D-Day: The Battle for Normandy

by Antony Beevor

Overview

"Glorious, horrifying... D-Day is a vibrant work of history that honors the sacrifice of tens of thousands of men and women."—Time

Renowned historian Antony Beevor, author of Stalingrad and The Battle of Arnhem, and the man who "single-handedly transformed the reputation of military history" (The Guardian) presents the first major account in more than twenty years of the Normandy invasion and the liberation of Paris. This is the first book to describe not only the experiences of the American, British, Canadian, and German soldiers, but also the terrible suffering of the French caught up in the fighting. Beevor draws upon his research in more than thirty archives in six countries, going back to original accounts and interviews conducted by combat historians just after the action. D-Day is the consummate account of the invasion and the ferocious offensive that led to Paris's liberation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143118183
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/28/2010
Pages:	624
Sales rank:	152,605
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Antony Beevor is the bestselling author of D-Day: The Battle for Normandy,which received the Royal United Services’ Institute Westminster Medal; The Battle for Spain, which received the La Vanguardia Prize; Paris After the Liberation 1944–1949; Stalingrad, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History, and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature; and The Fall of Berlin 1945, which received the first Longman-History Today Trustees’ Award. He is the recipient of the 2014 Pritzker Military Museum & Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. Beevor lives in England.

Table of Contents

D-DayList of Illustrations and Maps
Glossary

1. The Decision
2. Bearing the Cross of Lorraine
3. Watch on the Channel
4. Sealing off the Invasion Area
5. The Airborne Assault
6. The Armada Crosses
7. Omaha
8. Utah and the Airborne
9. Gold and Juno
10. Sword
11. Securing the Beachheads
12. Failure at Caen
13. Villers-Bocage
14. The Americans on the Cotentin Peninsula
15. Operation Epsom
16. The Battle of the Bocage
17. Caen and the Hill of Calvary
18. The Final Battle for Saint-Lô
19. Operation Goodwood
20. The Plot Against Hitler
21. Operation Cobra - Breakthrough
22. Operation Cobra - Breakout
23. Brittany and Operation Bluecoat
24. The Mortain Counter-attack
25. Operation Totalize
26. The Hammer and Anvil
27. The Killing Ground of the Falaise Pocket
28. The Paris Uprising and the Race for the Seine
29. The Liberation of Paris
30. Aftermath

Acknowledgments
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Absorbing... The reader finished this accessible history with the sense he has had a 360-degree look at Operation Overlord and its multinational cast... Terrifing reading."—USA Today

"A dramatic, important, and instructive story, and Beevor tells it surpassingly well."—The Washington Post 

"Where the book really scores is in its eye for the operational detail and its vivid reconstructions of the experience of battle, as unavoidable courage mixes with arbitrary tragedy."—Lawrence Freedman, Foreign Affairs

"Beevor excels in recounting, from interviews with veterans and from the testimony of soldiers' letters and reports, just what a bloody campaign the invasion was... Beevor is especially gripping in his account of the U.S. 120th Infantry... Beevor is to be commended for emphasizing a troubling theme: the inferiority of much Allied equipment."—The Wall Street Journal

"His account of atrocities on both sides, of errors committed and of surpassing bravery makes for excellent - though often blood-soaked - reading. Beevor gets better with each book."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Beevor has written an in-depth campaign history...that should be read by beginners and experts alike."—Library Journal

From the Publisher

…a dramatic, important and instructive story, and Beevor tells it surpassingly well. D-Day is very much a work of military history, so of necessity it is chockablock with the sort of battlefield chess-playing that can leave the non-military mind in a state of considerable confusion. But Beevor is less interested in moving troops from pillar to post than in telling us what war was like for them and for the civilians whose paths they crossed. Readers fortunate enough to know his previous books…are aware that his fascination with warfare is compounded by a deep knowledge, not always encountered in military histories, that war is hell…Yes, it was a great victory the Allies won in Normandy, and to this day all of us should be grateful to those who won it. But the cost, as Antony Beevor is at pains to emphasize in this fine book, was awful beyond comprehension.
—The Washington Post

Jonathan Yardley

Beevor has established a solid reputation as a chronicler of WWII's great eastern front battles: Stalingrad and Berlin. In addressing D-Day, he faces much wider competition with historians like Stephen Ambrose and Max Hastings, who also use his method of integrating personal experiences, tactical engagements, operational intentions and strategic plans. Beevor combines extensive archival research with a remarkable sense of the telling anecdote: he quotes, for example, an officer's description of the “bloody mass of arms and legs and heads, [and] cremated corpses” created by artillery fire as the Germans tried to escape the Allied breakout. He is sharply critical of senior commanders on both sides: Bernard Montgomery's conceit; Adolf Hitler's self-delusion; Dwight Eisenhower's mediocrity. His heroes are the men who took the invasion ashore and carried it forward into Normandy in the teeth of a German defense whose skill and determination deserved a better cause. The result was a battle of attrition: a “bloody slog” that tested British and American fighting power to the limit—but not beyond. Beevor says that it wasn't Allied forces' material superiority but their successful use of combined arms and their high learning curve that were decisive in a victory that shaped postwar Europe. Maps, illus. (Oct. 13)

