Book Review: D-Day 75 Years Later
The epic story of D-Day can never be fully told—these were the most intense and desperate moments in thousands of lives.
By Jonathan W. Jordan
The Wall Street Journal
May 31, 2019
Among American martial milestones, D-Day, June 6, holds a reverence in our collective memory equaled only by the Battle of Gettysburg and Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River—an eminence whose warm glow has deepened as twilight falls over the Greatest Generation. Nearly every American president since Jimmy Carter has made the pilgrimage to Normandy’s windswept cliffs to pay tribute to the “Boys of Pointe du Hoc” and thousands of others who launched Western Europe’s liberation on five blood-soaked beaches.
The battle’s resonance lies not only in its epic scale—history’s largest amphibious invasion—but in its easily comprehended, “High Noon” format: democracy versus tyranny, free citizens hurling themselves at an Atlantic Wall studded with cannon, machine guns and Hitler’s Übermenschen.
Since the invasion’s first grainy photos were snapped by Robert Capa on Omaha Beach, writers have labored to capture the invasion’s sound and fury. Cornelius Ryan’s “The Longest Day” (1959) remains the early high-water mark, though the story has been recounted in varying styles by the likes of Stephen Ambrose, Antony Beevor and John Keegan.
As the invasion’s 75th anniversary approaches, a fresh platoon of books have hit the beach and dropped their landing ramps. The spearhead version, lean and effective, is Alex Kershaw’s fast-paced “The First Wave” (Dutton Caliber, 368 pages, $30). Mr. Kershaw, a British-born resident of Savannah, Ga., has walked Normandy’s beaches and bluffs many times, and tackles the invasion through the eyes of Allied soldiers shouldering a jumble of interconnected missions, talents and emotions.
Capt. Frank Lillyman, son of an American mercenary, leads the first boots into Fortress Europe at the head of 18 pathfinders, who set up landing lights for the first wave of paratroopers. Maj. John Howard, a British glider-troop commander from London, survives a 95-mph landing on a stone-studded field and battles his way through German fire. Lt. Col. Terence Otway, who “looked more like an introspective academic than the leader of 750 of the toughest men in the entire British invasion force,” is welcomed to France by German gunners firing tracer bullets into his parachute.
In the American sector, Lt. George Kerchner, a Baltimore railroad guard, scales the 100-foot cliffs of Pointe du Hoc alongside fellow Rangers in one of the war’s most incredible feats. “His men quickly formed up and within moments were launching more grappling hooks over the bluff edges, dodging ‘potato masher’ grenades dropped from above, then clinging to ropes as they began to climb up the cliffs,” Mr. Kershaw writes.
The fighters are hard men, quick to move, quick to kill, but Mr. Kershaw returns time and again to the oppressive psychology racking those about to die. British commandos, he writes, “had waited to board trucks, waited to board ships, waited as they puked up their breakfasts, bouncing all the way across the bloody English Channel. They were sick to death of waiting. That was when their hearts and minds were weakest. Once they landed, they’d be too busy to worry, too focused to wonder if they’d die a virgin or ever down a pint again.”
As paratroops, commandos and ground-pounders fight for a toehold, Mr. Kershaw revisits themes of bravado, suffering and fatigue. Otway’s worn-out paras, having destroyed heavy howitzers menacing Sword Beach, drop from wounds and fatigue by a roadside crucifix. “Below the white stone figure of Jesus Christ hanging from the cross, Otway sat, exhausted, as around him dozens of wounded, many on stretchers, were attended to by medics,” he writes. “Some stood motionless, in a daze, no doubt replaying the fierce firefight and unnerving close calls in their heads. One lieutenant stared at his commanding officer, seated below the Christ, head in hands.”
As in his earlier works, like “Blood and Champagne” and “The Liberator,” Mr. Kershaw’s strength is his ability to place characters within their settings and tell their stories honestly. Some tales are far from heroic. One anecdote begins with Maj. Elliot Dalton, a Canadian rifleman who barely missed his end courtesy of a German mortar round. “ ‘It blew off part of my uniform and one shoe,’ he recalled. ‘But the worst part was the indignity. I fell face down in a cow flap and I had this . . . this stuff all over me. Two girls looked over a wall and started laughing. I was so mad I wanted to shoot them. I even took out my revolver. I was only half-conscious, you see.’ ”
Focusing on a well-chosen selection of warriors, “The First Wave” brilliantly sweeps the arc of fire that was the Sixth of June. But several other books, riding the same flood tide, join the battle with different literary tactics.
