D-Day: The Battle for Normandy by Antony Beevor

The definitive account of the Normandy invasion by the bestselling author of Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin 1945 From critically acclaimed world historian, Antony Beevor, this is the first major account in more than twenty years to cover the whole invasion from June 6, 1944, right up to the liberation of Paris on August 25. It is the first book to describe not only the experiences of the American, British, Canadian, and German soldiers, but also the terrible suffering of the French caught up in the fighting. More French civilians were killed by Allied bombing and shelling than British civilians were by the Luftwaffe. The Allied fleet attempted by far the largest amphibious assault ever, and what followed was a battle as savage as anything seen on the Eastern Front. Casualties mounted on both sides, as did the tensions between the principal commanders. Even the joys of liberation had their darker side. The war in northern France marked not just a generation, but the whole of the postwar world, profoundly influencing relations between America and Europe. Beevor draws upon his research in more than thirty archives in six countries, going back to original accounts, interviews conducted by combat historians just after the action, and many diaries and letters donated to museums and archives in recent years. D-Day will surely be hailed as the consummate account of the Normandy invasion and the ferocious offensive that led to the liberation of Paris. Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Beevor has established a solid reputation as a chronicler of WWII's great eastern front battles: Stalingrad and Berlin. In addressing D-Day, he faces much wider competition with historians like Stephen Ambrose and Max Hastings, who also use his method of integrating personal experiences, tactical engagements, operational intentions and strategic plans. Beevor combines extensive archival research with a remarkable sense of the telling anecdote: he quotes, for example, an officer's description of the bloody mass of arms and legs and heads, [and] cremated corpses created by artillery fire as the Germans tried to escape the Allied breakout. He is sharply critical of senior commanders on both sides: Bernard Montgomery's conceit; Adolf Hitler's self-delusion; Dwight Eisenhower's mediocrity. His heroes are the men who took the invasion ashore and carried it forward into Normandy in the teeth of a German defense whose skill and determination deserved a better cause. The result was a battle of attrition: a bloody slog that tested British and American fighting power to the limit--but not beyond. Beevor says that it wasn't Allied forces' material superiority but their successful use of combined arms and their high learning curve that were decisive in a victory that shaped postwar Europe. Maps, illus. (Oct. 13) Copyright ® Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From AudioFile After briefly treating the buildup to D-Day, Beevor examines the invasion and subsequent liberation of Paris in a mix of sometimes-dry strategic overview and often-ghastly personal details. Simon Vance gives it all proper weight, without extravagance. He has a likable voice and pleasant English accent, which he varies, at times from one word to the next, to suit the large number of quotations. His American accent is good, and he even does Canadian. Other accents make one wonder about the convention of presenting foreign speech as accented English, but it works. It's easy to lose track in complex audio histories (especially military); Vance's clarity and excellent pacing help. A fascinating and well-read book. W.M. ® AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From The Washington Post From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley It's not the title of Antony Beevor's new book that tells the tale, but the subtitle. One third of the way through his more than 500 pages of text, Beevor has finished off D-Day. Allied troops and materiel have successfully (if bloodily) secured the beaches of Normandy, but their job has only just begun. Ahead lies the battle for Normandy itself, two and a half months of vicious fighting, frequently hand to hand, before the liberation of Paris in late August. It is a dramatic, important and instructive story, and Beevor tells it surpassingly well. D-Day is very much a work of military history, so of necessity it is chockablock with the sort of battlefield chess-playing that can leave the nonmilitary mind in a state of considerable confusion. But Beevor is less interested in moving troops from pillar to post than in telling us what war was like for them and for the civilians whose paths they crossed. Readers fortunate enough to know his previous books -- among them Paris After the Liberation (with Artemis Cooper, 1994), Stalingrad (1998) and The Fall of Berlin 1945 (2002) -- are aware that his fascination with warfare is compounded by a deep knowledge, not always encountered in military histories, that war is hell. People looking for romanticized combat or Greatest Generation sentimentality will not find an ounce of either here. At one point, during the fierce battle for the town of Saint-Lô, Beevor quotes a medic: It's such a paradox, this war, which produces the worst in man, and also raises him to the summits of self-sacrifice, self-denial and altruism. Two pages later he quotes a French gendarme appalled by looting by soldiers and civilians alike: It was a great surprise to find it in all classes of society. The war has awakened atavistic instincts and transformed a number of law-abiding individuals into delinquents. The two comments summarize war as Beevor sees it: humanity at its cruelest, most violent and most selfish, alleviated by occasional moments of compassion and heroism. He admires some of the generals and ranking officers on both sides -- most notably the Americans Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton and the German Erwin Rommel -- but never hesitates to point out instances of military prima-donnaship, whether practiced by the admired Patton or the British field marshal, Bernard Montgomery, whom an angry Eisenhower dismissed in a postwar interview as egocentric and a psychopath. The story of D-Day itself has been told so many times and in so many ways that Beevor is right to restrict his account of its central event, the assault on Omaha Beach, to a mere 25 pages, albeit 25 pages filled with blood and chaos. There were many times when the situation on many parts of Omaha . . . was indeed horrific, and many of the deaths suffered that day were either excruciatingly painful or wholly unnecessary, or both, as