A BARNOLDSWICK historian is looking forward to his first epic book being released 15 years and tens of thousands of pounds after he started it.

"The Germans in Normandy" is the first in a series of books by Richard Hargreaves and is the result of almost £40,000 of his own money, travelling thousands of miles across Europe and America, reading and photocopying hundreds of thousands of transcripts and even teaching himself German!

The book, which tells the story of the Normandy landings from a German perspective, is due to hit the shelves in September.

But the 33-year-old, revealed it is totally different from the book he first thought of as a 19-year-old media studies student at Nottingham University.

He said: "It's not the book I set out to write.

"I set out to write something completely different about the Germans in the Second World War but I realised seven or eight years into the research that it would be too big and no publisher would touch it.

"Rather than waste all those years I decided to split it into different books and Normandy was the obvious choice to start with.

"I started putting pen to paper in 2001, actually sitting down and writing something. By that stage I'd spent £25,000. It's not been a cheap hobby, travelling to archivists all over Europe and actually visiting Normandy to get a feel for the land.

"I've been to the Imperial War Museum so many times it's not true and the New York public library.

"I felt sorry for the staff at Barlick library, getting all these strange requests for all kinds of books on the Second World War."

The Battle of Normandy was fought in 1944 between Nazi Germany in Western Europe and the invading Allied forces as part of the larger conflict of the Second World War. Over 60 years later, the Normandy invasion, codenamed Operation Overlord, still remains the largest seaborne invasion in history, involving almost three million troops crossing the Channel from England to Normandy in then German-occupied France.

Films and books have taken various Allied accounts of the invasion but little has been documented from the German point of view.

Richard, who lived at Hawthorne Drive and now works as a journalist with the Navy News in Portsmouth, said: "I've always been fascinated by the fact that a cultured nation could be so depraved.

"I wanted to know why this nation was transformed into such an incredible military machine and served such an evil regime.

"One of the things that always frustrates me is that most books on Normandy feature the British, Americans and Canadian sides.

"I don't know how you can tell the story properly without also telling it from the German point of view; telling both sides of it.

"The book puts a human face on the people who were fighting across there.

"In the films they are almost always portrayed as faceless Nazis plodding around.

"Most of the Germans who fought at Normandy weren't Nazis. Of course there were some but most were just doing their bit for their country.

"The biggest eye opener was how confident they were of defeating the invasion. From Hitler and Rommel right down to the soldiers they felt that they would stop the invasion within a day or two.

"But once it happened it was their morale that crumbled pretty quickly within a day or two."

Richard is now planning his second book about Poland, which he hopes will be released next year.

"The Germans in Normandy" is published by Pen & Sword and will be released on September 21, priced £19.99.