of 70 years later.   It's a good read, right up there with Samuel Elliot Morison. 
   An Army and Dawn and Day of Battle, Atkinson's  first two books are also good.