Book Review: D-Day, The Battle for Normandy, Antony Beevor

This is my third Beevor WWII book (the others were Stalingrad, and Ardennes, 1944), and I have to say that, for my money, he's arguably the best and most seductively exciting author currently writing, in a very crowded field. For once, we have here a book that really does live up to the dust-jacket hype. As Dominic Sandbrook puts it, Beevor undoubtedly is 'a master of narrative, expertly blending the grand sweep with the telling anecdote'.

British troops in action during Operation Goodwood. [1]

The title D-Day is a bit misleading, but is thankfully made good by the subtitle: yes, this book covers the D-Day landings - and does so very well - but it's given over more to the ensuing campaign, the Battle for Normandy, in north-western France. The relationship between the Allies is interesting, and Montgomery doesn't come off too well in Beevor's accounts. There's some tension and communication failures, leading to bogging down, particulalry, it would seem, in Monty's sector, where he often put an overly positive gloss in events, such that the gap between his reports and reality created tension with the American and Canadian allies, and even many of his own British colleagues and subordinates.

A P-47 Thunderbolt...

An RAF pilot scrambles to his Typhoon, during the Normandy campaign.

A pilots eye view, as a Typhoon fired its rocket(s) at what one hopes is a German column.

What an aerial bombardment looks like from above the bombers and their target, in this instance, the unhappy Villers Bocage.

And the devastation wrought by aerial bombing. [2]

Allied aerial dominance is a very strong theme in their victory. But, as ever, bombing proved to be a very inefficient blunt instrument, often causing collateral damage, sometimes aiding the German defenders (although also damaging them materially and traumatising them psychologically) and hampering the Allied advance, and certainly never delivering what it's apologists claimed for it.

With military histories such as this, which cover an immense amount of activity, any one of which myriad elements might merit a sizeable book itself, condensing events into a brief, readable synthesis, it can be bewildering trying to follow the numerous parallel threads. I feel Beevor handles this aspect as well, perhaps better, than most. 

Whilst the Allies feared Tigers and Panthers, Beevor argues the 88mm was one of Germany's most effective weapons.

Yes, despite the numerous maps included, it can be rather confusing. But this is as clear an account in one reasonably sized book as you're likely to find. And the scope is huge, from the landings themselves, to the numerous follow up operations, with such extras as Stauffenberg's bomb plot and attempted coup, and the Paris Uprising, all succinctly and adroitly told in an exciting, compellingly spare prose. 

After covering the landings, beach by beach, we follow the numerous operations, such as the British Epsom and Goodwood (both of which proved to be, as Beevor notes with irony, anything but 'a day at the races'), the Canadian Operation Totalise, and the most vigorous and successful breakthrough and breakout, that of Patton's forces in Operation Cobra.

It's the 'mass of unfamiliar sources, fresh voices and untold anecdotes', as fellow military historian Max Hastings pithily puts it, that really make this such an exciting read. Beevor does this sort of thing with such an easy fluency that it belies the great skill needed to write military (or indeed any) history with such verve. And his sources range from the top brass to the grunts. Beevor has always been notable for his ability to effortlessly shift gear from the higher echelons to the mud and blood of ground level conflict. And I have to say I love his books all the more for it.

A knocked out Cromwell amidst the ruins of Villers Bocage.

Tiger Ace Michael Wittman, Allied Nemesis of Villers Bocage. [3]

Whilst it's definitely good to have author's like Beevor not banging the nationalist drum - indeed, for some native readers he's overly critical of the British part, and Monty in particular - some might suspect him of sucking up to his prospective American readership. All things considered, the more I read Beevor on WWII, the more I admire his skill as an historian and storyteller. If you want military history writing that excites, informs and inspires, his books - and this one is a peach - are a good place to start.

The author.

----------

NOTES:

[1] Except for the cover image, this is the only photo on this review that also appears in this book. The rest are harvested from the interweb at large, with many sourced from Wikipedia.

[2] I forgot to note where this image depicts, but I don't think it's the same as the one above, which is Villers Bocage.

[3] Veteran 'Tiger Ace' and, for the Germans at least, hero of the Ostfront, Wittman was eventually  ambushed and killed during this campaign, by Shermas such as he had hitherto been so effective in destroying.

Book Review - Ardennes 1944: Antony Beevor

I bought this, my second Beevor book (Stalingrad was the first) at a recent Topping Bookshop talk delivered by Mr Beevor himself. Without any explanatory preamble he plunged us straight into the freezing bloody conflict of the Hürtgen forest, a messy prelude to the what is now best known as 'The Battle of the Bulge'.

For a while I was really rather confused, but as he built up to his central theme, what the Germans initially called Wacht Am Rhein (Watch on the Rhine), a deliberately defensive sounding name (they later renamed it, rather poetically, Herbstnebel, or Autumn Mist) for the offensive that was to be Hitler's final throw of the dice in the West, things gradually fell into place. At first I felt annoyed by what appeared to me a deliberately confusing gimmick. But then I warmed to it, realising Beevor had rather cleverly imparted to us, as we sat listening in a church in Ely, something of the confusion of battle.

The German attack certainly came as a surprise

but it quickly lost steam and bogged down.

