Les Faux de Verzy do exist in a forest near Reims.

The division Dan belongs to is based on the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, although I have occasionally had to take a little license with their precise movements; it is likely he would have been called out of Italy earlier than Easter to prepare for the invasion, the division fought at Anzio rather than Cassino, and it went across to Berlin, rather than Munich.

The intricacies of the battles of World War II and life in the U.S. Army were drawn from Antony Beevor’s The Second World War, David Drake’s Paris at War, and The Historical Atlas of World War II by Alexander Swanston and Malcolm Swanston. I also visited Utah and Omaha beaches as research for the novel as well as the Omaha Beach Memorial Museum, the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, and the Airborne Museum at Sainte-Mère-Église. I confess to this being the most difficult area of research for me as I knew nothing about army ranks and the difference between a platoon and a company and a battalion when I began; any errors to do with this are mine, and while I have tried my best, I am not an expert and hope I have it mostly correct.

Susan Sontag’s On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others were useful in understanding the moral complexities of war photography.

The inspiration for two of the images I describe as part of the photographer’s body of work comes from actual images: David Heath’s Vengeful Sister and Mark Cohen’s Group of Children.

The final word should, of course, be Lee Miller’s. Something she wrote in a letter to Audrey Withers, her editor at Vogue, sat with me as I wrote this book and tried to imagine what it might have felt like to witness and then to record both the horror and the heroism of war: “Every word I write is as difficult as tears wrung from stone.”

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