when landing craft -- part of by far the largest fleet that had ever put to sea -- dropped their gates well short of the beach and deposited their human cargo in deep water where many men drowned. The total number of American dead during the first twenty-four hours was 1,465, fewer than some had forecast but still a terrible day's work. By the end of the day on June 6 and then well into the next day, Allied forces had secured Omaha and the other beaches they had invaded: Utah, Gold, Juno and Sword. Exact statistics for casualties for all the forces involved in the first 24 hours are just about impossible to come by, since most formations' figures accounted for a longer period, never less than 6 to 10 June. But the figures for the first two weeks in Normandy are nothing if not sobering: American, British and Canadian casualties came to 5,287 killed, 23,079 wounded and 12,183 missing. I draw two conclusions from those statistics. The first is that although the Canadian role in the invasion of Normandy (or for that matter throughout the war in almost all theaters) is often minimized or even ignored, in Normandy it was large and important. Canadian troops were involved in many hard encounters and often acquitted themselves with great bravery. The strength of the Canadians lay in the quality of their junior officers, Beevor writes, many of whom were borrowed eagerly by a British Army short of manpower. The second point is that the remarkably large number of missing soldiers cannot be attributed to those captured by the Germans. Though Patton cruelly dismissed victims of battle shock and those who went AWOL as crybabies, in truth they were as much war victims as those who had been killed or physically wounded. US Army medical services had to deal with 30,000 cases of combat exhaustion in Normandy, and: Nothing . . . seemed to reduce the flow of cases where men under artillery fire would go 'wide-eyed and jittery', or 'start running around in circles and crying', or 'curl up into little balls', or even wander out in a trance in an open field and start picking flowers as the shells exploded. Others cracked under the strain of patrols, suddenly crying, 'We're going to get killed! We're going to get killed!' Young officers had to try to deal with 'men suddenly whimpering, cringing, refusing to get up or get out of a foxhole and go forward under fire'. While some soldiers resorted to self-inflicted wounds, a smaller, unknown number committed suicide. As Beevor says, there was a sharp contrast between the Allied foot soldiers and their German counterparts. The most fanatical of the latter (and fanatical is indeed the word), especially those in the SS and its Hitler Jugend offshoot, had been brainwashed by the Nazi propaganda machine into believing that the fate of the fatherland was in their hands, and they fought with that uppermost in mind. The British soldiers by contrast had been at war for five years and were exhausted by it. Americans and Canadians were not fighting for land they could call home and thus were motivated primarily by the group loyalty so essential to military morale. The Allied advance across Normandy was anything but a cakewalk and might well have been turned back had it not been for the air supremacy that the Allies enjoyed, enabling their planes to give ground troops pulverizing air support (men on the ground soon learned to radio enemy positions to fighter and bomber pilots so they could pinpoint their fire), while Rommel was left to ask: What's happened to our proud Luftwaffe? German troops often resorted to black humour. 'If you can see silver aircraft, they are American,' went one joke. 'If you can see khaki planes, they are British, and if you can't see any planes, then they're German.' En route to Paris, the Allies had to contend not merely with stout resistance from the Germans but with endless disputes among their top leadership, self-interested political maneuvering by Charles de Gaulle, and suspicion and hostility (as well as cries of welcome) from French civilians. The greatest weight on Norman hearts was the terrible destruction wreaked upon their towns and countryside, and the human cost was every bit as terrible: Altogether 19,890 French civilians were killed during the liberation of Normandy and an even larger number seriously injured. This was on top of the 15,000 French killed and 19,000 injured during the preparatory bombing for [the invasion] in the first five months of 1944. It is a sobering thought that 70,000 French civilians were killed by Allied action during the course of the war, a figure which exceeds the total number of British killed by German bombing. Yes, it was a great victory the Allies won in Normandy, and to this day all of us should be grateful to those who won it. But the cost, as Antony Beevor is at pains to emphasize in this fine book, was awful beyond comprehension. yardleyj@washpost.com Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review Absorbing... The reader finished this accessible history with the sense he has had a 360-degree look at Operation Overlord and its multinational cast... Terrifing reading.--USA Today A dramatic, important, and instructive story, and Beevor tells it surpassingly well.--The Washington Post Where the book really scores is in its eye for the operational detail and its vivid reconstructions of the experience of battle, as unavoidable courage mixes with arbitrary tragedy.--Lawrence Freedman, Foreign Affairs Beevor excels in recounting, from interviews with veterans and from the testimony of soldiers' letters and reports, just what a bloody campaign the invasion was... Beevor is especially gripping in his account of the U.S. 120th Infantry... Beevor is to be commended for emphasizing a troubling theme: the inferiority of much Allied equipment.--The Wall Street Journal His account of atrocities on both sides, of errors committed and of surpassing bravery makes for excellent - though often blood-soaked - reading. Beevor gets better with each book.--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Beevor has written an in-depth campaign history...that should be read by beginners and experts alike.--Library Journal --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. About the Author Antony Beevor is the bestselling author of five nonfiction books, including The Battle for Spain, which won the La Vanguardia Prize, Paris After the Liberation: 1944-1949, Stalingrad, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History, and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature, and The Fall of Berlin 1945, which received the first Longman-History Today Trustees' Award. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.