On a spring morning three quarters of a century ago, 20-year-old Lindley Higgins from Riverdale in the Bronx was having the time of his life. A humble private in the US 4th Infantry Division, conducting a final exercise before the day of days, he sprayed tracer bullets to set fire to hayricks amid the innocent Devon countryside.

“We were a singularly callous and unfeeling group of young men,” he told me wryly back in 1981, as we discussed the prelude to the event then looming before himself and his comrades: the invasion of northwest Europe. “We were dumb enough not to feel the slightest trepidation. We saw what we had; heard what they didn’t have. We really thought the whole Third Reich was going to