Lieutenant George Lane was in big trouble. Bullets from German guns were flying all around him as he and Captain Roy Wooldridge hid in the surf, crouching for cover behind beach obstacles made of iron girders and praying not to be hit. It was mid-May 1944, in northern France, three weeks before D-Day. They didn’t know whether the Nazi soldiers shooting blindly into the darkness were just letting off steam or if their secret mission to investigate a new type of German landmine had been compromised. What they did know for sure was that if they were caught, they were...