This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories.

Stephen Ambrose was one of America's leading biographers and historians.

At the core of Ambrose's phenomenal success, it's his simple but straightforward belief

that history is biography.

History is about people.

Stephen Ambrose passed in 2002, but his epic storytelling accounts can now be heard

here and our American stories thanks to those who run his estate. Here's Ambrose with the D-Day

Invasion, Part 1. Let's take a listen. The troops going in on D-Day morning were brief to expect that when they got to the bluff that overlooked the beach code-named Omaha,

they would find it just blasted to smithereens, full of craters.

All the defenses along the bluff destroyed.

All the German defenders in the immediate area dead or wounded or so badly dazed by the bombardment

that they would be incapable of offering any opposition. The men were

told that swimming tanks would come in beside them, tanks that had rubber skirts on them,

that could be dropped when they got to the shoreline, and that the men should get behind these tanks

and they would work their way up the draws

these little dirt roads that led off the beach through the drainage system there were five of them at

Omaha and after they had gotten to the top following behind those tanks, then their battle would begin.

But on the beach it was going to be a cakewalk, thanks to the naval and air bombardments that would precede the attack.

In the event, the air bombardment was delayed by the pilots and the navigators two fatal seconds.

As they crossed over Omaha Beach, they were afraid of hitting their own men, so they didn't hit that button so that the bombs would drop right on the beach.

They delayed, and the result was that an enormous tonnage of bombs the equivalent to the Hiroshima bomb about 10,000 tons

...