phoenix80
Banned
DAVID FRUM: D-Day generated consistently excellent writing. “David's Bookshelf”
http://frum.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTk3ZDdiN2JiYzU1NzgxNDA0ZjVhMmEyYTdjZmJjNDU=
We took the family to France this summer, culminating in a week in Normandy. We visited Pointe d'Hoc, Omaha Beach, Arromanches, Juno, and Pegasus Bridge, even having a drink at the little bar opposite Pegasus that claims the honor of being the first house in France to be liberated. (It is still owned by the widow of the innkeeper who busted open his basement to serve prewar champagne to the British glider pilots and soldiers who took the bridge in the early hours of June 6, 1944.)
Since the visit, I've been plunged into Normandy reading, starting with Stephen Ambrose’s D-Day: The Climactic Battle of World War II, followed by Max Hasting’s Overlord and then John Keegan’s Six Armies in Normandy.
I wonder if there is any other battle in world history that has generated so much consistently excellent writing? Waterloo maybe?
These three books are all impressive, each in their way. Their ways however are very different.
I think most of us are familiar with the broad elements of the D-Day story: the massive buildup in England, the successful deception of the Germans, the airborne attacks on the flanks of the Calvados coast, the five-beach landing plan (two American, two British, one Canadian), and the deadly fight borne by the 1st and 29th US Infantry Divisions at Omaha.
175,000 men took part in the D-Day operation. About 156,000 landed on the beaches, the rest served in the naval and air forces. About 2,500 allied soldiers lost their lives; another 7,500 or so were wounded. The Germans took between 4,000 and 9,000 casualties, nobody knows for sure.
As dramatic as D-Day was, on any measure of scale, it does not rank among the ten biggest battles of World War II. (All of the top ten were fought on the eastern front.) Yet it has to be regarded as among the very most decisive battles of the war — and certainly one of the most stupendous accomplishment of American arms in particular. The cemetery atop Omaha is one of the most moving landscapes on earth. (Though personally I cannot say I much care for the sculpture at its center.)
Reading the three books together, it becomes obvious why Stephen Ambrose won distinction as America's favorite historian of World War II. He is an unequalled collector and narrator of war stories. He describes the terror and heroism of combat in a brutally intimate way. The detail that most stays with me: as night falls atop Omaha, a senior officer joins a group of men gathered in a foxhole. He tosses a German boot at them. In the boot is a severed leg. "Bet some poor bastard misses that," says the officer
Ambrose interviewed hundreds of veterans of D-Day, up to and including Dwight Eisenhower, whose papers he edited. He must have been a very engaging audience, to judge by the quality of the stories he elicited.
Another favorite: An American soldier wanders into a Norman farmyard. Communicating through sign language, he persuades the farmer to cook him a fresh omelet. In return, he gave the farmer a knapsack full of chocolate bars. The farmer handed a bar to his 6-year-old son, explaining, "He's never tasted chocolate till now."
It's characteristic of Ambrose that he would note Omar Bradley's surprise that the wreckage on the beach included a broken tennis racket. Who on earth would have brought such a thing with him to an invasion?
I could fill this screen with other amazing and terrible stories gathered by Ambrose. Many of them have now made their way to film via the HBO series Band of Brothers, which takes its title from another Ambrose book.
Ambrose’s reputation was darkened in his final hours by serious and credible allegations of pervasive plagiarism in many of his works. Yet plagiarism is not the worst of Ambrose's flaws as an historian.
The graver flaw is a tendency to hero worship.
Ambrose devoted the final phase of his career to a glorification of the American fighting man.
And indeed: all glory is due to the citizen-soldiers of World War II, and especially to those who hit that fearsome beach at Omaha. Yet it is no dishonor to brave men to seek to understand what actually happened, to seek the truth, and to separate the task of the historian from that of the builder of monuments.
Here is Ambrose, in his much-quoted prologue to D-Day:
And of course we concur with every sentiment, even that unfootnoted and not quite accurate characterization of the popular fiction of the prewar era. (Did Gone with the Wind really portray slackers as heroes?)
But there is just one problem: If Hitler believed the thought Ambrose attributes to him, that the Wehrmacht would prevail in any roughly equal contest with the US Army, well ... Hitler was right.
Or so argues Max Hastings. It is curious that the most skeptical and scholarly of the three books on D-Day is the one written by a journalist rather than a professional historian.
http://frum.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTk3ZDdiN2JiYzU1NzgxNDA0ZjVhMmEyYTdjZmJjNDU=
We took the family to France this summer, culminating in a week in Normandy. We visited Pointe d'Hoc, Omaha Beach, Arromanches, Juno, and Pegasus Bridge, even having a drink at the little bar opposite Pegasus that claims the honor of being the first house in France to be liberated. (It is still owned by the widow of the innkeeper who busted open his basement to serve prewar champagne to the British glider pilots and soldiers who took the bridge in the early hours of June 6, 1944.)
Since the visit, I've been plunged into Normandy reading, starting with Stephen Ambrose’s D-Day: The Climactic Battle of World War II, followed by Max Hasting’s Overlord and then John Keegan’s Six Armies in Normandy.
