Since Beevor’s mission is to describe war not at the top but at the bottom, he takes us from bombing crews to bobbing infantry in landing craft and towed gliders, then through the ensuing, decisive 24 hours that would either spell the beginning of the end of the Nazi occupation of Western Europe or result in the worst Allied defeat since Pearl Harbor.
Intelligently told and nicely documented (though sadly, without a single new interview), the initial D-Day section ends around page 200, when on June 14, 1944 General Charles de Gaulle visits the liberated town of Bayeux.
Had Beevor ended his book at that point, he would have spared himself - and us - much futile narration, for it is after the capture of Bayeux that his own problems really begin, as the Allied beachhead becomes a bridgehead, and the Allies race to cut off the entire Cherbourg peninsula.
In static battles, such as sieges, Beevor’s relentless determination to depict what war was like for front-line attackers and the besieged pays great dividends - indeed Beevor has become the World War II siege-expert de nos jours. He positively relishes the details of weapons, violence, and human discomfort. In fact he has almost single-handedly transferred the public fascination with trench warfare in World War I to the great battles of attrition in World War II. But once the D-Day invasion becomes a battle for France, Beevor’s siege mentality cannot do justice to what was, in fact, one of the great battles of history - a contest not simply between vast armies (the Allies sending some two million men into battle) but between two great generals: General Bernard Montgomery, the Allied land forces commander, and his opposite number, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (and later Rommel’s successor generals, once the commander was strafed and put out of action by Allied warplanes).
