Some years after the second world war, an early book on the Normandy campaign featured a photograph of a handsome young German officer surrendering to Canadian troops at Falaise. Its publication prompted a letter to the Canadian embassy in Bonn. The correspondent cited the picture, and said she would be glad of any information about the fate of the German depicted with his hands up. He was her son, and had never been heard of since.

Though that story is not Antony Beevor’s, one of many bleak revelations in his latest ­battlefield epic is that the killing of enemy prisoners was a commonplace of the 1944 ­struggle for Normandy. Amid fighting that at times cost casualties as heavy as those on the eastern front, more than a few allied units refused quarter to their enemies. The most fanatical Nazi formation on the battlefield, 12th SS Panzer division, killed Canadian prisoners in significant numbers in June. Thereafter, their opponents responded in kind. So, too, did many British and American units. Some soldiers were merely reluctant to run the gauntlet of fire to escort PoWs to the rear. ­Others resented the notion that enemy ­captives might escape the risk of death while they themselves could not. Others again vented special rage against snipers, in ­flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention. Enemies who particularised the business of killing seemed more hateworthy than those who merely ­participated in indiscriminate mayhem.

The story of D-Day and the campaign for Normandy has been told many times. But Beevor is a master of the art of casting ­brilliant new illumination upon familiar themes. I find it galling that he has contrived to write a book that resurrects virtually no scrap of material that I used in a book of my own about the Normandy campaign 25 years ago. Instead, he has assembled a mass of unfamiliar sources, fresh voices and untold anecdotes to create a saga as impressive as his earlier narratives of Stalingrad and the battle for Berlin. He makes my version, and those of many other historians, seem old hat.

Describing D-Day itself, he focuses ­special attention upon events on Omaha beach, the most fiercely contested of the June 6 landing zones. American legend holds that the landing was a bloodbath. Yet in truth, some units got ashore and scaled the bluffs behind the sands with amazingly little difficulty. C Company of the 116th Infantry lost only 20 out of 194 men, and were soon overrunning German positions from the rear. By contrast, A Company of the same unit suffered a massacre, losing almost half its strength killed, and many more wounded.

Great assault going well

The Allied Expeditionary Army has landed in Normandy after the greatest operation of its kind in history

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More than 17,000 Americans were ashore by noon, flooding the coastline. Some were ­slaughtered, impaling themselves on the German defences, but enough trickled or blasted a path through the cracks to gain the high ground and win the day. The US Army lost well under 1,000 dead taking Omaha, a negligible “butcher’s bill” by eastern-front standards — and even compared with the frightful losses suffered by many allied units in the battles ­following D-Day.

Beevor’s account of June 6 is exemplary. Thereafter, he describes the struggle to break the German army in the west. This required the most painful attritional fighting British and American forces ­experienced, as costly for some units as the Somme or Ypres a world war earlier. Again and again, infantry and tanks were thrown forward against Hitler’s panzers and infantry units. Again and again, they achieved small gains only at shocking cost. The beauty of the Norman countryside mocked the dreadful human tragedy for which it provided a setting.

Montgomery had brought home from the Mediterranean three veteran formations to spearhead his assault. But the book is unsparing in its acknowledgment of the poor performances in Normandy of the 51st Highland, 7th Armoured and 50th Northumbrian divisions. Far from being “battle-hardened” — almost always a foolish cliché — many of their men were worn out and cautious, and their commanders had to be sacked. Beevor quotes a Canadian who was shocked in one action to see how “Scotties threw their weapons and equipment away and fled”.

Tank crews who had fought in north Africa were much dismayed by the close countryside of Normandy. A trooper of the Sherwood Rangers wrote: “We could see the buggers in the desert and they could see us. Here they can see us but I’ll be buggered if we can see them.” It is hard to ­overstate the impact on allied performance and morale of engaging ­German Tiger and Panther tanks with ­British and American tank guns whose shells usually bounced off.

Nobody knows better than Beevor how to translate the dry stuff of military history into human drama of the most vivid and moving kind. His book offers a thousand vignettes of drama, terror, cruelty, compassion, courage and cowardice. He is especially good in describing the sufferings of civilians on the ­battlefield, whose plight is often ignored.

As many French people died on D-Day as did allied soldiers — around 3,000, most from their ­liberators’ bombs and shells. In the course of the campaign, 20,000 civilians perished. Many survivors said afterwards that the German occupiers had behaved better than the British and American ­deliverers, who looted and destroyed mercilessly.

I quibble with Beevor’s respectful account of the ­contribution of maquisards, especially in Brittany. The legend of Resistance contributed much to the spiritual resurrection of France after 1945, but nowhere did the maquis significantly influence ­military outcomes. The Resistance staged noisy and vengeful demonstrations as the allied armies approached, but local populations paid extravagantly for a belated patriotic pantomime.

This is a detail, however. The book paints a ­magnificent portrait of the horrors, splendours and absurdities of the greatest campaign of the western war. A British infantryman cranking the telephone on the back of a Sherman tank under machine-gun fire was only marginally amused by the Coldstream Guards officer in the safety of its turret who answered wittily: “Sloane 4929.” In the desperate fighting for Hill 112, a soldier of the Somerset Light Infantry hung crucified on German wire, suffering agonies after a ­bullet detonated a phosphorus grenade in his pouch. He screamed “Shoot me! Shoot me!” until a compassionate officer did so. A corporal noted that only nine of 36 men in his platoon survived that action. One of these then shot himself in the foot, rather than fight on.

There is a wry description of General de Gaulle paying his first visit to liberated Bayeux. An overexcited local cried out “Vive le Marechal!”, confusing the lofty eminence with Marshal Pétain, who had ruled from Vichy since 1940. De Gaulle muttered to an aide with his usual drollery: “Another person who does not read the newsapers.”

The climax of the book is a superb account of the race for Paris by Leclerc’s Free French 2nd Armoured Division, which provided one of the most moving melo­dramas of the war. As Leclerc’s ­columns advanced on Paris, they were so short of men that they cheerfully enlisted volunteers who offered themselves on the road. An Alsatian deserter from the SS joined up in time to share in the triumphal scenes on the Champs Elysées 10 days later, in French uniform. The joy of the French nation, granted a charade that allowed it to pretend that Frenchmen liberated their own ­capital on August 24-25, 1944, was irresistible.

This is as powerful and authoritative an account of the battle for Normandy as we are likely to get in this generation. It cannot be said that victory in the west sealed the fate of Hitler’s Germany — the Red Army achieved that. But Eisenhower’s forces in France between June and August 1944 fought the greatest battles of the Anglo-American war. Here is a worthy memorial to their sacrifice and final triumph.

D-Day by Antony Beevor
Viking £25 pp608

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