I wonder if there is any other battle in world history that has generated so much consistently excellent writing? Waterloo maybe?
These three books are all impressive, each in their way. Their ways however are very different.
I think most of us are familiar with the broad elements of the D-Day story: the massive buildup in England, the successful deception of the Germans, the airborne attacks on the flanks of the Calvados coast, the five-beach landing plan (two American, two British, one Canadian), and the deadly fight borne by the 1st and 29th US Infantry Divisions at Omaha.
175,000 men took part in the D-Day operation. About 156,000 landed on the beaches, the rest served in the naval and air forces. About 2,500 allied soldiers lost their lives; another 7,500 or so were wounded. The Germans took between 4,000 and 9,000 casualties, nobody knows for sure.
As dramatic as D-Day was, on any measure of scale, it does not rank among the ten biggest battles of World War II. (All of the top ten were fought on the eastern front.) Yet it has to be regarded as among the very most decisive battles of the war — and certainly one of the most stupendous accomplishment of American arms in particular. The cemetery atop Omaha is one of the most moving landscapes on earth. (Though personally I cannot say I much care for the sculpture at its center.)
Reading the three books together, it becomes obvious why Stephen Ambrose won distinction as America's favorite historian of World War II. He is an unequalled collector and narrator of war stories. He describes the terror and heroism of combat in a brutally intimate way. The detail that most stays with me: as night falls atop Omaha, a senior officer joins a group of men gathered in a foxhole. He tosses a German boot at them. In the boot is a severed leg. "Bet some poor bastard misses that," says the officer
Ambrose interviewed hundreds of veterans of D-Day, up to and including Dwight Eisenhower, whose papers he edited. He must have been a very engaging audience, to judge by the quality of the stories he elicited.
Another favorite: An American soldier wanders into a Norman farmyard. Communicating through sign language, he persuades the farmer to cook him a fresh omelet. In return, he gave the farmer a knapsack full of chocolate bars. The farmer handed a bar to his 6-year-old son, explaining, "He's never tasted chocolate till now."
It's characteristic of Ambrose that he would note Omar Bradley's surprise that the wreckage on the beach included a broken tennis racket. Who on earth would have brought such a thing with him to an invasion?
I could fill this screen with other amazing and terrible stories gathered by Ambrose. Many of them have now made their way to film via the HBO series Band of Brothers, which takes its title from another Ambrose book.
Ambrose’s reputation was darkened in his final hours by serious and credible allegations of pervasive plagiarism in many of his works. Yet plagiarism is not the worst of Ambrose's flaws as an historian.
The graver flaw is a tendency to hero worship.
Ambrose devoted the final phase of his career to a glorification of the American fighting man.
And indeed: all glory is due to the citizen-soldiers of World War II, and especially to those who hit that fearsome beach at Omaha. Yet it is no dishonor to brave men to seek to understand what actually happened, to seek the truth, and to separate the task of the historian from that of the builder of monuments.
Here is Ambrose, in his much-quoted prologue to D-Day:
It was an open question, toward the end of spring of 1944, as to whether a democracy could produce young soldiers capable of fighting effectively against the best that Nazi Germany could produce. Hitler was certain the answer was no. [Hitler believed] that on anything approaching equality of numbers, the Wehrmacht would prevail. Totalitarian fanaticism and discipline would always conquer democratic liberalism and softness. Of that Hitler was sure.
If Hitler had seen Den Brotheridge and Bob Mathias in action at the beginning of D-Day, he might have had second thoughts. It is Brotheridge and Mathias and their buddies, the young men born into the false prosperity of the 1920s and brought up in the bitter realities of the Depression of the 1930s, that this book is about. The literature they read as youngsters was antiwar, cynical, portraying patriots as suckers, slackers as heroes. None of them wanted to be part of another war. They wanted to be throwing baseballs, not hand grenades, shooting .22s at rabbits, not M-1s at other young men. But when the test came, when freedom had to be fought or abandoned, they fought. They were soldiers of democracy. They were the men of D-Day, and to them we owe our freedom.
Makes you feel warm all over, doesn't it?If Hitler had seen Den Brotheridge and Bob Mathias in action at the beginning of D-Day, he might have had second thoughts. It is Brotheridge and Mathias and their buddies, the young men born into the false prosperity of the 1920s and brought up in the bitter realities of the Depression of the 1930s, that this book is about. The literature they read as youngsters was antiwar, cynical, portraying patriots as suckers, slackers as heroes. None of them wanted to be part of another war. They wanted to be throwing baseballs, not hand grenades, shooting .22s at rabbits, not M-1s at other young men. But when the test came, when freedom had to be fought or abandoned, they fought. They were soldiers of democracy. They were the men of D-Day, and to them we owe our freedom.
And of course we concur with every sentiment, even that unfootnoted and not quite accurate characterization of the popular fiction of the prewar era. (Did Gone with the Wind really portray slackers as heroes?)
But there is just one problem: If Hitler believed the thought Ambrose attributes to him, that the Wehrmacht would prevail in any roughly equal contest with the US Army, well ... Hitler was right.
Or so argues Max Hastings. It is curious that the most skeptical and scholarly of the three books on D-Day is the one written by a journalist rather than a professional historian.