HISTORY: A dramatic and insightful warts-and-all re-evaluation of an apparently familiar story from one of the finest military historians of our time
D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, By Antony Beevor, Penguin, 592pp,£12.99
EXACTLY 65 YEARS ago, on June 6th, 1944, the largest seaborne invasion force in history landed on the beaches of Normandy. From the shores of occupied France, previously bombarded by some 11,000 Allied aircraft, the German defenders watched the approaching fleet with a combination of awe and horror. To one of the Wehrmacht soldiers guarding the French coastline the approaching 7,000 vessels looked like “a gigantic town on the sea” unleashing a naval bombardment “like an earthquake”.
But victory was by no means certain. “It may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war,” feared Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke on the eve of the invasion. The supreme Allied commander, Gen Eisenhower, even prepared a provisional press release announcing that “the landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed”. In order to secure victory, Eisenhower was prepared to accept astonishingly high casualty rates. Military planners anticipated that 20,000 troops, more than a quarter of the invasion force, would be killed or wounded on the first day of the operation.
Measured against these grim expectations, D-Day proved to be a great success. The heroic tale of the Allied landing has been told many times before, but rarely as objectively and comprehensively as in Antony Beevor’s new book. The result is everything one might expect from one of the finest military historians of our time: a dramatic and insightful re-evaluation of an apparently familiar story, combining an intimate understanding of the grim realities of war with the narrative technique of a novelist.
Subdivided into 30 short chapters, Beevor’s weighty book offers a balanced account of the vicious fighting that took place in France for three months after the Normandy landings, and it reminds us that the liberation of France was both a major military triumph and a human tragedy of epic proportions.
ONE OF THEgreatest strengths of this book is that it avoids the sort of triumphalism that often underpins popular history accounts of D-Day. Without denying the remarkable strategic achievement of landing 70,000 soldiers under enemy fire within a few hours, Beevor offers a number of important and timely correctives to popular perceptions of D-Day.
Many things did not go according to plan. Even before the landing started, hundreds of paratroopers dropped behind the lines drowned in the flooded fields of Normandy. The Allied bombers missed most of the German shore defences, and the invasion force initially failed to reach any of the major objectives set for the assault, even though the defenders had anticipated the landing to take place elsewhere.
The lack of immediate success is even more remarkable given that, by mid-1944, the quality of most German army units in France was diverse, to say the least. By and large, the western Allies faced a motley crew of child soldiers, Poles forcibly drafted into the Wehrmacht, and deaf war invalids from the Eastern Front, commanded by some senior officers who had spent most of the war years in the bars of occupied Paris. Allied air superiority was unchallenged, the German communication codes had been cracked, and the Wehrmacht’s commanding officers were hopelessly divided over the question of how to fight off the invasion.
DESPITE THESEconsiderable strategic advantages, Allied casualties in battle were not significantly lower than those of the German defenders. The SS divisions hastily thrown into battle after the Allied landing proved particularly committed and deadly. Beevor is at his best when he describes the face-to-face combat that followed between some of these SS divisions and Allied forces in various villages across Normandy over the subsequent weeks. In these circumstances, battle-hardened SS men from the Eastern Front often proved superior to the untested American recruits who, as one of their officers admitted, "were too young to be killers and too soft to endure the hardships of battle".
Beevor is to be congratulated for not forgetting to mention those who suffered most during the invasion. For the civilian population of Normandy, liberation came at a high price. Quite apart from the widespread public humiliations of French women rightly or wrongly accused of collaboration horizontalewith members of the German army, some 20,000 French civilians were killed in Normandy alone during and immediately after the landing, most of them as a result of misguided Allied bombing attacks that failed to destroy German defensive positions, but hit civilian dwellings in the hinterland instead. By the end of the campaign, 50,000 French civilians had died – a death toll that exceeded that of the actual combatants.
Overall, the Americans and Canadians fare better in Beevor's account than the British. In a recent controversial interview that made the front page of the Observer, Beevor referred to the RAF's bombing of Caen, which destroyed the entire city except for the German defensive positions, as a "war crime". Such statements, however, are not indicative of the book's content. The overall strength of D-Dayis its even-handedness, its attempt to avoid sensationalist judgements and its ability to include the perspective of all sides involved in the fighting.
THE MAIN STORYLINEof D-Daywill not come as a major surprise for readers interested in the history of the second World War. What the book offers, however, is a brilliantly written synthesis of recently published scholarship on the subject and it will not fail to leave a deep impression on a general readership. As in his previous masterpieces, Stalingradand Berlin, Beevor reminds the reader of the ugly realities of wars, even when these wars are fought for a good cause.
The current public debate about whether or not the British bombing of Caen was a “war crime” shows that emotions still run high when certain failures during the campaign are highlighted. Nearly 65 years after the end of the second World War, however, we should have gained enough critical distance from the events of 1944 to develop a more complex history of D-Day that allows for an acknowledgement of both the remarkable achievements of the Allied landing in Normandy and its shortcomings.
Robert Gerwarth is director of UCD’s Centre for War Studies. See warstudies.ie