Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #167 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 608 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780670021192
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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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.

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.

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.

Customer Reviews

Well done look at famed invasion by a great military historian
Some may simply ignore this book, yet another look at the Normandy invasion that has been seemingly done to death. But what makes it good is that it was researched and written by well-known historian Antony Beevor, author of 'Stalingrad.' Beevor does an incredible job of interweaving the stories of soldiers involved in the invasion along with the decisions made at the top. He finds a good deal of fault with his own countrymen, namely General Montgomery, who he finds reacted much too slowly to German counterattacks and even hints that the Brits may have been suffering from a bit of war exhaustion. Like Cornelius Ryans' classic 'The Longest Day,' Beevor explores the actions and reactions of each side, including the Brits, Americans, Germans, and the French. There was something of a controversy when the book was released in Britain after Beevor asserted that the bombing of Caen by the Brits before D-Day was "very close to a war crime." Many felt Beevor made the statement to help sell books. I don't think that was the case because I don't believe Dr. Beevor will have trouble selling this book, nor do I feel this statement is hardly controversial. Many of the bombings during the war could come close to being considered war crimes, especially when civilians were made to suffer, but each side was guilty of this. Also, with hindsight, this is an easy statement to make. The Brits did have a rough time taking Caen after German panzer reinforcements reached the town and held it against Montgomery's forces. I also enjoyed a section where Beevor discussed the highly controversial replacement system of the American army during the war. Many green soldiers were sent to the front lines simply as "bodies" to fill a space left by a dead or wounded GI. Beevor claims that the word "replacements" was done away with later in the campaign by the brass and changed to "reinforcements." That was news to me. I have spoken with many American veterans of the war that only ever referred to the "replacement" system, and none of them ever had anything good to say about it. His chapter on the fighting in the bocage is also well written and interesting.

The book does not reveal much new information or break any new ground, but the writing is excellent and the maps are very well done. Since I had an uncorrected proof of the book, I do not know what photographs will appear in it, but I suspect there won't be many that the public has not already seen. Beevor did a fantastic job of breaking the action up by chapter in sequential order as the invasion and later fighting in Normandy unfolded. I wish he had spent a little more time on the battles themselves, such as the battle at Pointe-du-Hoc or for the port city of Cherbourg, but overall this is a small complaint. I feel Beevor also did a commendable job of discussing the confusion that seemed to wrack the German High Command during the campaign, mostly due to Hitler, as well as the bravery and toughness of the Allied soldiers and their German counterparts. I recommend this book to those who enjoy military history and the Second World War.

Another Beevor winner
There have been many books written about D-Day, starting with Cornelius Ryan's "The Longest Day", and one (this one anyway) wondered whether there would be anything new to say about the momentous events of 6 June 1944. In short, the answer is no. Mr. Beevor relates all the familiar stories of the build-up and the great stories of D-Day - Pegasus Bridge, the Merville Battery, Pointe du Hoc and Omaha Beach - in relatively abbreviated fashion. The stories are told better elsewhere.

However, what is not told better elsewhere, and what makes this book so different and interesting, is signalled by the subtitle "The Battle for Normandy". Whereas many others stop at the successful establishment of the Normandy beachhead, Mr. Beevor takes us further - much further. He takes us into the hedgerows of Normandy and the bloody and difficult fighting that took place there, to the breakthrough, leading to the great turkey shoot of the Falaise Gap, where the Allied air forces and artillery caused staggering carnage among the Germans trying to escape the closing Allied pincers. The story ends with the liberation of Paris.

Many (myself included) have discounted D-Day and the Western Front as a drop in the bucket, compared to the titanic struggles of the Eastern Front, but Mr. Beevor convincingly shows that the Normandy effort was no mere sideshow. The Allies faced difficult terrain, a determined enemy (including fanatical SS divisions) with often vastly superior equipment (the 88mm gun, the Tiger and Panther tanks and the MG42 light machine gun), and incompetence, one-upmanship and dissension in the Allied upper ranks (the arrogant, difficult, prickly and often downright infuriating Montgomery and the vain, gung-ho, glory-hunting "Blood and Guts" Patton get special attention here).

