Customer Reviews

D-Day: By Those Who Were There

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D-DAY BY THOSE WHO WERE THERE is a treasure trove of first-person accounts by men and women of all nationalities who took part in the Normandy Invasion. As such, it offers the modern-day reader a rare, up-close-and-personal view of that epic event.

Peter Liddle's book divides the personal accounts into 14 chapters covering pre-invasion training/planning/assembling, the airborne assault, crossing the Channel/Naval ops/Naval bombardment, Utah Beach, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and so on. The hundreds of accounts include reminiscences, diary excerpts and unpublished letters from Allied and Axis soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians. They range in length from a single paragraph to several pages long. Dozens of b&w photographs, diagrams, maps and illustrations are included throughout the book.

The bulk of the material is drawn from the archives of England's Second World War Experience Centre in Horsforth, Leeds. The Centre, whose director happens to be Peter Liddle(!), is the ONLY archive dedicated to the Second World War. Its mission is to preserve the recollections of military veterans and civilians of all nations who lived during the war. Other materials came from the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans, etc.

D-DAY BY THOSE WHO WERE THERE offers a fascinating smorgasbord of viewpoints ranging from a British major assigned to Bradley's 12th Army Group staff to a Wehrmacht machine-gunner defending Omaha Beach, the skipper of a RN minesweeper to an 82nd Airborne paratrooper, a Canadian artilleryman to a RAF Lancaster gunner, a WREN Signals Clerk to a Canadian war correspondent and so on. Generally it's a good blend of voices although I think not enough American reminiscences were used in the Omaha Beach chapter.

In any case, Liddle's book is a great piece of history brought to life. Read Liddle's book and then pick up a copy of D-DAY IN PHOTOGRAPHS by Andrew Whitmarsh, another recent book I reviewed which is authored by the curator/director of an English D-Day museum. Together they offer a marvelous text and photo overview of the Normandy Invasion.