Herald and Review from Decatur, Illinois • Page 61

BY HERBERT KUPFERBERG WHAT'S UR TH4S WEEKq rut: xrn- OA The best books about the most crucial 24 hours of World War II The Winners and Losers Remember D-Day )H2 4 Private Healey 's quotation is from D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, by Stephen E. Ambrose (Simon Schuster, $30). Ambrose probably knows more about Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allies' supreme commander, than does anyone else: He has written a two-volume biography of the general and directed the Eisenhower Center at the University of events that were called off. Among the books that tell the whole story, one should not overlook the late Cornelius Ryan's classic The Longest Day, the first of the D-Day histories, which subsequendy became an admired movie.

Published in 1959, it has been reissued as a Touchstone paperback ($11) and still stands up very well for its swift-moving coverage of the strategy, the battle scenes and the episodes of individual heroism. Assault on Normandy: First Person Accounts From the Sea Services, New Orleans, BIB eussie epic or iTfii 1 1 if pit But he also knows a great deal about the D-Day battles and the men who fought them, and much of his 700-page book is based on accounts by Allied and German soldiers and on the re Among the debris on the beach the day after D-Day, Pvt. Robert Healey, a G.I. who had survived the invasion attack on June 6, 1944, came upon the body of another young soldier who hadn't Near the dead man's outstretched hand lay a paperback book, Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, by Cornelia Otis Skinner. Healey thought the title reflected the spirit of the invasion ordeal itself: "Our hearts were young and gay because we thought we were immortal, we believed we were doing a great thing, and we really believed in the crusade which we hoped would liberate the world from the heel of Nazism." Perhaps the incident is significant in another way: for showing that some soldiers carried books in their supply packs along with the three items regarded as most essential ammunition, rations and cigarettes.

Certainly today, as we prepare to observe the 50th anniversary of D-Day, it is books that are retelling most compellingly the story of the landings by the Allies on the Normandy coast of France. It's impossible to cover all the volumes of D-Day reminiscences, analyses and critiques that are now coming out, so this roundup of recommended titles is necessarily limited. Some of these books have an official publication date of June 6, but you'll find many of them in bookstores already. All are illustrated, some quite handsomely, and any will give the reader new insight into the military, political and, above all, human aspects of this mightiest of all in woman in the Caen area, where some of the fiercest fighting took place. The feisty, independent-minded Mme.

Osmont saw her chateau occupied by German troops for four years and subsequently by the British. It's a little sad to observe that she found the Germans the better behaved. Her distinctively personal and spirited book is filled with the agonies of the devastation she witnessed and the daily deprivations she underwent when a visit to a hairdresser could become "a physical pleasure, almost a spiritual relief." Finally, Michelin has reprinted its Battle of Normandy map originally issued in 1947. Folding out to approximately 46 by 28 inches, it shows the entire Normandy area in great detail, with the landing zones and battle sites clearly marked, plus brief but informative annotations in French and English. If any map can bring alive the great campaign, this is it.

edited by Paul Stillwell, gives the U.S. Navy its due share of credit for the invasion's success. The book, published by the Naval Institute Press has some 50 firsthand accounts of troop transport, shore bombardments, planting of artificial harbors and other crucial aspects of the massive crossing. One key element was the LCVP (Landing Craft Vehicle, Personnel), which carried thousands of infantrymen to the beaches. Andrew Jackson Higgins and the Boats That Won World War II, by Jerry E.

Strahan (Louisiana State University Press, tells the story of the maverick industrialist who overcame the naval bureaucracy to design and construct the shallow-draft boats. No G.I. ever remembered a ride aboard a bobbing, 36-foot LCVP with pleasure, but the little ships got the job done. The Normandy Diary of Marie-Louise Osmont (Random House, $17) is devoted to a journal kept by a French- actions of those who could only wait and hope, including even Anne Frank in her lonely attic hideaway. From such personal details, Ambrose builds up a magnificent picture of the great battle, with such shrewd observations as that Hitler, trying to run the show from Berchtesgaden, interfered disastrously with his commanders, "in sharp contrast to Churchill and Roosevelt, who made no attempt at all to tell their generals and admirals what to do on D-Day, and to Eisenhower, who also left the decision-making up to his subordinates." If Ambrose's is the most extensive of the new books, the most compact is D-Day and the Invasion of Normandy, by Anthony Kemp, an entry in Abrams' admirable "Discoveries" series This beautifully printed little 192-page) paperback recounts both the buildup and the battle concisely, and its 230 illustrations are distinctive and imaginative.

Most unusual are a color fold-out of an aerial view of the beaches and a replica of the "Overlord Tapestry," created by English needleworkers to update the famous medieval Bayeux Tapestry that hangs in the battle zone. vasions. AND WHAT IF THEY HAD LOSTP The invasion of Normandy was to borrow Wellington's description of the Battle of Waterloo "a near-run thing." There were times, such as at the fiercely contested landing at Omaha Beach, when the tide of battle could easily have gone the other way. As it turned out, the Allies got several breaks: The Germans weren't convinced that this was the real invasion, Field Marshal Rommel was America at D-Day: A Book or Remembrance, by Richard Goldstein (Delta paperback, is espe pari wlfcu SffsrfWyg' I HI 'I! away from the front, and Adolf Hitler held back his armor. But what if things hadn't gone right? Peter Tsouras, a British author, has written Disaster at D-Day (Stackpole Books, a fictional account in which the invaders lose.

In this fanciful version, Rommel stays on the scene, Hitler unleashes his reserves, and the Allied troops are driven back into the sea. Tsouras spins out his yarn in meticulous military detail, even providing maps, pictures and footnotes (some of the latter deliberately phony). In the end, all turns out well, with Hitler's generals inviting him to a victory party in Normandy, where they take care of him in their own way. But it's much better that it happened the way it did. cially worthwhile for its glimpses of the home-front reaction the newspaper that ran the Lord's Prayer as its editorial, the synagogue that stayed open for prayer for 24 hours, the sports PARADE MAGAZINE MAY 8, 1994 PAGE 13.