The Liberation Line
Christian Wolmar
Atlantic Books, £25, 384 pages
In The Liberation Line transport journalist and historian Christian Wolmar tracks the Allied invasion of Europe in the summer of 1944. It examines the American, British and French personnel involved: first in neutering the German-controlled railway network in occupied France, and secondly the reconstruction of this infrastructure following D-Day.
Wolmar writes with journalistic flare, and is able to make relevant a number of often arcane details. The railways were the key in providing a steady and consistent supply chain to support the Allied advance, offering an economy of scale which the roads could not match. Yet he argues that it was not the railways but a fleet of some 6,000 trucks, zooming to and from the front lines, which captured the public imagination, being the subject of the 1952 film Red Ball Express, directed by Budd Boetticher.
