Antony Beevor’s D-Day: The Battle for Normandy (2009) provides readers with a narrative of the major events from the beach invasions to the Liberation of Paris during the Allies’ invasion of France in 1944. In addition, the author extensively details the wartime experiences of individuals, adding depth to the understanding of his overarching account. A significant claim made in the book is that the scale of fighting on the western front during 1944 was especially large, and comparable to the blood-drenched battles in the east in its brutality. The British historian is able to support his claim through an illustration of the sheer magnitude of the Allies’ attacks and defense against a fury of Nazi opposition. Further demonstrating the viciousness of the battlefields of France, he shows that morality and fair-fighting were often absent in an example of all-out war at its most horrific.
Beevor’s assertion that the western front of the Second World War saw a similar amount of killing and destruction during 1944 as the battlefields of the east seems hard to accept when looked at superficially. Historian Norman Davies notes that the Battle of Stalingrad (1942-1943) and Kursk (1943) were responsible for 973,000 and 325,000 deaths respectively (Davies, 25). Death totals as a result of Operation Overlord do not reach either one of these figures. However, Beevor’s judgment of the deadliness of battles of the Second World War is anything but uninformed. Also an established expert on the eastern front, Antony Beevor authored the 1999 publication, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege. It is not reasonable to attribute the author’s national pride as a reason for making this claim. Throughout D-Day: The Battle for Normandy the British author’s portrayal of his home country is rather unimpressive. British participation in France is marked with occasional poor execution and questionable military leadership, especially General Montgomery who Beevor depicts as a raving egomaniac with no shortage of flaws.
Perhaps the greatest difference from battles on the eastern front dealt with the geography of France. Unlike the Soviet Union, France is not a vast expanse of land; any opposition that the Allies faced was significantly more concentrated than the wide-open battlefields of the east. The Allied invasion had to be precisely calculated, and it was executed by combining the greatest concentration of manpower by air and sea ever. In the middle of the night just minutes before 6 June 1944, more than 1,200 aircraft dropped three divisions of British and American soldiers on the shore of Normandy (Beevor, 51). This was accompanied by an even more grand display a few hours later. The roughly 5,000 ships carrying about 100,000 men were backed by hundreds more naval warships (74-75). This invasion, unmatched in its scale, undoubtedly produced immense carnage.
The airborne invasion ultimately was a success, but it was not without deadly costs. Beevor details the chaotic experiences of these men during the invasion by describing: troops crashing to the earth in flimsy gliders, men being dropped into fire, the common occurrence of bones snapping, and infliction of paralysis (Beevor, 52, 63). Perhaps even more nightmarish were the experiences of troops on the beaches where amphibious invasions took place. Troops at Omaha Beach witnessed their bombers missing targets, many men came under direct machine-gun fire upon setting foot on land; some were gunned down on their ships (91, 105). The brutality of combat did not relent once the Allies had all of their men on shore. Beevor notes that numerous atrocities occurred almost immediately. An early experience described tells of a dead American soldier who was mutilated and sexually humiliated; this inspired a number of American soldiers to mercilessly kill any German soldiers, regardless of their willingness to surrender (68). One American soldier spent time cutting ears off of dead Germans, making himself a macabre necklace from his collection; both sides engaged in bayonet practice, impaling wounded enemies (68-70). After the first day of the invasion about 1,200 Germans and over 1,400 Americans were dead (112). These figures do not even account for the British, Scots, Canadians, Norwegians, and Poles that took part in the beach invasions.
As previously mentioned, the geography of France contributed greatly to viciousness of war in the west. Adding to immense concentrations of military power pitted against each other in a small geographic area, was the challenges presented by the terrain. Just inland from Normandy’s coast was the bocage, a forested area filled with natural barriers to the Allies’ advancement (Beevor, 157). The landscape was treacherous enough for tanks to disappear into hedgerows, and it became rather common for both the Allies and Nazis to find themselves surrounded by the enemy in battle. Bocage fighting was largely a stalemate, and both sides became steeped in bloody attrition warfare. Atrocities were just as pervasive in bocage fighting as much as the beach warfare. Both Canadian and German divisions were guilty of shooting prisoners of war in cold blood (180). Beevor relates more morbid accounts of souvenir-hunting that Americans and Germans engaged in among their dead enemies (214). Additionally, some Americans became victims of a gruesome and deadly surprise when exploding mines were placed within the corpses of their countrymen (286).
