Peter Caddick-Adams, a former British army officer who taught at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, is the author of Sand & Steel: A New History of D-Day. As a historian, he became interested in the subject after discovering that "no one had seriously studied the day in its full macro complexity for decades." His work pays tribute to all the men who fell in the run-up to the day of the landings, and to the meticulous preparatory work carried out in the year leading up to the event.

It was my tribute to that wartime generation. I think only now do we realize how different their lives were from ours and how much it cost them. Having spent decades of my life interviewing Normandy veterans of every nationality, I felt they had collectively handed down to me the torch to tell their story to another generation. I found that there were even Koreans found in Nazi uniform! It was the story of the world on one day, that represented an entire era.

I was lucky enough to first visit the beaches aged 14 in 1975 with veterans, including Bill Millin the Scotsman who played his bagpipes as he came ashore. Since then, I've been collecting their testimonies, initially as a schoolboy, then as a professional soldier, then an academic, now as a writer. Most are now dead, but their words have haunted me for years. I hope I have done justice to what they told me.

I had so much material that my book has since become the first part of a trilogy on the European war of 1944-45. Part 2 dealt with the winter campaign in the Ardennes of 1944-45, but I resumed the story of many of my French and British characters in my third volume (Victory in the West), which covers the story of January-May 1945, where I particularly enjoyed writing about the role of General de Lattre and his French Army in liberating Marseille and the Riviera, then going on to fight in the Colar region in early 1945.

In the early days, I can remember the hedgerows and ditches of Normandie still full of twisted rifles, rusting helmets and old ammunition. It's all gone now of course. I'll never forget the day a former British commander explained to me where he had located a trench. We walked to the spot, and there was a depression in the ground containing a very rusted old mess tin. "I must have left in a hurry," he remembered!

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