D-Day: The Battle For Normandy

Anthony Beevor

Editions

Review

After his bestselling books Stalingrad and Berlin, it was hard to see how Beevor would maintain the pace with a book on the Normandy landings, about which so much has been written already.  But this book will not disappoint his fans.  The complex account of the American, British, Canadian, French and Polish invading troops is shot through with vivid details of individual dramas.  Beevor has combed the archives for the human side, as well as the military, which enables him to provide a constant sense of war’s collateral damage.  While never losing sight of the clear goal – that the Germans had to be defeated – Beevor is constantly vigilant for incompetence, poor judgement or inept leadership that made casualties worse than they might have been.  If an air attack failed to achieve its targets and bombed its own side, he says so.  Suffering is detailed in the same matter-of-fact tone as bravery, and the lack of sentimentality makes it all the more striking.

Although I was sometimes a bit lost among armies, divisions, battalions, platoons and so forth, the book is hard to put down.  Interesting too to learn how vain and difficult Montgomery was, and how much the French (the Normans, anyway) suffered at the hands of their liberators, never mind their occupiers. - review by John de Falbe