It may sound fatuous or redundant to describe a book as highly readable, but of course different authors have different voices, and different approaches, making some more or less easy to read for their equally varied readership. Beevor is, it seems to me, the consummate popular modern military historian, able to tell an engaging story, whilst weaving in a lot of detail on numerous levels, from the strategic or tactical to the political, whilst also giving both the big picture and the small vignettes, the broad sweep of events being enlivened with enough ground level detail to keep it humane and stop it being drily academic.

After setting the scene, the central core of the battle is described day by day, rounded off by a kind of 'mopping up'. During the course of telling the tale of this epic battle - in which Hitler's German war machine managed to scrape together a very sizeable strike force (far larger than anything the Allies deemed the Germans capable of raising, hence the 'calculated risk' which left the Ardennes sector so poorly defended), and then inspire them to attempt a last-ditch effort to reverse the flow of the Allied forces over the Rhine and into the Fatherland - certain themes emerge.

One theme follows the rise and fall of German hopes and morale, whilst another charts the mirror image in the mostly American Allied camp. These contrapuntal themes are further complicated by a parallel and dissonant theme, which Beevor more or less lays at Montgomery's door, even going so far as to speculate on the possibility of Monty suffering from Asperger's syndrome. As Allied fortunes revived, thanks, according to the story as it's told here, to Monty's overweening egotism and a tub-thumping British Press [1] (some things never change, eh?), Britain's attempts to maintain a central role backfired, seeing them levered out of the decision making process. In a way this isn't so surprising, as the statistics speak for themselves: by this stage of the war the Western theatre was clearly and irrefutably an American 'show'. Even the French, fighting to reclaim their own territory, had to play second fiddle to the Yankee Doodle Dandies.

Where there's brass, there's muck?

Monty's repeated demands for overall command

of forces in the north really cheesed off the

American chiefs.

Bradley's ill-preparedness, distant and ill-informed

command from Luxembourg, slow reactions, and then his

spat with Monty, don't show him in the best light.

But although Beevor's account might be seen, rather intriguingly, Beevor being a British author, to pander somewhat to a U.S. viewpoint, he doesn't let the American brass off scott-free: everyone from Eisenhower to Bradley can be seen to dither, or put their own reputations (prestige is a word that crops up a lot in discussions about the internecine strife in the command structure) before the best laid plans or the well being of their troops. And the other side of the American coin is all too often the kind of blusterous bravado of commanders like Patton, who give the impression (as does this account of Bradley) of being every bit as egomaniacal as Monty.

Beevor's decision to progress chronologically rather than by theatre or operation gives the narrative zest and pace, but, as some other reviewers point our, can be confusing, as he jumps around. In relation to this, this book has better maps than many on such subjects, but I still found I couldn't always keep the topographical picture in focus, especially as the narrative hops all over the place. And it also switches constantly between the various sides, Allied and German, or nations within a side, American and English (not to mention Canadian, French and Belgian!), or even between military and civilian.

This pic. appears in one of the several sections

of black and white photos.

Another interesting theme, only obliquely alluded to in the text, is the way in which war, such a horrifying and wastefully destructive process, remains so seductive and alluring (another more critical review of this book rather amusingly refers to WWII as 'the gift that keeps on giving', in relation to Beevor's professional success). Abraham Lincoln aptly describes it thus: 'Military glory - that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood - that serpent's eye, that charms to destroy...' I sense that for all his handwringing, Beevor kind of revels in the horrors of war, as do us readers, rather like the traffic that inevitably slows down and rubber necks in the opposite lane when there's been an accident in the motorway. Whatever the truth of this complex and uncomfortable area, Beevor's account is a richer and better one for the inclusion of this dimension.

What will be the fate of these 'doughboy'

prisoners? They certainly look anxious!

(This pic. is also in the book.)

I recently watched the superb Brownlow and Mollo film It Happened Here, about a successful Nazi occupation of England. I admired that film for its unflinching depiction of such awful yet ultimately mundane horrors as the casual execution of prisoners, by both sides. It's to Beevor's credit that he highlights the hypocrisy, albeit tempered by some considerations (I won't go into the detail here, you can read the book!), that must inevitably surround the condemnation on the one hand of the SS massacres of prisoners and civilians, and the 'reprisals' carried out by Allied troops (war, it seems, is almost always a 'reprisal' for some real or imagined wrongs visited on the aggressor at some prior point!).

By the end of the book the German offensive has failed, in the process draining troops from the far greater threat posed by several millions of Russian troops knocking on the door [2] of Germany's Eastern Front. Beevor delivers the story in an engagingly compelling form, turning the applying suffering and carnage into something very enjoyable for the reader. What a bizarre alchemy military history effects! I thoroughly enjoyed reading this, and now want to re-read Stalingrad, and get/read Beevor's Berlin and D-Day books.

----------

I was reading this whilst in Belgium for the Waterloo 2015 celebrations. Whilst in our local supermarket (which was small but absolutely fabulously well stocked) I saw these:

... bloody Bastogne, eh!?

----------

On a more sobering note, this is worth watching, as a reminder of the potentially traumatising legacy of warfare:

 http://www.wearethemighty.com/wwii-vet-says-killing-enemy-saddest-memory-life-2015-05

NOTES:

[1] The Daily Mail was conspicuous in this role, and is the only paper mentioned by name as contributing to the souring of Anglo-American relations thanks to its part in this sad episode of nationalist chest-beating.

[2] Ironically Hitler's comment at the opening of Operation Barbarossa - 'We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down' - proved much truer when the roles were reversed.