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264 of 294 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Beevor's D Day, a job half done, 1 Jun 2009
We all agree that Antony Beevor is a fine popular historian; you feel you are leaning over the Colonel's shoulder, maps spread out amid the confusion of battle. But D Day is more than a battle in France, it was an immense task conceived, organised and implemented then very hard fighting won. If you are interested in the Normandy campaign he is up to the task, but so too are a plethora of authors. What can Beevor add, could he link the pre 6th June preparation in equal measure to the fighting and present a complete D Day in one book? I wish he had given it a go.
Previous - serious - reviews suggest he has written a good but not an outstanding book. Given the confusion and complexity no one will ever write a definitive account. Of course narrative and academic historians will slog it out but for me it was a good "macro" account that added to the other books I have read. It is still the case D Day tends to be marginalised, gathering overwhelming forces in Southern England, a cross channel dash, some fighting against second tier troops, the allied generals -with "real time" Enigma intelligence - breaking out and processing to Germany. Allied air domination made it a turkey shoot. It was not like that and Bevoor details just how bloody the post invasion campaign was. Could the landing have been repelled on the beaches, or the breakout prevented? Disaster was real possibility, massive force never guaranteed success (ask the Romans). Beevor gave no sense of just how great the risks were.
D Day is a generic term for a staggeringly complex event. The harder you work, the luckier you get might be the real lesson. It demands an outstanding writer to present it to the general reader. To put the first soldier on French soil required a level of intelligence, audacity and imagination arguably without equal in war. How was the political will formed and the planning put in place? They did it with little more than pencils and card index boxes. Who were the people that organised the invasion, not bickering Generals but those in Nissen huts in Dorset? Many would have seen war in the Western Front in 1914-18 well aware of the disastrous events at Gallipoli and Dieppe. The 6th June is incomprehensible to those that did not see it - some 175,000 men, 1,500 tanks, 3,000 artillery pieces and 10,000 vehicles crossed the channel. This required nearly 7,000 vessels and 11,590 aircraft. Then the technological aspects, the Mulberry harbours, the fuel line PLUT0 and the beach storming equipment. How did they create a command structure for American, British, Canadian -Free French and Poles - operating in combined operations in sea, air, beach and paratroop landings? And the deception that convinced the Germans that Normandy was a feint for the Pas de Calais. Behind every front line soldier were at least a dozen in uniform and even more civilians. Who has told their story?
Had Beevor called his book the Battle for Normandy he would deserve full credit. But the prefix D Day - which we know sells books - begs a fuller account and here he has missed the target. What is on the "label" is not what is in the "can". Max Hastings the consensus suggests - has told it better while there are many competent, well-illustrated books written over the same ground. D Day - the whole story - is incredibly inspiring. The men that made D Day have a lot to teach us, understanding what they did is how we honour them. The objective was glorious, a colossal sacrifice to rid us of fascism. It seems Bevoor is stuck in a rut, although one he does well. This book is a disappointment, is it cashing in on his reputation and the 65th anniversary?
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Far too simplistic, 13 Jul 2009
I was suspicious of the true historical value of this book after watching Antony Beevor commenting on the BBC during D Day commemorations. However, I took the plunge and ought the book as a holiday read. There is nothing of substance in the book and the text is littered with comments which originate from the mouths of 'Officers Mess Bores' and armchair experts and as such have little worth. The author tells us no more about D Day and the subsequent battle for Normandy than we already know. Beevor focuses on the failings on Monty which is not new. However, his constant referral to these failings when referring to the British influence on the battle became rather annoying. If you want a true history of the events, look elsewhere.
