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researching and writing Pegasus Bridge (1984), a blow-by-blow account of an airborne coup de main that secured the left flank of Montgomery's landing in Normandy in June 1944. When he had done with Nixon, he wrote Band of Brothers (2001), the story of a single company of American parachutists from their first encounter with the enemy, on the Cherbourg peninsula in the small hours of 6 June 1944, through the siege of Bastogne next winter to the drinking up of Goering's cellar at Berchtesgaden in May 1945.
The leitmotif of both these books, and of his major study D-Day: June 6 1944, was that the professional armies of dictatorships were no match for the military skills of democratic soldiers: a telling propaganda point during the cold war, still worth making after it (the D-day book came out for the 50th anniversary). Band of Brothers was made into a film, and he also wrote the film script for Saving Private Ryan (1998), which took care to pull no punches about how horrible wars are.
Ambrose wrote a monograph, Ike's Spies (1981), explaining how Eisenhower came (while still a general) to value secret action and how he got on with the espionage establishment in Washington; a book on Eisenhower and Berlin (1967); and a teaching textbook, Rise to Globalism (1971), on American foreign policy from 1938.
He set up the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain, on the site of the Higgins boatyard where so many landing craft had been built to assist the Americans' war in the Pacific. It has become a useful centre for historical research.
He taught, as he wrote, well and clearly; but did not restrict himself to writing and teaching. He led an expedition in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark, the two young US Army officers who had explored the upper Missouri for President Thomas Jefferson. He threw a wedding breakfast for his eldest daughter on one of Lewis's favourite camping sites, a remote upper Missouri island.
For several years, Ambrose eked out his salary at New Orleans by taking parties of rich Americans through General Eisenhower's footsteps in western Europe; spending some days in London, sailing from Southampton to Caen on the night of 5/6 June, visiting the Normandy beaches and Paris, and in a good year Rheims and Berlin as well. He made a wonderfully affable tour guide, keeping up his party's spirits in spite of every hitch of weather and travel; and was once diplomat enough to secure the presence, all at the same time on the same beach, of the sons of Eisenhower, Montgomery and Rommel.
After the success of his Nixon book, he took early retirement to the wilds of Montana, while keeping on his house on the Caribbean at Bay St Louis, east of New Orleans. He took an interest in politics, trying to persuade Colin Powell to run for president - but Mrs Powell would not let her husband stand. Recently, Ambrose was sharply attacked in the press for plagiarism - a journalist's slur, unsupported by the facts of his hard work. He was sensitive enough to be hurt by this. He was carried away, by a sharp attack of cancer of the lung, still deep in another book, about how much he owed to America.
M.R.D. Foot
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