Book reviews: D-Day: The Battle for Normandy | Forgotten Voices of D-Day

Published on Thursday 4 June 2009 13:36

D-Day: The Battle for Normandy by Antony Beevor Viking, 608pp, £25 Forgotten Voices of D-Day by Roderick Bailey Ebury, 400pp, £19.99 Review by RICHARD HOLMES

THERE IS ONE THING REALLY wrong with Antony Beevor's book: its title. Only about a quarter of its pages are concerned with the amphibious and airborne landings of 6 June, 1944, while the rest tell the story of the battle of Normandy as a whole, culminating in the liberation of Paris. This massive narrative sweep is very much in the tradition of Beevor's bestsellers Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall.

It is clear from the outset that he succeeds, to a remarkable degree, in catching the sense of scale that marked out one of the decisive campaigns of history. He avoids writing along national lines: American, British, Canadian, German and Polish combatants tell their own stories. The agonising conundrums facing the French are sensitively described. They emerge as victims of Allied bombardment and German brutality; as heroic fighters in (but sometimes last-minute converts to) the Resistance; in the shape of Gen Leclerc's 2nd Armoured Division, brave soldiers anxious to show that Frenchmen could fight; but also, in the vengeful mobs that attacked captured Germans, revealing the dark underbelly of a country that had been invaded too often.

Beevor's judgments are overwhelmingly sound. He recognises that Allied and German combat motivation was fundamentally different. While there were still some Germans who would die for Hitler (even to the extent of rejecting transfusions of non-German blood), the British and American armies were essentially what Shakespeare might have called "warriors for the working day", citizens in uniform, generally prepared to do their patriotic chore but not always imbued with the killer instinct of some of their opponents.

He wisely rejects the theory that German pre-invasion deployment was conditioned largely by the desire of those engaged in the plot against Hitler to have reliable troops ready to move on Paris. And he recognises that it was not just the Germans who sometimes killed opponents out of hand.

He strikes a sensible balance over Anglo-American relations (bedevilled as they were by some of the more idiosyncratic personalities involved), quoting the wise verdict of Churchill's adviser Gen "Pug" Ismay that "they have won their spurs and that maybe we have been a bit too 'staff collegey' in our conduct of the war".

Given the breadth of his canvas, we should not be surprised that Beevor's command of fine detail sometimes lets him down. The talented American air commander "Pete" Quesada did not become a lieutenant-general until after the war; the British 50th Division was Northumbrian, not Northumberland; there is actually a fierce dispute over the circumstances surrounding the death of German tank ace Michael Wittmann; and it seems odd to discuss the Canadian defence of St Lambert sur Dives without mentioning Major David Currie, who won his VC inspiring it. And, while it is certain that Admiral Somerville's 1940 attack on Mers el Kebir was profoundly painful, it did not sink "the French fleet". Most of the squadron based there eventually made its way back to Toulon.

These are minor irritations, and will not stop this book from becoming the standard popular work on a campaign which, as Beevor quite rightly affirms, helped shape the post-war world.

Roderick Bailey's Forgotten Voices of D-Day is the most recent of Ebury's admirable series which uses unpublished material from the archives of the Imperial War Museum. In this case, the contents are precisely what the packaging suggests, with a wonderful selection of first-hand accounts of D-Day by British servicemen. Among other things, they remind us that there were indeed British landing craft crews on Omaha beach. "It's lived with me ever since," recalls a naval officer. "I can still see those fresh-faced boys getting out of the boat ... I know I had to do my job, they had to do their job, but I was in some way responsible for putting them there and it does haunt me from time to time. It does haunt me. I still see their faces."