by ANTONY BEEVOR
What They Say About The Book
At one point, during the fierce battle for the town of Saint-Lô, Beevor quotes a medic: "It's such a paradox, this war, which produces the worst in man, and also raises him to the summits of self-sacrifice, self-denial and altruism." Two pages later he quotes a French gendarme appalled by looting by soldiers and civilians alike: "It was a great surprise to find it in all classes of society. The war has awakened atavistic instincts and transformed a number of law-abiding individuals into delinquents."
As Beevor says, there was a sharp contrast between the Allied foot soldiers and their German counterparts. The most fanatical of the latter (and "fanatical" is indeed the word), especially those in the SS and its Hitler Jugend offshoot, had been brainwashed by the Nazi propaganda machine into believing that the fate of the fatherland was in their hands, and they fought with that uppermost in mind. The British soldiers by contrast had been at war for five years and were exhausted by it. Americans and Canadians were not fighting for land they could call home and thus were motivated primarily by the group loyalty so essential to military morale.
The Canadian major is quoted as saying, “The thing that shocked me was the 51st Highland Division. The Scotties threw their weapons and equipment away and fled.”
Mr Beevor said: “The fighting was indeed ferocious, far more than has been recognised, and that was one of the main themes of my book.
“But many of its battalions were badly shaken, and it took several weeks and a new commander, before its fighting spirit was restored.
“The 51st Highland Division went through a bad patch, but its morale and fighting ability was rapidly restored in late July as I emphasise in my book.”
What makes Beevor's D-Day: The Battle for Normandy worth reading isn't revisionism (at least not of the distortion-of-history type) but rather the inclusion of previously unavailable first-person accounts and, perhaps more important, a keen awareness of two seldom-discussed factors: the Germans' true motivation for fighting a seemingly losing battle and the price the French people paid in blood for their liberation. (Beevor points out at the end of the D-Day chapters that some 3,000 French men, women and children died on June 6, 1944, twice the number of GIs killed on Omaha Beach.)
Beevor is harder on the British than the Americans, perhaps because with all their experience of war to date they should have known better. And it is significant that the dustjacket shows US troops landing, not British: the Americans were preponderant on D-Day itself and became ever more so in the build-up that followed. Indeed, the book is in many ways the classic story of “young stag, old stag”. But, most important of all, from the author of Stalingrad and Berlin, the Downfall, is the re-evaluation of the “second front”, of late seen increasingly as a sideshow to the great events in the east: “The ferocity of the fighting in northwest France can never be in doubt. And despite the sneers of Soviet propagandists, the battle for Normandy was certainly comparable to that of the eastern front.”
Don't worry if you do not survive the assault,' was how one British officer's pep talk to troops ahead of the Normandy landings went, 'as we have plenty of back-up troops who will just go in over you.'
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