War is Hell for Other People

TITLE: D-Day: The Battle for Normandy
AUTHOR: Antony Beevor
PUBLISHER: Viking

RATING
5/5 "The Mother of All Battles"; 4/5 "The Aunty of All Skirmishes"; 3/5 "The Granny of All Protest Marches"; 2/5 "The Niece of All Arguments"; 1/5 "The Step-Sister of All Tantrums"
SCORE: 4/5

The D-Day invasion of France, the golden moment of the Greatest Generation, is probably one of the best-known battles of the whole war. A new book on the subject sheds little new light on the events, but helps remind us of the staggering cost in lives, Allied, German and civilian, that was the price of victory.

In "D-Day: The Battle for Normandy", British historian Antony Beevor attempts to recreate the award-winning formula that served him so well in 1998's "Stalingrad" and 2002's "The Fall of Berlin 1945". With these books, Mr Beevor found something of a niche between scholarly, broad and sweeping histories like John Keegan's "The Second World War", and more intimate accounts like Stephen Ambrose's "Band of Brothers".

Mr Beevor's style is to weave together first-hand accounts of generals, soldiers and civilians into a coherent and comprehensive account of battles. This again is the pattern for "D-Day", flitting among personal anecdotes as it follows the campaign from the initial airborne landings to the liberation of Paris. He does an admirable job of balancing his sources, including American, British, Canadian, French and German voices.

If the objective is to let you know how it felt to be there, then the book fails. You can't pretend that reading about the explosions, the screams, the fear, the stench can come within shooting distance of the real thing, any more than watching "House MD" trains you to be a doctor. It does, however, give you a better sense of war as something experienced by its participants, rather than some abstract development on a map. You can appreciate the feelings expressed, even if you can't understand them.

Mr Beevor's style also allows him to highlight previously under-appreciated aspects of the campaign. In "Stalingrad", this was the role of the hapless Soviet "volunteers" in the German armed forces, viewed as traitors by their countrymen and sub-humans by their new masters. In "D-Day", the spotlight again falls on those dealt the lowest of war's playing cards: civilians, prisoners and the wounded.

These people tend to get short shrift in most accounts. War is hell, we are often told. Yes, but who for? "Saving Private Ryan" or "Letters from Iwo Jima" focus on the plight of the men in uniform, but by contrast Mr Beevor's account makes it clear the real horrors happen not on the front lines, but behind them. Indeed, the book leads me to the (admittedly unoriginal) insight that it's much easier to shoot people who aren't shooting back, and the safest thing to do on the battlefield was probably to be the one holding the machinegun. Mr Beevor presents us with a series of saddening, sickening stories of prisoners and wounded shot, civilians murdered, towns massacred and destroyed. It's sobering to realize that more French people died being liberated by their allies, than Englishmen did being bombed by their enemies.

However, what worked so well in "Stalingrad" and "Berlin" begins to feel a little forced here. The two previous books were both about sieges, which by nature gave them both a limited scope and a natural beginning, middle and end. The colossal scale of D-Day, and the lack of clear ending work against Mr Beevor's style.

"D-Day" provides only a sketchy overview of the strategic course of the battle, supplemented by some awkwardly-placed maps. It does not stay with any one figure long enough to give us any insight into their personal lives. Analysis of leading figures never rises above the level of oft-repeated cliches: vain Montgomery, nagging Churchill, foul-mouthed Patton. The rank-and-file get even less air time. Ironically for a book built on first-person recollections, we never get to know any of the participants as people. Instead they frequently get used as local color, to spice up the account and move it along, before returning to obscurity. The book does not so much reach a conclusion as abruptly stop, with a lame comment on how different the world would be if the invasion had failed.

In spite of these shortcomings, "D-Day" is a highly readable addition to the coverage of the campaign, and a useful guide to the true costs of war.