THE LONGEST DAY (350 pp.)—Cornelius Ryan—Simon & Schuster ($4.95).
No Allied soldier from General Eisenhower to Pvt. Schultz knew it. but D-day's luckiest augury was a pair of women's grey suede shoes, size 5½. They nestled in the command car of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel as he sped away from his Normandy headquarters on the morning of June 4, 1944, D-minus-two. Rommel, charged with throwing back any invasion attempt, planned to ask Hitler for reinforcements during his visit to Germany, but something more personal sent him on his trip. June 6 was his wife's birthday, and the Desert Fox planned to surprise her with the grey suede shoes.
The surprise, of course, was on Rommel, who was caught notably out of position; and he was to keep muttering through that fateful invasion day, as he rushed back to Normandy: "How stupid of me, how stupid of me." It is the number of fortuitous errors and outright bungles on the German side that lends fascination and suspense to Author Cornelius Ryan's reconstruction of The Longest Day. Author Ryan, onetime senior writer for Collier's, has dug assiduously into the histories, war diaries and personal recollections of all the D-day fighters he could find on either side, in a full two years of interviewing. As a result, the familiar facts are tautly exciting. There is a lonely Ike, scuffing the cinders and scanning the skies outside his English trailer headquarters on the eve of his greatest decision. There is the breathtaking invasion fleet of some 5,000 ships stretching from the Normandy coast back to the embarkation ports of England. There is the gore and gallantry of the assault troops slashing their way onto Omaha and Utah beaches through the underbrush of mines, barbed wire, antitank and antipersonnel devices, while being Jashed by bullets, mortar and artillery fire from the German Atlantic Wall. As one British marine classically understated it when his outfit was dumped 50 yards offshore and forced to swim through a hail of machine-gun fire: "Perhaps we're intruding. This seems to be a private beach."