Take Giles Milton’s “Soldier, Sailor, Frogman, Spy, Airman, Gangster, Kill or Die” (Holt, 486 pages, $30), an exquisitely written narrative that weaves individual tales into a modern tapestry. The characters on both sides are intricate, wonderfully developed and entirely human. Unlike the camera angles of Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” which relegate Germans to dark shadows lurking behind machine guns, Mr. Milton’s vivid descriptions give Normandy’s defenders the freedom to leap off the page.
The first German we meet on Hitler’s Atlantic Wall is Eva Eifler, a teenage girl sent to Normandy to transcribe Allied radio signals. On June 5, Mr. Milton writes, “as the clock slowly ticked its way towards midnight, Fräulein Eifler detected a change to the pace of the incoming messages. . . . There was a sense of urgency. They were coming faster. Every few seconds. And then, at exactly 01.00 hours, ‘everything erupted.’ ”
Mr. Milton’s characters move through the story with a novelistic smoothness. Lord Lovat, a commando leader who invaded with a bagpiper at his elbow, “had the wind-blown air of an Elizabethan pirate-adventurer,” Mr. Milton writes in one of his many lyrical flourishes. This modern Odysseus leads his men onto Sword Beach to the skirling of pipes playing the Scottish folk song “The Road to the Isles.” Mr. Milton notes: “Few hesitated on the beach that morning, least of all the men of 6 Commando who ‘moved like a knife through enemy butter.’ They blasted a passage off the beach, achieving in seconds what the lads of the East Yorks had failed to do over the course of forty minutes.”
As the battle unfolds, Mr. Milton spices his narrative with canny asides. The assault on Pointe du Hoc, he writes, “was a nod and a wink to Major-General James Wolfe’s attack on Quebec almost two centuries earlier, relying on stealth, subterfuge and physical stamina.” The man who led the Rangers up those cliffs, Texan James Rudder, he writes, was “big-boned, broad of chest and fueled by a heady cocktail of testosterone and stamina.”
Mr. Milton’s subjects blend flair with malice aforethought, and his spearheads cut through defenders in Feldgrau with cold efficiency. After lobbing a grenade into one German bunker and spraying the dugout with bullets, Wally Parr, one of John Howard’s British glider troops, heard voices “groaning and moaning” and knew there were wounded Germans inside. “It was no time for squeamishness,” writes Mr. Milton. Parr “pulled a 77 phosphorus [incendiary] grenade from his belt and lobbed it inside. ‘If the shrapnel didn’t get them,’ he said, ‘the phosphorus would.’ There was another massive explosion and Parr gave a little smile. ‘It went off a treat.’ ”
Mr. Milton sums up the bloody work of elite units: “They had been trained not to feel any emotion: this was a fight to the death. ‘We were not taking any prisoners,’ said one. ‘Anything that moved, we shot.’ ”
Mr. Milton does one of the best jobs in recent memory of capturing the emotions of men and women huddled in bunkers, straining at radio receivers, vomiting in boats and crouched behind bullet-stitched shingles. His antagonists stride on and off stage like characters in an Aaron Sorkin screenplay. Of the Longest Day’s assault-class books, “Soldier, Sailor, Frogman, Spy” stands as the best of the best.
British historian James Holland expands D-Day’s beachhead in “Normandy ’44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France” (Atlantic Monthly, 649 pages, $35). While the invasion’s first wave consumes half the book’s ammunition, Mr. Holland holds plenty in reserve for the Allied crawl through hedgerow country, the battle with Hitler’s panzers at Caen, the brilliant breakout of Operation Cobra seven weeks after D-Day, and the corpse-strewn German retreat through the Falaise Gap.