The enormity of the losses that both sides experienced in Normandy is noted by drawing a comparison to the eastern front. He states that roughly 2,300 Germans and 2,000 Allied troops were being killed in each month that the battle raged in Normandy; this is compared to the 1,000 Germans and 1,500 Soviets who perishing each month on the eastern front (Beevor, 113). This is an illustration that the Allies preferred swiftness in their defeat of the Nazis, whereas the Soviets valued perseverance. There is also evidence that there were defining moments on the western front which stand alongside the largest-scale battles in history. When the British delayed in launching Operation Epsom they were faced with “the greatest concentration of SS Panzer Divisions which had been assembled since the Battle of Kursk” at Caen (234). While there were more deaths at Kursk, France’s geography needs to be taken into consideration again. The battlefields of the East were far more wide-open. With the author’s penchant for soldiers of democratic states aside, he notes that even some Red Army officers estimate as much as sixty percent of Soviet soldiers never fired a rifle in battle (205). This can be an argument that they were weaker trained and less motivated than the Allies, but it may also speak to the fact that they were not in the midst of the concentration of military power per square mile as large as in Normandy.
The author shows that the Allies were not content in prolonging the bloody deadlock that characterized bocage fighting. Therefore, drastic means needed to be taken. The British-crafted Operation Goodwood and the Americans’ Operation Cobra are two examples illustrating the Allies’ willingness to speed up victory by unleashing an assault unparalleled in fury. The frustration of a stalemate in Caen, along with their costly experience of delaying a major assault through Epsom, motivated the British to launch Operation Goodwood. The author characterizes it as “the largest concentration of air power in support of a ground operation ever known” (Beevor, 314). The 2,600 bombers assaulted an area that was roughly just 7,000 yards long, which literally caused earthquakes so horrifying that some Germans killed themselves in a deafened and frenetic state. However, the response of the SS Panzer Corps was nothing short of legendary. Although outnumbered, the superior German craft engaged the British in a gruesome stalemate involving hundreds of tanks (319). Beevor notes that over 5,550 British and Canadians lost their lives over the span of just three days during Goodwood (322).
While Goodwood is perceived as a failure by the author, it arguably contributed significantly to an American follow-up assault which effectively provided the breakthrough necessary to advance towards Paris and damage German morale. Perhaps the fight during Goodwood kept the strong Panzer Corps occupied and effectively wore down German rage, allowing for American success during Operation Cobra. Cobra employed similar tactics of Goodwood. Heavy bombing was notably accompanied by George Patton’s “Hell on Wheels” division, possessed by a desire to achieve victory they embodied the spirit which the Allies continued to fight, while the Germans’ morale waned (351). An observer described the site of the breakthrough at St. Lo as an “area [where] raw meat was splattered on burned and ruined vehicles;” swamps were littered with dead Germans (363-364). Beevor’s account shows this pattern of events continuing until the Allies reach Paris and General Choltitz is forced to surrender. The uprising of the French and the totally overpowering Allied assault in the Falaise Pocket—involving British, Americans, and their cooperating nations—contributed to the slaughter of German troops in the tens of thousands (Beevor, 478). It was the massive Allied assaults and multi-nation cooperation during the Battle for Normandy which prevented the campaign from becoming an ongoing battle of attrition similar to fighting in the east (518). In conclusion, the battle should be remembered as one of the most horrifically bloody examples of human loss in warfare. It must be realized that the staggering casualty totals Beevor provides in his aftermath—240,000 Germans and 209,000 Allies—happened within the short time period of June through August in the summer of 1944 (522). This is certainly a convincing testament to the battle’s bloody legacy.
Works Cited
Beevor, Antony. D-Day: The Battle for Normandy. New York: Penguin Books Ltd. 2009, 591 pages.
Davies, Norman. No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe. New York: Penguin Books, Inc. 2006, 544 pages.
