Shortly before the Allied assault on German-occupied France in June 1944, Field Marshal Rommel remarked to an aide: "The first 24 hours of the invasion will be decisive. For the Allies, as well as for Germany, it will be the longest day."
The man whose name will always be associated with those last three words is the Dublin-born author and journalist, Cornelius Ryan, because he used them as the title for his best-selling book about the D-Day landings.
Cornelius John Ryan was born in Heytesbury Street in Dublin in 1920 and attended the local Christian Brothers' school in Synge Street. In a letter to The Irish Times in February 1974, he remarked that the group of boys he was with called themselves the "no-pass class" - but they included Liam Cosgrave, Jack McGowran and Eamonn Andrews.
He also said that the man most responsible for his success in writing was his teacher Francis McManus, the novelist and radio and television producer. Ryan said he had paid tribute to McManus all over the world for "his love of the English language and his persistency in making us understand its richness and - to be quite frank - for belting us into understanding its glories".
The eldest of a family of eight, the young Ryan was restlessly energetic with a mind forever questing after something new. His two passions were books and music. He played the violin in the old Torch Theatre and became secretary of the Father Mathew Hall in Church Street, where he wrote scripts and produced pantomimes. For about 18 months he worked as a traffic officer for Aer Lingus when the line had two tiny planes in operation.
In 1940, he went to London as secretary to the MP Garfield Weston. His ambition was writing, however, and in 1941 he found a job with the Reuters news agency. Two years later he moved on to the Daily Telegraph as a war correspondent, in which capacity he observed the D-Day invasion of Normandy. "I was too horrified and too young then to fully appreciate and understand what I saw," he said. But it was an experience he was to revisit.
He covered the air war over Germany and the progress of General George Patton's Third Army. After the fall of Berlin he moved on to the Pacific, covered the atomic bomb tests, and later the war in Palestine for Time magazine as well as the Telegraph.
In 1947, he moved to New York to work for Time and later Newsweek and Colliers magazine. But also made several visits to Normandy in those years. He was honeymooning there with his wife, Kathryn Morgan, when, walking through a war graveyard, they came upon a headstone with the inscription: "Into this great mosaic of victory, this priceless piece was set." It was then that he decided to tell the D-Day story in full.
He spent the next 10 years off and on pursuing the arduous research that led to the publication in 1959 of The Longest Day. His method was based on meticulous accumulation of detail, drawing on the experiences in battle of everyone from enlisted men to generals. He advertised in American, Canadian, British and German newspapers, seeking interviews with participants. From 6,300 replies he culled more than 1,000 interviews; parts of 400 of them appeared in the book, woven seamlessly into a suspenseful narrative.
The Longest Day was an immediate best seller and was hailed as a masterpiece of popular history. Malcom Muggeridge called Ryan "perhaps the most brilliant reporter in the world". Another critic described him as "one of the great living masters of the well-told story".
But his method did not please everyone. Drew Middleton, the military affairs correspondent of the New York Times, called it "the Fifi-Dupont-was-washing-her-drawers-when-the-American-tanks-arrived style of military history", and complained that an excess of minute details obscured the great themes. While praising Ryan's work as a narrative, he said it was wanting as history.
Whatever the book's merits as narrative or history, it has sold more than 10 million copies. It was also made into an award-winning film by Darryl Zanuck, which set box-office records. Ryan visited Dublin for the first Irish showing of the film in November 1962 and was interviewed for this newspaper by Michael Viney, who remarked that for Ryan this was one of the few in a long series of "gala" first showings that he really wanted to attend.
"Only the fact that he grew up in Dublin and his family live here has braced him to see that picture for the 22nd time," Viney wrote. But Ryan was happy with how Zanuck had translated his book into film. "When The Longest Day was finished, there were quite a few producers who wanted it for a film. I suppose I was lucky with Zanuck. I might have got Errol Flynn winning the war by himself, or something of that sort."
The success of his book and the money from the film rights ended Ryan's years of debt, during which his wife's salary as editor of House and Home and Architectural Forum was their only income. They moved to a 15-roomed house in Ridgefield, Connecticut (he had become an American citizen in 1950), and settled down to a life of live-in maids, dinner parties and research on the next book project.
He produced two more best-sellers about the second World War. The first, called The Last Battle, dealt with the fall of Berlin. During his research, Ryan even convinced the Soviet government to give him access to military records, thus becoming the first American allowed to consult Russian documents since the 1930s. His final book, A Bridge Too Far, was an account of the disastrous Allied Operation Market Garden and Battle of Arnhem in Holland in 1944.
Cornelius Ryan died from prostate cancer in November 1974, aged 54.