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235 of 284 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
On the negative side...., 28 May 2009
`D-Day' is in many ways a very good book. However, its publicity and blurb make very big claims regarding the research that underpins it, and these deserve scrutiny. In particular, although significant sources in Caen and New Orleans have been intensively mined, close examination of Beevor's endnotes reveals a much more restricted research base than might be inferred from the book's publicity and a casual glance at the list of archives used. For example, although the author lists almost 300 separate U.S. National Archives references, over half of these originate in just five boxes of documents, from thousands that might have been consulted. Work in several other important foreign archives produced very limited results, and there is little evidence of systematic research even in archives closer to home. Beevor's bibliography of secondary sources, memoirs and unit histories omits numerous important works, among them (and this is a real surprise) some of the best personal accounts of the Normandy fighting. His awareness of academic research on related matters also appears thin. Some readers, for example, may feel that reference to recent books by David French (`Raising Churchill's Army'), John Buckley (`British Armour in the Normandy Campaign'), and Timothy Harrison Place (`Military Training in the British Army, 1940-1944') would have enhanced Beevor's portrayal of British combat performance in Normandy. Similarly, Beevor's judgement on Allied deception plans ("more effective than the Allies had ever dared imagine" [p.157]) might have been more cautiously expressed had he read Mary Barbier's published work on the topic. Sadly, on these subjects - as in several other areas of enquiry - Beevor's comments appear somewhat out of date.
The consequences of Beevor's reluctance to engage with a broader range of reference material, or (perhaps) of his publisher's failure to employ a competent fact-checker, are felt throughout `D-Day'. Although the Normandy campaign is big and complicated, and honest mistakes are unavoidable in any study on this scale, the number of factual errors contained in Beevor's book is disconcertingly high. Admittedly, many of these are of a relatively minor kind that will probably not much concern the general reader (e.g. a `General Helmlich' [sic, p.214] did not die on 10 June, although General Hellmich WAS killed seven days later). Nevertheless, there are lots of them, and cumulatively they call into question the bold assertion that this is the most well-researched account of the Normandy campaign yet to appear. More to the point, there are places where insufficient familiarity with key sources contributes to narrative or analytical confusion (for example, when the author makes mistakes about the sequence of events on the Martinville Ridge in mid-July); for an author who is concerned above all with describing and explaining real human experiences of war, this is a problem. Similarly, although the book's accompanying publicity disparages "interviews conducted too long after the event" as a unreliable historical source, this did not absolve Beevor of responsibility to check the written (but still personal) accounts on which he so relies so heavily. Had he done so, he might have avoided errors such as those found on page 211, where he describes numerous Allied aircraft being hit by `friendly fire' off Utah Beach on 9 June (a day on which bad weather grounded almost all British and American planes), or on page 247, where a more careful reading of his source would have revealed that the author was referring to a battle that occurred on 29 June, not one taking place over a week later. Nor are the maps contained in `D-Day' of as much assistance to the reader as their number (19) might imply; none appears to be entirely free of errors, and that on pp.244-5 - to be blunt - is a complete shocker.
Arguably, `D-Day' also lacks balance in its treatment of Allied and German experiences of the campaign. Whereas most of Beevor's German sources originate with accounts written (mostly from memory) by senior commanders held in British or American captivity after the war, the vast majority of Allied accounts come from soldiers of junior rank. Although General Patton (whose published diaries are much quoted by Beevor) provides something of an exception, this means that the campaign is seen mainly from one perspective for the Allies, but from an entirely different one for their enemy. Perhaps the greatest victim of this approach is Bernard Montgomery, 21st Army Group's commander throughout the campaign. Beevor seems to have little time for Montgomery, whose personality and behaviour could admittedly be distinctly unappealing. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the Allies eventually won a crushing victory in Normandy, and perhaps Monty deserves just a little more credit for this, and understanding, than he gets from Beevor. Certainly, at the very least it would have been nice to see the author take account of arguments presented in Nigel Hamilton's multi-volume biography of Montgomery. Perhaps not surprisingly, this is among the sources absent from Beevor's bibliography.
`D-Day' offers considerable rewards to its readers, not least in terms of its value in re-invigorating unsettled debates on the planning and conduct of the Normandy campaign, as well as the light that it casts on how best-selling works of popular history are researched, written and marketed. But although it is full of the vivid colour and detail that we have come to expect from this most talented and readable of authors, this reviewer remains unconvinced by many of the claims made in its accompanying publicity. Indeed, it could be argued that despite the signs of age shown by both books, Max Hastings' 'Overlord'and Carlo D'Este's 'Decision in Normandy' remain distinctly superior works, both in their ability to balance narrative and analysis, and in some of their conclusions about the campaign. Still, at the risk of contradicting almost every response to Beevor's latest work that seems likely to appear in the next few months, this reviewer feels compelled to state his final position unambiguously. A great read D-Day certainly is; great history, however, it is not.
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