D-Day

D-Day

Review by Dennis Showalter A superb work in conception, research and presentation, D-Day extends and develops the approach pioneered by Cornelius Ryan and continued by Stephen Ambrose. Beevor is a master analyst of modern war from the perspective of the sharp end. He possesses an extraordinary capacity to integrate personal experience from both sides of the line into the contexts of tactical engagements, operational intentions and strategic plans. Stalingrad and Berlin are outstanding. D-Day is better. Beevor begins with the run-up to the landings and ends with the liberation of Paris. Devoting little time to plans and preparations, he takes readers into the story immediately. The decision to go on June 6 is presented in terms of tensions among the decision–makers—not merely senior generals like Eisenhower, but technicians like RAF meteorologist Group Captain Stagg, who delivered arguably history’s single most important weather forecast. The landings themselves were characterized by confusion at all levels—not the abstract “fog and friction” of Clausewitz but the elemental chaos of modern high-tech war. The situation on Omaha Beach was saved by the dozen British and U.S. destroyers that closed to grounding range to blast German pillboxes. Prisoners and civilians were shot, some by mistake and others deliberately. Planned Allied moves inland were frustrated by a German resistance that recovered from the invasion’s shock faster than expected. From there the campaign bogged down in the hedgerows and fields of Normandy—again in good part due to a defense as skilled as it was determined. Beevor appropriately stresses both the Germans’ application of tactics learned in Russia and the iron discipline that sustained flagging morale at gunpoint. He is one of the few authors equally able to describe British and American experiences in the contexts of their respective military systems and operational sectors. His illustrative material—ranging from a medic’s discussion of treating wounded in the front line to a tanker’s description of the “organized slaughter” of a retreating German convoy by white phosphorous, high explosives and machine guns—brings to vivid life experiences that will be alien to the vast majority of his readers, even those with recent service in the Middle East. In the end German means and German will were alike eroded by constant Allied pressure and high Allied learning curves, from army headquarters to rifle squads. Beevor offers a balanced critique of the operations that created but failed to close the Falaise Gap. His conclusion that German desperation had more to do with that than did Allied mistakes cuts through a great deal of nationalist-influenced wordage on the subject. And his concluding chapters on the breakout leading to the capture of Paris eschew triumphalism in favor of a look at liberation’s darker sides: the death and destruction inflicted on French civilians, the obscene revenge taken on women accused of “collaboration” whose crime might have been working as a cleaning lady in a German headquarters. At the end one is reminded inescapably of Niall Ferguson’s term—the pity of war.

Hardcover: 608 pages

Publisher: Viking Penguin/Div of Penguin Putnam ( October 13, 2009 )

Item #: 14-1778

ISBN: 9780670021192

Product Dimensions: 6.0 x 9.0 x 1.22 inches

Product Weight: 34.0 ounces