Publishers Weekly

This is as powerful and authoritative an account of the battle for Normandy as we are likely to get in this generation . . . . Nobody knows better than Beevor how to translate the dry stuff of military history into human drama of the most vivid and moving kind. His book offers a thousand vignettes of drama, terror, cruelty, compassion, courage and cowardice. He is especially good in describing the sufferings of civilians on the battlefield, whose plight is often ignored.
—Max Hastings

The Sunday Times (London)

Beevor is singularly expert at homing in on those telltale human details that reveal just what it would have been like to be in Normandy in the summer of 1944 . . . His description of the first American landings, at Omaha Beach, is quite terrifying.
—Craig Brown

The Mail on Sunday

There is no writer that can surpass Beevor in making sense of a crowded battlefield and in balancing the explanation of tactical manoeuvres with poignant flashes of human detail . . . dramatic, exciting, well-paced and lucid.
—Christopher Silvester

Daily Express

Beevor's previous books on the siege of Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin led us to expect something special from D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, and he does not disappoint . . . .The chapter on the Omaha Beach landings is almost the literary version of the opening scene of the movie Saving Private Ryan, with the same horror and pace.
—Andrew Roberts

Sunday Telegraph

Beevor tells it all with the soldier's eye for what matters on the ground as much as with the historian's for the broader understanding of events.
—Allan Mallinson

The Times (Book of the Week)

The story of operation Overlord and the French-coast landings on D-day, June 6, 1944, has been recounted many times both in print and on the big screen. It is certainly a story worth retelling, and Beevor (Stalingrad) does it well, combining contemporary accounts with a moving narrative, beginning on June 2, 1944, and ending with the liberation of Paris in August. He relates the operation from all points of view, from the commanders to the men on the beaches, giving equal time to all participants and including, more unusually, the experiences of the French civilians involved. Civilian casualties ran into the tens of thousands, a fact either ignored or given short shrift in most books. Beevor shifts perspectives smoothly, enabling the reader to follow along without confusion, from the U.S. landings on Omaha and Utah beaches to the British and Canadians landings on Sword and Juno beaches, to the airborne incursion and the German response. VERDICT Beevor has written an in-depth campaign history, comparable to Max Hastings's Overlord and Carlo D'Este's Decision in Normandy, that should be read by beginners and experts alike. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/09.]—David Lee Poremba, Windermere, FL

Library Journal

The grand Allied invasion of Normandy had myriad ways to go wrong, writes historian Beevor (The Mystery of Olga Chekhova, 2004, etc.) in this skilled account. Miraculously, it did not. "Everyone in Britain knew that D-Day was imminent," the author writes, "and so did the Germans." What kept the Germans from knowing the exact details of the attack is the stuff of legend-and a massive program of disinformation and double-agenting, which Beevor deftly relates. The larger outlines of the story are well-known; historians and journalists from John Keegan to Cornelius Ryan have had their say about the matter. To this Beevor adds sharp observations derived from the archives, among them the unsettling fact that just before the invasion almost every American unit involved was rated "unsatisfactory," most having never experienced combat before. Fortunately, the Germans across the English Channel were divided in how to respond. As the author notes, Erwin Rommel wanted to concentrate his troops near the landing sites, while his superior officers wanted to assemble a mighty counterattack in the woods north of Paris. Elements of both strategies were hastily assembled as needed, and in either event they cost the Allies plenty. One of the strongest elements of the book is Beevor's inclusion of sometimes overlooked and discounted actors, including French Resistance forces and veterans of the Polish army who had made their way west, and who told their French counterparts, "You will be liberated . . . but we will be occupied for years and years." As the author writes, the Germans had an international army, too, including Cossack forces that were mowed down as they rode into battle. His account of atrocitieson both sides, of errors committed and of surpassing bravery makes for excellent-though often blood-soaked-reading. Beevor gets better with each book. Agent: Andrew Nurnberg/Andrew Nurnberg Associates

Kirkus Reviews

After briefly treating the buildup to D-Day, Beevor examines the invasion and subsequent liberation of Paris in a mix of sometimes-dry strategic overview and often-ghastly personal details. Simon Vance gives it all proper weight, without extravagance. He has a likable voice and pleasant English accent, which he varies, at times from one word to the next, to suit the large number of quotations. His American accent is good, and he even does Canadian. Other accents make one wonder about the convention of presenting foreign speech as accented English, but it works. It’s easy to lose track in complex audio histories (especially military); Vance’s clarity and excellent pacing help. A fascinating and well-read book. W.M. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2010 - AudioFile