Saturday, June 6 marks the 65th anniversary of D Day, the storming of the beaches of Normandy to push the Germans out of France.
Was it also a time of looting and sexual assault by some Allied troops as well as stoic heroism?
The BBC looks at the issues raised by new books: D Day, by Anthony Beevor and Liberation, The Bitter Road to Freedom, by William Hitchcock.
Some 20,000 French civilians were killed in the two-and-a-half months from D-Day, 3,000 of them during the actual landings.
In some areas - like the Falaise pocket where the Germans were pounded into oblivion at the end of the campaign - barely a building was left standing and soldiers had to walk over banks of human corpses.
As for the destruction of Caen, it has long been admitted that it was militarily useless.
The Germans were stationed to the north of the city and were more or less untouched.
Twenty-five years ago, in his book Overlord, Max Hastings had already described it as "one of the most futile air attacks of the war."
Though these revisionist accounts were written elsewhere, it is in France that these ideas strike more of a chord today.
It is not as if the devastation wrought by the Allies is not known - it is just that it tends not to get talked about.
And yet for many families who lived through the war, it was the arrival and passage of British and American forces that was by far the most harrowing experience.
"It was profoundly traumatic for the people of Normandy," said Christophe Prime, a historian at the Peace Memorial in Caen.
"Think of the hundreds of tons of bombs destroying entire cities and wiping out families. But the suffering of civilians was for many years masked by the over-riding image - that of the French welcoming the liberators with open arms." ...
In his book, Mr Hitchcock raises another issue that rarely features in euphoric folk-memories of liberation: Allied looting, and worse.
"The theft and looting of Normandy households and farmsteads by liberating soldiers began on June 6 and never stopped during the entire summer," he writes.
One woman - from the town of Colombieres - is quoted as saying that "the enthusiasm for the liberators is diminishing. They are looting... everything, and going into houses everywhere on the pretext of looking for Germans."
Even more feared, of course, was the crime of rape - and here too the true picture has arguably been expunged from popular memory.
According to American historian J Robert Lilly, there were around 3,500 rapes by American servicemen in France between June 1944 and the end of the war.
"The evidence shows that sexual violence against women in liberated France was common," writes Mr Hitchcock.
"It also shows that black soldiers convicted of such awful acts received very severe punishments, while white soldiers received lighter sentences."