As the title of this review suggests, I was drawn to Antony Beevor's book "D-Day: The Battle for Normandy" because the book's title promises to focus not just on June 6, 1944, but also on the succeeding weeks of desperate close-quarters fighting in the hinterlands of the Normandy beachhead. In this regard, Beevor's book does not disappoint.
Most people know that the June 1944 Normandy landings were a huge gamble that could have gone badly (indeed, Eisenhower, supreme Allied commander in Europe and the one who gave the go-ahead for the D-Day landings on June 6, had prepared a short speech to be delivered in the very real event that the American, British, and Canadian armies failed to establish a beachhead), and the actual D-Day landings at Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches have been covered in the most minute detail (by Cornelius Ryan, Max Hastings, and others)in the last 65 years. As important as getting a toehold on these beaches was in the first few days (and as fantastic a logistic feat the June landings were), the great majority of the battles (and casualties)occurred in the next two months as the Allied and German armies clashed in the most bitter fighting in the hedgerow ("bocage") and hill country just inland of the beaches. Gains and losses in these battles were often measured in hundreds of yards, while the British and American casualty-rates were double those of the Soviet forces (2000 losses per division per month in the West, as opposed to 1000 per division on the Eastern Front) in the comparable timeframe, even as the Soviet armies were rolling the Germans back hundreds of miles in their massive Operation Bagration offensive.
I began Beevor's book particularly interested in the numerous and successive British offensives in the seemingly compact eastern sector of the Allied front (Operations Epsom, Goodwood, and Totalize) that appeared to be signal failures despite the massive human and materiel resources (including hundreds of RAF and USAAF bombers that carpet-bombed the frontlines prior to Goodwood and Totalize) and where gains were maybe a few miles at best at the cost of hundreds of tanks and thousands of men. As with all his battle-coverage, Beevor is excellent at narrating these desultory battles in adequate detail (including identifying the units on both sides) without getting bogged-down in any kind of rote recitation. (Also, a major virtue of this book, as with all of Beevor's titles I have read, is the superb maps.) In Epsom, Goodwood, and Totalize, Gen. Montgomery always promised a major breakthrough, only to (characteristically, of course) seek to shift the blame to other Allied commanders when these operations failed to meet their most modest goals. After five years of war, the British were at the end of their materiel and manpower reserves; they had failed to take enough territory inland of the Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches to build airfields for tactical fighter support; they were facing the majority of SS divisions on the Normandy front along a very short frontline; their Churchill and Cromwell tanks were far inferior to German tanks; the hedgerow and hill country of Normandy severely limited armored mobility and thus favored the defending Germans who also had large numbers of 88mm flak guns to kill Allied tanks; and it did not help that the heavy Allied bombers which were supposed to tear open the German frontlines prior to Goodwood and Totalize, made their bombing-runs perpendicular to the frontline rather than flying parallel to the front (in an effort to limit exposure to the many German flak batteries) and ended up hitting almost as many Allied ground forces as German troops.
To the west, the Americans faced the same difficulties in terms of limited mobility in the hedgerows (one American officer who had served in the Pacific compared bocage fighting to jungle warfare), superior German tanks and 88s, and fanatical resistance by German troops convinced that failure to push the Western Allies off the northern continent meant the inevitable end of the Reich. And it would be unfair to say the Americans initially fared much better than the British and Canadians, when U.S. troops were trapped in the hedgerows for a month after D-Day. However, the American forces were able to secure more territory (aided by airborne landings and paratroopers) inland of the beaches immediately after D-Day and were thus able to build fighter airfields within their beachheads; were successful in driving across the Contentin Peninsula to the Atlantic and the approaches to Brittany, and reducing the German forces northward and eventually capturing the port of Cherbourg; and, crucially, the Americans had vastly more manpower and materiel resources than the British.
As the British sector of the Normandy front bogged-down, and gains were measured in increments of five miles, Montgomery (conveniently) declared that his forces' function was now to tie-down the majority of the SS units in the eastern sector so that the Americans could achieve a breakout further west around the left flank of the German forces in Normandy. This indeed did occur in Operation Cobra, 25 July-1 August, 1944. When a Soviet general observing the stalemated British sector commented to a British general that Soviet forces faced many more German troops on the Eastern Front than the Allied forces faced in Normandy, the British commander retorted that the Russians faced the same number of German soldiers across many hundreds of miles of front in the East that the Americans and especially the British faced along a front of all of sixty miles. Again, Beevor rightly observes that (for a change) the fighting in Normandy was more ferocious than in the comparable period in the East. There is much truth in this observation.
Beevor also gives substantial coverage to the defending German forces in Normandy. These included both regular Wehrmacht army as well as many SS units, including both SS panzer corps and Hitler Youth divisions. While the Germans fought doggedly, often to the last man, inflicted heavy losses on the Americans and British for every mile gained, and specialized in quick and punishing counterattacks, I was struck, in reading Beevor's book, at the horrendous losses the Germans were suffering from the very beginning of the Normandy battles. The Germans had negligible air support for the duration of the fighting, and they were consequently pummeled by British and American fighters every daylight hour of every clear day. The reader very quickly appreciates how difficult these constant air attacks made it for German operations. Rommel (the German commander in Normandy in the early days after June 6) had been promised generous Luftwaffe aid in the event of any Allied landings, and when this air support did not materialize (there were not enough planes, pilots, or fuel), he quickly realized that (as he had experienced in North Africa) it was basically futile to try to throw the Allies back into the sea. The German mechanized forces (and even reserves of ground troops marching to the front from deeper inside France) could move only at night and had to remain hidden during the day. Though German troops were experienced and determined, they and their commanders quickly learned that this was no way to conduct a successful military campaign. This eventually culminated in late August 1944 in the slaughter from the air of tens of thousands of German troops in the Falaise Pocket when Allied forces decisively broke out and sent German armies reeling all the way back to Paris and the line of the Seine. However, even here it should be said that determined German resistance coupled with inept British /Canadian leadership, allowed many German troops to escape the Falaise Packet and subsequently be deployed against the Allies in the Ardennes in December 1944, and in Hungary in March 1945, in the last two German offensives of the war.
This is the third book by Antony Beevor that I have read (I have also read his book on the British defeat in Crete in 1941, and his "The Fall of Berlin" on the final German defeat in 1945), and I greatly enjoyed it. Beevor is clearly immersed in the primary (he researched in the relevant archives in North America and Europe) and secondary literature, yet his prose is not turgid or overly technical. He writes in a clear and effective style in which the reader feels Beevor gives his subjects a complete treatment with a certain economy of words. There are also fascinating single chapters on the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt on Hitler, and the liberation of Paris, that offer brief but masterly accounts of these more peripheral events.
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Top reviews from other countries
M. MAY
Patton wins the war.......
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 8, 2018Amazon Customer
Beevor's American publisher must be happy.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 10, 2018
Abbi G
Poorly written and executed
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 31, 2019Adam J.
Apparently written for a Franco-American Audience
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 10, 2021LES DEUX HIBOUX
Very good, but not the definitive book about D-Day
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 28, 2021
