The seeds of this excellent book were sown by a French assistant in Douglas Boyd’s grammar school who told his class about the flattening of Caen, the assistant’s home town, by Allied bombers in 1944, and the consequent deaths of thousands of innocent civilians.

Then at a recent reception in Bordeaux, Boyd met an old gent who had flown sorties in Lancaster bombers and freely admitted that he had not worried too much about hitting the target, only about dropping his bombs and getting away from the flak.

These observations were not part of the standard Second World War victory narrative, and Boyd has written an outstanding book about the horrors of total war in Normandy, drawing on many years of careful research and further vivid eyewitness accounts.

He pulls no punches in telling readers just how it was to be caught up in the conflict — by this account, a nightmare for the locals. They had to deal with a four-year occupation by German troops, with all its violence, uncertainties and rationing, and then the invasion and its bloody aftermath.

Allied bombing wasn’t accurate: three-quarters of the better-crewed RAF bombers on a good raid dropped their loads wide by five miles or more, and that was for nights with a moon and good visibility.

They didn’t often hit the German military targets, so it’s hardly surprising that the Allied bombing of that one region caused more civilian deaths than in Britain from German bombs in the whole of the war.

The stories of what happened on the ground, or underground in makeshift shelters, recounted in letters and diaries, are gripping. Many people showed immense courage in rescuing others buried under the rubble of their houses, even as more bombs dropped or fires from incendiaries raged.

Boyd reports even-handedly on these dreadful events — it is obviously difficult to make judgements about the behaviour of others when thrust into such extreme circumstances.