Customer Reviews

Normandy: The Search for Sidney = Normandie: A La Recherche de Sidney

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Many of us dream of visiting the sites of great battles of WWII or Korea. That is, indeed, the reason KilroyWasHere.org was started. See the Foreword (Volume 2). Tom has actually done it and written a gripping, historic book about his adventure. We have read a lot about the landings at Omaha (USA 1st Div.), at Utah, (USA 4th Div.), but little about the landings at Gold (British 50th Div.), Juno (Canadian 3rd Div.), or Sword (British 4rd Div.) This great book changes that about Sword in an up close and personal way.

It is really three books. Each could be a book by itself and well worth the read! The first is Tom's own. He discovered and was intrigued by Corporal Sidney Bates (same last name but not related) whose single-handed efforts, firing a Bren gun from the hip, stopped an attack by panzer grenadiers after D-day. For this he won The Victoria Cross, ". . . his sovereign's highest decoration for valour . . . " Tom's search is for the exact place where Sidney gave his all. Tom, himself a WWII veteran in Burma, was helped by two Sword survivors and many French locals who ". . . gladly gave their liberators the 'freedom of their fields' in return for the blood their comrades had spilt there."

An interesting aside is that the book is written in English and French side by side in two columns per page. It is done this way as a tribute to a very brave French woman, Madam Lenauld whose story is told in the second book. Her father was the gallant French mayor maligned in the Movie "The Longest Day."

The third book is a detailed battlefield account of the 1st Battalion, The Suffolk Regiment who, having survived Dunkirk, landed at Sword.

All three are worthy of being stand alone books but together, they make an outstanding addition to any library.

A dual language book with its text in both English and French, Normandy: The Search For Sidney by Thomas J. Bates and Eric Lummis is an extensively, meticulously researched history and vividly presented narrative journey, which reveals the authors' search for the battle site in Normandy where one man, Corporal Sidney Bates, held back a force of panzer-grenadiers almost singlehandedly and paid for his valor with his life. Normandy: The Search For Sidney also reveals the courage of a French woman and her family in the tumultuous events up to and surrounding D-Day, and an amazingly detailed chronicle of the 1 Suffolk infantry during the D-Day battles that changed history. Black-and-white photography enhances this vivid, visceral narrative which is an especially recommended contribution to Military History collections in general, and World War II European Theatre military buff in particular.