Based on 1,400 oral histories from the men who were there, bestselling author and World War II historian Stephen E. Ambrose reveals for the first time that the complex plan for the June 1944 attack on France had to be abandoned before the first shot. The true story of D-Day, as told by Ambrose, is about the citizen soldiers - junior officers and enlisted men - who took the initiative to act on their own in order to break through Hitler's Atlantic Wall when they realized nothing was as they had been told. D-DAY is the brilliant, unrestricted account of the battles of Omaha and Utah beaches. Ambrose revives the monumental victory of democracy on the most important day of the twentieth century.