Inevitably perhaps, most accounts of World War II by British or American historians tend to exude a muscular and unambiguous patriotism, partly because many immediate post-war battle histories were military memoirs. Professional studies emerged later, but the prism of analyses scarcely changed. This viewpoint evaded critical scrutiny for years because the predominantly Anglo-American-Russian alliance happened to emerge on the right side of history by dint of fighting an enemy as conspicuously evil as Hitler.
Several revisionist versions are emerging now, drawing increasingly on freshly declassified material and, importantly, Axis sources as well. Even so, balanced histories are few on the ground. Antony Beevor is one of the few military historians on the Allied side to bring a wider, more rigorous degree of research and scholarly dispassion to his writings that have significantly enhanced our understanding of the face of battle as much as its strategies. D-Day joins two earlier works — Berlin, The Downfall (2002) or Stalingrad (1998), to name just two — in providing new and human perspectives to the most seminal confrontation of the modern world.
Beevor was, for instance, among the first historians to highlight the mass rape and plunder Russian commanders endorsed as military policy during the invasion of Eastern Europe and Germany — facts that were known but rarely acknowledged at the time. As East Europeans fled west to surrender to the Americans and British instead, they unwittingly stoked Stalin’s chronic suspicion that his allies would do him out of the territory the Red Army had gained.
The Allied invasion of Normandy, France (on June 6, 1944) ranks among the most audacious operations in military history and with reason. Four years after 130,000-odd men were chased off the European continent at Dunkirk by the German blitzkrieg the Allies’ successful landing has become the stuff of legends that grew with the telling. There is the famous six-hour window of good weather that a lanky young Scots weatherman gives Dwight D Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, to launch “Overlord” as the operation was codenamed before one of the worst storms in a century closed off the English Channel. There is Operation Fortitude, complete with dummy tanks, warships and troops, and the Double Cross Committee that convinced the Germans the Allies were going to land simultaneously in Norway and Pas de Calais in France, the closest point to England.
Working through new material from half a dozen countries, Beevor is able to turn out an absorbing and comprehensive account that examines not just battle strategy but also the experiences of soldiers and civilians in the battle-zone.
Most versions of the Allied progress through France suggest that despite the odds, the Allied invasion of Normandy worked to plan. The fact that things went badly wrong despite overwhelming manpower and resource superiority began to emerge in some recent histories. Indeed, the politics between General Montgomery and his American colleagues over war strategy erupted long before the breakout from the bocage — the high hedges that dotted the Norman countryside and wrong-footed Allied soldiers and commanders alike.
Monty, in fact, does not emerge unscathed in this account — “he suffered from a breathtaking conceit that almost certainly stemmed from an inferiority complex”. And Beevor shows that his feted Alamein heroes, the Desert Rats — the Seventh Armoured Division— failed miserably in this treacherous new terrain. But he also punches holes in the long-accepted US position that Monty was entirely to blame for failing to break out from the British sector quickly enough. Even accounting for admittedly poor generalship, Beevor shows how Monty’s 21st Army Group faced the brunt of the German Panzer Divisions, a fact that partly helped the Americans charge south and east faster than anticipated.
The other accepted truth is that the French population was uniformly ecstatic about liberation. The image is of gallant Allied soldiers fraternising on terms of greatest harmony with French civilians. In truth, the Normans suffered almost 20,000 casualties during a three-month campaign that matched the Eastern Front in ferocity, so their attitude towards their liberators was mixed. They welcomed them and were astonishingly forbearing of the wholesale destruction of towns and villages in pursuit of the Germans. There were certainly far fewer incidents of rape and pillage than under the Russians. But the Allies were hardly saints when it came to observing the Geneva Convention against the enemy — several took seriously the adage that the only good German was a dead one — or demanding fresh food and mademoiselles from local homes. The question is what yet another book on D-Day adds up to 65 years after the event. A lot, as it turns out. As Beevor writes, “One must also consider what might have happened should the extraordinary undertaking of D-Day had failed…This raises the possibility that the Red Army might have reached not just the River Rhine, but even the Atlantic Coast. The post-war map and history of Europe would have been very different indeed.” The world would have been a different place too.
D-Day
Antony Beevor
Penguin
592 pages; £14.99
