Rating: WORTHY!
This is the second of Ambrose’s books I’m reviewing. The first was called Crazy Horse and Custer wherein he attempted to show that the two leaders at the Battle of the little big Horn led parallel lives and he failed in doing so in my opinion. He does a better job, fortunately confined to a single chapter in this volume, in showing the parallel lives of Erwin Rommel and Dwight Eisenhower.
This book describes events leading up to, and the execution of the D-Day landings on June 6th, 1944 in the effort to retake Europe from Hitler’s entrenched Wehrmacht. The Nazis had swept through Europe with their Blitzkrieg tactics almost effortlessly, but now they faced the combined might of many nations and instead of attacking, they were defending.
Ambrose describes the state of affairs amongst the allies, focusing mostly, if rather arrogantly, on the USA. Out of thirty-two chapters, the rest of the allies (the British, the Canadians, the French) get a handful and are rather cursorily and derogatorily dealt with. He has some rather scathing remarks about the British, as though this was all their fault. At one point he writes: “The poison of pacifism had eaten into the souls of British youth…” (p50) which I found objectionable. Yes, pacifism is a complete failure in the face of aggression, especially such as that mounted by the Nazis and in more modern times by terrorists. If everyone adopted pacifism, none of this would have begun, but of course, humanity is not a pacifistic species. That said, to call pacifism a poison is overdoing it by a long shot.
It was without doubt interesting - although there is a mite too much detail for my taste! I was disturbed not only by the bravery of the men and how badly abused they were by the lethal German defenses, but by how poorly served they were by the people who were sending stuff into the beach behind them. The battle plan called for a sequence of unloading which was adhered to despite the fact that the beach battle was not going according to their plan. They seemed incapable of adjusting to what was really happening. This was poor leadership.
For example, most of the radios the men took ashore in the early waves were lost or damaged severely hampering communications, yet no one thought to send in more radios, evidently. Despite the fact that they did not competently hold the beach until later in the day, the ships were sending in matériel to a rigid plan rather than adapting to what was happening. Trucks, for example, were being sent in instead of tanks and heavy guns which would have been far more useful at that point.
Instead of splitting supplies between landing craft so that some of everything got through despite heavy losses, they loaded up the craft with large amounts of one thing, so that when that particular craft was destroyed, the one thing was lost in huge quantities. This happened to two craft carrying plasma - both were destroyed, hampering the efforts of the medics. There was a similar problem with ammunition.
Worse than this, those who did make it to the top of the bluff continued on inland as best they could trying to follow rigid orders instead of fanning out across the top of the bluff and wiping out the Germans who were firing down on the beach. If they had worked to eliminate that threat immediately, they would have freed up the guys on the beach who could then have come up the bluff and made their way inland to carry out the original plan.
One problem as leadership - or lack of it. The officers were typically the first people off the landing craft and so were shot down with startling efficiency, and the rest of their men were often stuck, not only held down by heavy defensive fire, but also through lack of someone to tell them what to do. It was only through individual initiative rather than cohesive leadership that anything got done, and the major leadership - people like the revered Eisenhower and Montgomery were AWOL.
The fact that the higher-ups didn't know what was happening on the beach or up on the bluffs didn't help, of course. Direct line of sight was obscured by heavy smoke, and there was virtually no radio communication.
So this makes for a sad and irritating read, but it does describe in great detail the hell that these people went through and for that, it's a worthy read.
