This is the story of what happened after the D-Day landings. Operation Overlord secured a vital foothold in Nazi-occupied France but the Battle of Normandy that followed was a brutal twelve-week struggle against fierce German resistance. From the crucial hours when Adolf Hitler remained asleep as the invasion began, to the deadly hedgerows (bocage), the hard-fought battles for Caen and Cherbourg, and the final dramatic breakout of Operation Cobra — this is the complete, high-quality historical account of the costly campaign that opened the road to the liberation of Western Europe in World War II.