Details Books Concering D-Day: The Battle for Normandy

Original Title: D-Day: The Battle for Normandy
ISBN: 067088703X (ISBN13: 9780670887033)
Edition Language: English
Characters: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Paul Hausser, George S. Patton, Bernard Montgomery, Erwin Rommel, Omar Bradley, Alfred Jodl, Adolf Hitler, Fritz Bayerlein, Leonard T. Gerow, Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff, Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque, Eugen Meindl
Setting: Normandy,1944(France)
Literary Awards: Duke of Westminster Medal for Military Literature (2010)
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D-Day: The Battle for Normandy Hardcover | Pages: 591 pages
Rating: 4.16 | 8426 Users | 448 Reviews

List Appertaining To Books D-Day: The Battle for Normandy

Title:D-Day: The Battle for Normandy
Author:Antony Beevor
Book Format:Hardcover
Book Edition:Anniversary Edition
Pages:Pages: 591 pages
Published:July 1st 2009 by Viking
Categories:History. Nonfiction. War. World War II. Military. Military History

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"Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world. Your task will not be an easy one..."
- General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, June 6, 1944

Christmas break, my sophomore year in college, I went to England and France with my brother, my dad, and my dad’s new girlfriend. If the traveling party seemed a little uncomfortable – well, free trip to Europe.

The trip featured just about what you’d expect from a trip to Europe in late December. Cold, dank, miserable weather. A lack of crowds. A lack of things that were open. And of course, in true Clark Griswold fashion, my dad insisted on wearing a beret. (I was past the age of being mortified by him, and well into the age of being constantly irritated with him. I could go on, but you’re not my therapist).

Our excursion is mostly memorable for the low points. The bleak melancholy of a post-Christmas, wintry London. New Year’s Eve spent in a slummy motel outside Paris, with no booze and no television. My dad’s beret.

The high point, at least for me, was our trip to Normandy. Because it was off-season, Bordeaux felt deserted. We stayed in one of the few hotels taking lodgers. We drove to the D-Day landing beaches on empty roads. The weather was bone-achingly cold, and charmed by wind-whipped sleet. When he walked onto Omaha Beach, near Colleville-sur-Mer, we experienced something quite unexpected: solitude. We were absolutely alone on one of the most famous battlefields in human history.**

The beach seemed remarkably small, an effect perhaps heightened by the position of the tide. Even allowing for that, it was sometimes hard to imagine the epic struggle that took place on this sand, amid the grass-swept dunes and craggy heights. The fates of nations balanced here one day – I thought it would be bigger.

You don’t really understand the titanic nature of the battle until you climb the bluffs overlooking Omaha and reach the American cemetery (a French concession, over-flown by the American flag and administered by the United States). There, 9,000 crosses and Stars of David lay before you in terrible, beautiful symmetry. Standing there, alone in the rain, was an impressive experience that ranks high among the historical pilgrimages I’ve made. You think you know 9,000; then you see it spread before you in mathematically precise rows.

The dead who lay beneath white stone did not all fall during the first day of the D-Day invasion. Despite the triumphal images associated with the landings (and the triumphalism of, for example, Cornelius Ryan’s classic The Longest Day), World War II did not end on the evening of June 6, 1944. In terms of blood, it really began.

Antony Beevor’s D-Day: The Battle for Normandy tells the story of D-Day and the many hard days after. Its focus can be found in its subtitle: the ferocious inland push against a determined German foe. The American and British contributions to World War II have long been denigrated vis-à-vis the contributions made by the Soviet Union. Contrarians love to point out how the USSR fought bigger battles, lost more men, and drained the Third Reich like an enormous leech.

Russia’s contribution to Allied victory can’t be overstated (though it’s helpful to remember that they were as awful as the Nazis in almost every way). But as Beevor points out, in statistical, per capita terms, the fighting in Normandy was as costly and vicious as the battles in the East.

D-Day: The Battle for Normandy is a sturdy, well-constructed history. I’ve read Beevor’s Stalingrad and sensed a vague disjointedness to the narrative. That is not an issue here. This book is straightforward, chronological, and thorough. Though the book’s focal point is not simply the landing, Beevor still gives it an extended look, with individual chapters devoted to the airborne drops, and each of the beach assaults (Omaha, Utah, Gold, Juno, and Sword). Though the subject is well-trod, Beevor attempts to present different viewpoints than those already published. (The amazing thing I’ve recognized in reading a wide variety of D-Day books is that there are enough anecdotes to fuel a thousand books without using the same ones twice).

Once the beachhead is established, the book follows the American forces as they moved west along the Cotentin Peninsula, and the British under Bernard Montgomery, as they struggle to take Caen in the east. Hard fighting follows among the hedgerows, at Saint-Lô, and in the Falaise Pocket. Beevor ends his tale with the liberation of Paris.

Intermixed with the military history are sharp character sketches and fascinating side conversations that cover varied topics, such as P.O.W. treatment, war crimes, and the conundrum that was the French. There is also a chapter devoted to the July 20th plot against Adolf Hitler. I enjoyed seeing this oft-told event placed in its wider context. It was not simply a move by patriotic Germans who wanted to rid themselves of an obvious evil; it was a reaction to Hitler’s glaringly poor responses to the Allied invasion.

