Allies

ALLIES begins before dawn on June 6, 1944, as two American soldiers, 16-year-old Dee Carpenter (a German immigrant) and his best friend, 17-year-old Sid Jacobstein, are boarding one of the boats that will take them and thousands of other Allied soldiers to the beaches of Normandy. The invasion of German-occupied France is about to begin. In a plane flying above the English Channel, two Canadian paratroopers, 19-year-old James McKay and Samuel Tremblay, a Cree Indian from Quebec, await orders to jump into a sky already filled with enemy gunfire. At midday, with the battle still raging, a British tank driver, 19-year-old Private Bill Richards, and his crew head ashore from their transport boat only find they've been taken Omaha Beach instead of the beach where British troops had been ordered to land. On Omaha, a 20-year-old African American medic named Henry Allen, a member of the only African American unit on the beach, is treating the wounded, one of them the white officer who'd tormented him throughout boot camp. It's not just soldiers who have important work to do that day. An 11-year-old French Algerian girl named Samira Zidante must take a message to Resistance fighters after her mother is captured by the Germans. And 13-year-old Monique Marchand unexpectedly finds herself aiding the wounded men on the beach. As the day and the story unfold, some characters will briefly meet and team up to work together. Some will witness new friends' sudden and unexpected deaths. As D-Day comes to an end, there are joyful reunions and the knowledge that for those surviving, the fighting will go on.