At its heart, “Normandy ’44” is a pleasantly straightforward history, embracing tactics, logistics and the bayonet end of combat. Mr. Holland glides up and down the chain of command, from Eisenhower, Montgomery and Bradley down to the Poor Bloody Infantry who stood at “the coal-face of battle.”
In 1943, Joseph Stalin had remarked that the war would be won by machines. Unlike “The First Wave” and “Soldier, Sailor,” “Normandy ’44” presents the combatants’ equipment—the fearsome German MG-42 machine gun, the 6-pounder antitank gun, the venerable .45-caliber pistol—as mechanical characters. “The MG42 had its faults, but there was no question that it could spray a huge number of bullets on to a target very rapidly—bullets that now tore into the young men trying to get clear of the beach,” Mr. Holland writes in one of many evocative passages reminding the reader that 20th-century industry produced everything on a mass scale. Even death.
Detail and scope are the twin strengths of “Normandy ’44.” While emphasizing GI and Tommy less than Messrs. Kershaw and Milton, Mr. Holland effectively balances human drama with the science of war as the Allies knew it.
For the technical purist, Peter Caddick-Adams’s “Sand and Steel” (Oxford, 1,025 pages, $34.95) provides wonderful insight into war on the Western Front. With this follow-up to his magisterial “Snow and Steel” (2014), on the Battle of the Bulge, Mr. Caddick-Adams weighs in with a detailed chronicle that hard-core World War II buffs will relish. The preparation leading up to D-Day runs to 393 pages, not including a postscript chapter dedicated to the “Fortitude” deception plan—which successfully misled Hitler into believing that the main attack would come at Calais, not Normandy—and the spies who helped carry it out.
The chronological flow of “Sand and Steel” takes occasional detours for side characters such as Lt. James Doohan, who survived D-Day with six machine-gun wounds to become famous as “Star Trek’s” dour engineer Scotty, or British Brig. K.P. Smith, who in 1984 felt compelled to write an autobiography in defense of his failure to take Caen in the early hours of the campaign.
Mr. Caddick-Adams captures the invasion the way Eisenhower’s planners saw it: as tonnage shipped, sorties flown, objectives taken. In a different approach from Mr. Milton’s, the “who” is oft subordinated to the “what” and “when.” “Sand and Steel” plays to Mr. Caddick-Adams’s strength, telling a story of machines, logistics and events that decided the fate of France.
Pulling back from the wide-angle lenses of Messrs. Kershaw, Milton, Holland and Caddick-Adams, Daniel Guiet and Timothy Smith complete the literary landings with “Scholars of Mayhem” (Penguin Press, 252 pages, $28), a riveting story of Mr. Guiet’s American father, Jean Claude Guiet, who parachuted into France and coordinated an army of 10,000 brave but untrained French Resistance fighters. Working for the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s predecessor, Guiet and his teammates armed French guerrillas with plastic explosives, submachine guns, radios and other tools of sabotage and trained them in assassination and violent resistance.
The narrow focus of “Scholars of Mayhem” allows us to follow Jean Claude Guiet’s journey intimately. We get to know his confederates, known as Corinne, Bob and Major Staunton. We learn what they eat, whom they trust, how they survive. In one scene, Violette—“Corinne”—and Jacques Dufour, another Resistance fighter, flee into a cornfield to escape a pursuing company of SS soldiers when Violette goes down with the bane of movie-chase scenes: a twisted ankle. “Dufour tried to pick her up and carry her, but she pushed him away, insisting that he keep running and save himself. She crawled to an apple tree, hauled herself upright, clamped a fresh magazine into her Sten [submachine gun], and opened fire,” Messrs. Guiet and Smith write. “Violette kept the German soldiers at bay for the better part of half an hour, firing when she saw movement in the cornstalks. But she couldn’t run on her bad ankle, and the gunfight’s conclusion was foregone. She emptied the last of her magazines, and her Sten fell silent.”
A true-life mix of James Bond, Lawrence of Arabia and “Casablanca,” Jean Claude’s story of resistance and heroism is beautifully told. “Scholars of Mayhem” packs the punch of an armored division and adds weight to the fresh titles taking on the Normandy landings 75 years after Eisenhower opened the Longest Day.
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