Customer Reviews

D-Day 1944 (3) Sword Beach & British Airborne Landings

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The latest Osprey campaign title on the British D-Day landings at Sword Beach and the 6th Airborne Division landings represents a mixed big. On the one hand, Sword Beach is a well written and attractive synthesis of the critical eastern flank of the Allied invasion. On the other hand, this book is hardly original and in light of the excellent Battleground Europe title Sword Beach by Tom Kilvert-Jones last year, Ken Ford's effort seems to be following in well-worn tracks. Despite the plethora of other titles on this subject, Ford renders a yeoman's effort and has produced a worthwhile summary of the British campaign in and around Sword Beach in June-July 1944. The title deserves five stars for content, three for originality and thus a compromise four stars.

Ford begins with a short section that introduces the origins of the battle and emphasizes that the seizure of the French city of Caen was regarded by Montgomery as the key to the British landing. After a detailed chronology, the author provides a short section on opposing leaders and then a seven-page section on opposing armies. The author makes good points about the British substitution of self-propelled artillery and anti-tank in the assaulting 3rd Division, but tends to unduly denigrate the German 21st Panzer Division. Ford is a bit vague about the 21st Panzer - which is odd because Colonel Hans van Luck's account of that unit in Normandy has been available for more than a decade - and suggests that the unit was not really combat worthy and composed of cast-off men and equipment. The real reason the 21st Panzer was not rated fit for service on the Russian Front was due to its lack of a Panther tank battalion, but it substituted an assault gun battalion and was a fairly heavy unit. The reason for the unit's poor performance on D-Day was not due to poor leadership or poor quality troops but rather, due to high-level confusion and tangled command control relationships. Various German commanders, from Runstedt and Rommel, down to the local Corps and division commanders, vacillated between going after the British airborne, going after the sea borne landing or waiting to launch a properly coordinated assault in strength. Ford then covers the opposing plans in seven pages. The British 6th Airborne Division landings are covered in 17 pages, followed by 29 pages on the Sword Beach landings, 6 pages on expanding the bridgehead after D-Day, and a short aftermath. A ground order of battle for both sides is provided. This volume has five 2-D maps (British 6th Airborne landing areas, German defenses in Sword Beach area, the landings on Sword Beach, the Allied lodgment at the end of D-Day, the Battle for Caen) and three 3-D "Bird's Eye View" maps (British airborne landings, Sword Beach landings, 21st Panzer counterattack). There are also three excellent color battle scenes: the seizure of Pegasus Bridge, No. 4 Commando moves inland and the capture of Hillman position.

Overall, Ford's summary of the British operations in this sector of D-Day is accurate and succinct. Unfortunately, the author falls into the ex post facto trap of suggesting that once the British failed to take Caen on D-Day that Montgomery then planned to pin down most of the German armor in the eastern sector of Normandy so that the Americans could break out in the west. This is a post-war rationalization pushed by Montgomery's adherents, which conceals the reality that Montgomery had intended to seize Caen and exploit with armor on the eastern flank but he repeatedly failed to accomplish this. Furthermore, the author tends to blame the 3rd Division commander for failing to seize Caen but ignores the plethora of missions given to this unit (seize Caen, link-up with airborne, link-up with Canadians, repel German counterattack and eliminate resistance nests in sector). Although landings of the British airborne were a great tactical success they were operationally sterile because Montgomery wanted to drive southward, not eastward. If Montgomery really wanted Caen on D-Day, he should have dropped at least one airborne brigade on the northern outskirts of Caen, which might have resulted in seizure of at least half the city on D-Day. Too much effort was put east of the Orne River, for negligible gain. The British drive inland was also delayed for seven critical hours by the 150 German defenders in the Hillman position behind Sword Beach (one wonders where all the 79th Armored Division "funnies" - tanks specifically designed to deal with bunkers and obstacles - were during this period); the author views the capture of Hillman as an out-an-out victory but in reality, the stubborn defense of that position upset the British timetable.

Readers interested in Sword Beach should use this book in conjunction with Kilvert-Jones book, because taken together they pack a lot of information and insight on this subject. Standing alone, Ken Ford's book lacks some of the depth needed for really understanding why the British failed to achieve all their D-Day objectives and why the German counterattacks were so ineffective. Readers should also consult Robert Kershaw's excellent Piercing the Atlantic Wall, which offers more material on the British landings. Oddly, Ford makes little mention of Allied casualties at any point, so readers will have to consult other sources for that type of detail. However one area where Ford out-classes Kilvert-Jones' book is on information about the battlefield today, particularly concerning the German bunker-turned museum in Ouistreham and the Merville Battery.

I noticed a few errors in Dr Forcyk's review, so feel urge to write a few correction in the hope that people will not be mislead.

Montgomery's strategy:
Refer to the Post D-Day phase lines, which suggested that Montgomery did intend to hold round Caen and thus attract the German armour, while allowing the American armies in the West to seize Cherbourg, as having a working port was vital to the success of the Invasion (though this did not work as the Germans destroyed Cherbourg rather effectively).
The so called "myth" about Montgomery's original strategy failing stemmed from arguments at command level based on the success of certain battles (eg Goodwood) failing to live up to Montgomery's hype. This was purely down to Montgomery's sometimes arrogant nature which upset certain people (Tedder, Patton etc). For rather obvious reasons, Montgomery could not publish his strategies at the time (the Germans would then find out), and so naturally the press asked questions as to why the Allied forces (particularly the British and Canadians, who I might add faced substantially better equipped troops, including the majority of the SS that was deployed in Normandy, and certainly more Panzer Divisions then the American armies) had appeared to stall in Normandy.
From this arose the "myth" of Montgomery's failed strategy. Though admittedly the British 3rd Division had failed to capture Caen, which was not planned for but was down mainly to problems on the beach, and the arrival of the 21st Panzer on the afternoon of June 6th.
And the relief of the 6th British Airborne Division was not the responsibility of the 3rd Division. The Special Service Brigade (the Commandoes) who landed at Ouistreham relieved the embattled 6th Airborne until their reinforcements arrived at 21:00 on D-Day.

The area East of the Orne was "operationally sterile"? Hmmm. Maybe so, if you call the holding of the entire Eastern Flank of the invasion "sterile."
Without the Orne bridges and the Breville Heights, and by not destroying the Dives bridges, the 21st Panzer could have quite easily rolled into the Eastern flank of the 3rd Division and perhaps got onto the beaches. The Orne bridges were arguably the most important single objective of the entire invasion!

Dropping an Airborne Brigade onto Caen?! I doubt that would have achieved a lot. Except massive casualties.

Hillman: The "funnies" were trapped on the beaches. Delays and the incoming tide, plus of course the Germans, resulted in traffic jams on the beaches. The British at Hillman were left with little armoured support. Bear in mind that this was the first time the 3rd Division had been in battle, and so over-emphasised the threat of Hillman and the German forces that were in there. Yes it could have been by-passed. But it wasn't. Fortunes of war.

"British failed to achieve all their D-Day objectives"? May I remind you that the 6th British Airborne was the ONLY D-Day unit to complete all their tasks (though the Merville battery was re-occupied later).
Caen is an issue that military historians will be arguing for the rest of time, only by considering all the options and decent sources (not Stephan Ambrose!) can we begin to get some understanding of what happened on D-Day.

it is now available in collected hardcover version. The collected version can probably be obtained for the same price used as each individual volume would cost by itself. I believe the collected version is titled "the d-day landings"