The liberation of Paris in August 1944 was a turning point of the Second World War and, contrary to myth, it was far from bloodless. Drawing on unpublished diaries, eyewitness accounts, coded messages and secret conversations, Matthew Cobb provides an hour-by-hour account of the street fighting, the barricades, the burning tanks and the reprisals, as the Germans, realizing defeat was imminent, played a nerve-racking game of bluff with both the advancing Allies and their own High Command.