The subject of prickliness brings up the Free French. Winston Churchill famously said that, of all the crosses he had to bear, the heaviest was the cross of Lorraine (the emblem of the Free French). Charles de Gaulle and the Free French military were afraid that the Resistance, of which a large part was ardently Communist, would seek to form a government once the Germans had been defeated, and were prepared to step on as many toes as necessary to ensure that this didn't happen. On the helpful French side, Mr. Beevor gives its due the tremendous work done by the Resistance in handicapping the Germans' effort to get men and matériel to the front. This success provoked some of the more vicious German reprisals, notably the acts of the Das Reich SS Division in Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane.

In terms of viciousness, the savagery of the fighting in Normandy was often on a par with that in the East. Thankfully, the many mistakes and misjudgements on the Allied side were more than compensated by those of the German side even without being hamstrung by the tactical and strategic genius of Corporal Adolf Hitler. In addition, the Allies had almost complete air superiority from Day One, and, given good weather, shot up and bombed everything that moved. They helped throw an enormous spanner in the works of any German attempt to counter-attack.

Most of all, and unlike any of the other D-Day writers I can think of, Mr. Beevor details the appalling suffering of the French population caught in the middle of these terrible events, looted and murdered in reprisal by one side, bombed, shelled and looted by the other. The Vietnam experience of destroying a town or village in order to save it is frequently repeated. The most famous case is Caen, an Allied goal on the first day, which they didn't make, and which was bombed flat, but it was to be repeated, by accident or design, in many other places. Never was William Tecumseh Sherman's famous remark that "war is hell" more true than here.

In short, an excellent volume and highly recommended.

A compelling read
At well over 500 pages, Antony Beevor's newest work is quite a lot to pick up. I'm happy to report that it's much harder to put down.

We are at an important point for historians of the Second World War. The events are two-thirds of a century in the past. But these events are still living memory for thousands of people. The outlines of the Normandy effort have been known and recounted for quite some time. What recent years and recollections have given us is detail. We can now say more about the effectiveness of a particular battle and how it may have had a completely different outcome. We have many more vignettes recounted by soldiers and civilians alike. And we finally come face to face with the enormous price paid by tens of thousands of people who called Normandy their home. The passage of time gives a historian perspective. The passage of too much time leaves a historian with no one to talk to.

While there are brief appearances by major historical figures--Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eisenhower, de Gaulle--Beevor tells this story primarily from a tactical point of view. The book opens with the last details of planning the assault and ends with the liberation of Paris. Most of us think of "D-Day" as the series of beach assaults beginning on June 6. That was only the beginning. There was terrible fighting and loss of life for more than two more months. The account of Omaha beach is unnerving. There is confusion, slaughter and there are atrocities on all sides. This is an effective telling, done with words alone. Those of us who were not there can only wonder what we would have done.

Our view of well-known names is sharpened. We get a better picture of the plodding but strategic Omar Bradley. We learn about the vain and often ineffective Montgomery, the vain but ruthlessly effective Patton. We learn how many of the best German generals knew it was a lost cause, but soldiered on. We get an even stronger picture of the qualitative advantages of German training and weaponry over almost anything in the Allied toolkit. If Germany had not extended itself all over Europe, it is hard to see how they could have ever been dislodged.

Beevor provides his own analysis of battle plans and results. Often a battle could have been won with a small change in allocation of manpower. Often the wrong battle was joined. This is what a half-century of post-game analysis gives you. Lack of information often caused the deaths of thousands. It may be hard to understand this fully from our technological time. There were no weather satellites, no GPS system, no U2 spy planes. Entire companies marched off, often not even knowing where they were.

It's not a perfect book, but I expect it to be in print for quite some time. There is time for follow-on editions to rectify any exclusions. While there were no photographs in my review copy, I understand there are quite a few in the book as released--I'll have to get a peek at the final version to see what I missed. There is a glossary, but it is insufficient for non-scholars. Important terms like 'E-boat' and 'Sapper' are missing. There are a great many tactical maps, perhaps of more use on a second read-through. But there is no single large map of the region. An index was promised, but not present, in my review copy. That index will be important and helpful for those inclined to pull the book off the shelf again and again. But my quibbles are minor.

A good book can answer questions and leave you with many more. Exactly what was it about the 'bocages' -- the hedgerows that hosted much of the early fighting--that made them so difficult? What was it that made the German tanks, particularly the Tigers, so much more effective than the Churchills and Shermans? I think there's room for a whole appendix on that. The people that fought this war are the generation of my parents. Whether it was reticence on their part or incuriosity on ours, it has taken too long to hear their stories. We seem to be making up for lost time. Beevor's fine and unflinching book goes a long way in filling those gaps.