REVIEW
Intro: Astonishingly, the casualty rate of D-Day was even higher than the Somme – just one of the insights in a devastating new account of the horror of the Normandy campaign 75 years ago.
THE D-Day landings 75 years ago spark a concoction of emotions – pride and awe at the courage and heroism; despair and grief at the sacrifice of so many young lives; and, incomprehension.
What was it really like to step out on to those deadly beaches on June 6? The tale is best told by those who lived to tell it.
The aptly named Sergeant Bob Slaughter leapt from a landing craft into 6ft of water as a hail of German artillery and gunfire from the clifftop above tore into his platoon.
“Good men screamed as bullets ripped into soft flesh and others screamed as the fierce, flooding tide dragged the non-swimmers under.”
As he struggled to the beach, a body floated by, the face already of a deep purple colour.
Corporal Walter Halloran managed to reach dry land and simply ran for his life, ducking and weaving to minimise the risk of being killed.
“If you stopped to help someone who’d been hit, then there were two casualties, not one, because the moment you stopped moving you got shot,” he said.
American war correspondent Ernie Pyle witnessed the terrible aftermath when he landed the next day and waded ashore, amid shattered corpses floating in the water. His powerful description echoes down the years.
“Strewn all over those bitter sands,” he wrote, “were submerged tanks and overturned boats, burned trucks and shell-shattered Jeeps and sad little personal belongings” – toothbrushes, a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it and even a tennis racket.
“Lying in rows were the bodies of soldiers, covered with blankets, the toes of their shoes sticking up in a line as though on drill.”
Here was “a shoreline museum of carnage” and the waste of it all appalled him, even though, after nearly five years of war, it was the necessary first step in liberating Europe from the grip of the Nazis.
Voices such as these are one of the standout strengths of James Holland’s impressive new account of D-Day and the Allies’ subsequent, long drawn-out battle to secure a foothold in Normandy.
Not that he stints on the bigger picture. Seasoned World War II historian that he is, Holland is extremely knowledgeable when it comes to military matters.
The reader is in safe hands navigating each aspect of this complex campaign – from the glider and parachute drops inland with which it began, to the bloody struggles on Omaha, Utah, Sword, Juno and Gold (the five beaches) and beyond.
He reads the minds of the generals, their tactics, their blunders – on both sides.
AND he examines the strategic context – the importance of air power in softening up the enemy and destroying vital infrastructures such as the roads and railways that might otherwise have rushed reinforcements to the front line; the Navy’s role in making the invasion possible in the first place.
He praises the enormous achievement of getting 132,000 men over the Channel on that first day alone, then topping up their numbers to a staggering two million in the coming weeks, providing the weight of manpower to make victory certain, however great the human cost.
He approves of the methodical way in which the British, American and Canadian Allies went about their business – building up their strength of men and arms to the point where defeat was virtually impossible, consolidating their gains, rather than rushing ahead, ensuring supply lines of weapons, fuel and food were in place.
It may have been a much less dashing form of warfare than the gung-ho Blitzkrieg mentality of the Germans, but, in the conditions of 1944 (as opposed to 1940, when Hitler’s armies overran large swathes of Europe), was so much more effective.
But what drives Holland’s narrative – and puts his account of the Normandy campaign at least on a par with doyens in the field such as Antony Beevor and Max Hastings – are the memories, in their own words, of scores of those at the sharp end.
Their individual stories, seamlessly woven in, makes this a Bayeux Tapestry of a book. All human life – and, more pointedly, death – is there.
“Bugger!” yelled the gentlemanly paratrooper Lieutenant Richard Todd, in pain as his canopy opened and a rope cut into his hand on the very first drop into France at 2am on D-Day to seize a strategic canal bridge.
Undaunted, he sneaked up on an enemy machine gun nest with his commanding officer and wiped it out.
There are men like gunner Lance Corporal Ken Tout in his tank, toe-to-toe with 20 camouflaged German Panzers in a grim firefight outside the town of Saint-Aignan as the Allies fought their way through the impenetrable bocage, the high hedges, small fields and narrow lanes of Normandy. Inside the belly of the tank, he desperately traversed the turret, trying to arrow in on the enemy, and “the day degenerates into chaos, noise, flame, smoke, grilling sunshine, stinking sweat, searing fear, billowing blast, and our tank shuddering and juddering even as it stands still on the exposed, so exposed crest of a ridge”.
A German shell flashed past. Missed by inches!
Tout returned fire: there was a puff of smoke, a shape jerking backwards among the trees, then thick black smoke tinged with flame. “The Panzer was dead.”
When he got to the crumpled German tank, he saw the commander leaning out of the turret – just the top half of him, it turned out. His entire bottom half had been eviscerated.
Earlier in the campaign, as they advanced towards Caen, he and his colleagues had, out of curiosity, clambered on the burnt-out wreck of a German tank and peeked inside, where what remained of the crew still sat, blackened and wizened.
“The roasting of human flesh and the combustion of ammunition and the defecation of a million voracious flies,” he recalled, “created an aura of such sense-assaulting horror that we recoiled.”
It could just as easily have been their tank that “brewed up”, such was the haphazard nature of the vicious conflict in which they were engaged – and that realisation only added to the horror.
HOLLAND counts the grim cost of D-Day and the Normandy campaign – 209,000 Allied casualties out of two million who crossed the Channel; up to 20,000 French dead, mainly from Allied bombing; 300,000 German soldiers killed, wounded, missing or captured – more than half of those who fought.
Over the 76 days of the battle, the daily casualty rate averaged out at 6,870, making it worse, he notes, than the Somme, Passchendaele and Ypres in World War I, which are usually cited as benchmarks for wanton slaughter.
Holland concludes: “It was a terrible battle, and what followed until the final surrender in May 1945 was every bit as horrific.
“Yet out of this tragedy, a better world did emerge. We must look after it and remember how easily we can throw this haven back into turmoil.”
– Normandy ’44: D-Day And The Battle For France by James Holland is published by Bantam Press/Penguin Books for £25, 720pp
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