When you read a lot of World War II books, you start to notice an odd tension: near-constant criticism of Allied forces coupled with grudging (and sometimes not-so-grudging) admiration of the fighting capabilities of the Wehrmacht. This manifests itself in severe critiques of the martial abilities of men like Montgomery, Dwight Eisenhower, and Omar Bradley. The oddness, of course, is that the Allies won the war, with this reality attributed to some vaguely defined inevitability.

A great example of this is the Falaise Pocket. This was an envelopment of Germany Army Group B (which Hitler had not allowed to retreat) by converging American and British forces. By any measure, it was a great Allied victory: many Germans were killed; many more were captured. But Allied actions at the Pocket are often criticized because not enough Germans were killed; not enough were captured.

To be sure, Beevor has some harsh words for many of the Allies, particularly Montgomery (whose reputation was always questioned, but who has taken an even more severe beating in the postwar years). But Beevor, unlike, say, Max Hastings, is more charitable in his observations, and more cognizant that war is an imperfect practice, and that battles are not fought on maps, with pushpins, but on physical terrain, amongst human beings.

Beevor is a well-respected historian of World War II. When you read one of his books, you know you are in good hands. He is not as beautiful a writer or as gifted a storyteller as Rick Atkinson, who recently covered this same time period in his magisterial The Guns at Last Light. He also does not have the acid tongue or contrarian instincts of Max Hastings. This is not a criticism, by any means, since Atkinson and Hastings are two of the best. But it is a way of saying that Beevor – in terms of literary merit, at least – works with a lower ceiling.

With that said, Beevor is one of the best, and he does a wonderful job of covering all the days after “the longest day.”

**Since this experience, off-holiday vacations have become an obsession with me. I strive to avoid crowds by going places at the time of year that the least number of people are visiting. So, not only are we constantly traveling to distant battlefields, but the weather is always terrible. Needless to say, this will likely become a separate article in the divorce proceedings my wife eventually files against me.

Rating Appertaining To Books D-Day: The Battle for Normandy
Ratings: 4.16 From 8426 Users | 448 Reviews

Write-Up Appertaining To Books D-Day: The Battle for Normandy
After having read a number of Steven Ambrose's books on the battle for Normandy, Anthony Beevor's version is a relief in that it has much cooler analysis, more maps (which every book on warfare should have more of) and manages to include the German, Canadian, Polish and French side of the equation to a much larger extent. (for instance, he points out that more French civilians died as a result of the war in Normandy, particularly the bombing and shelling, than died during the blitz in London).

Antony Beevor is one of the greatest historians of the last fifty years. His books on Stalingrad and the Fall of Berlin have forever changed our view of the war in the East. This volume is then an excellent choice for anyone wishing to learn more about the invasion of Normandy. I give it four stars rather than five because it does not change our basic understanding of WWII in the same dramatic way that Beevor's greatest masterpieces do.Nonetheless, Beevor is an outstanding historian and every

This book was recommended my my son Russel who picked it up while traveling in Asia. It is a very detailed account of the Normandy invasion up to the capture of Paris. Beevor has written it from original documents and first hand accounts. It is extremely detailed giving the movements and actions down to company levels. It deals equally with the Allied and German activities.What I found most interesting was the mention of small details. For instance that many of the American soldiers shaved their

Beevor, at great length, tells us very little new. He presents soldiers tales as hard fact without question or thought. For example, the tales of French women snipers killed by US troops. That young men in action for the first time, finding themselves shot at by an unseen enemy, should pick on a terrified woman hiding under her kitchen table as the culprit, should prompt some questions. We might ask about the quality of the men's training that they would choose a farmhouse as the likely source

I recently read and really enjoyed 'D DAY Through German Eyes - The Hidden Story of June 6th 1944' and that made me want to read more about D Day. I've really enjoyed the other books I've read by Antony Beevor (Staingrad, Berlin, Crete) and so thought I'd be in safe hands with D-Day: The Battle for Normandy.It's splendid. Moving from the initial drama about adverse weather forecasts, to surveillance of the assault beaches, to individual accounts of each beach, to the breakout for Paris, the

A good narrative of the battle and liberation of Normandy and Paris, the book tells the story of how the Americans, British, Canadian, and other Allied forces landed on France and began the bloody fight to liberate France and defeat Nazi Germany.While the book is a riveting read, I observed that it would have been better if Mr. Beevor also included the genesis for Operation Overlord (the codename for the landings) and its planning. But still, the book manages to give the reader a chance to

I picked this up because I felt I ddin't know enough about D-Day.Beevor can write. While the book is a miltary history, Beevor keeps intersting for none miltary historians by including touching little stories and details (like the hairstyle of American troops). He focuses not just on the armies but on the French civilians caught in the battle.The book focuses on the whole battle to free most of France, it ends with the liberation of Paris. Beevor details the power struggles on both sides of the

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