There have been a great many books written about the 6 June 1944 invasion of Normandy by allied forces. Sir Max Hastings made a fine contribution to the literature on the subject in 1984 with his Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy. He returns to the subject four decades later, albeit with a significantly narrower focus. This volume examines the assault on the area codenamed Sword—one of five designated D-Day landing areas—by elements of the British Second Army.
In the introduction, Hastings notes that he told the big picture story in Overlord and writes that his ‘main purpose is to address relatively little people, in a detail that was unavailable in my earlier broad-brush books’. The book partially succeeds in that, especially in the first part, which details the four years of preparation by British forces for the eventual return to France after the disastrous rout of 1940. There are many passages focussing on the experience of everyday soldiers as they train and prepare themselves for going into battle. In many ways the period 1940 to 1943 saw the UK-based proportion of the British Army treading water in almost endless exercises, and without a firm idea of when—or if—it would be called to action. Hastings does a good job of capturing the thoughts and feelings of those soldiers. In one especially poignant observation, he points out that some trained for years for an operation that saw them killed in the first minutes.
Of course, during the same period there were British units who were very much in action, in Greece, Crete, North Africa, Singapore and later Italy, with varying degrees of success. And when planning for Overlord began in earnest, the units with battle experience were preferred over untried troops as vanguard elements for the invasion. Not unreasonably, as Hastings notes, veterans of years of fighting thought it might be someone else’s turn to bear the brunt of the fighting.
The bulk of the book revolves around the D-Day operations themselves, both seaborne landings on the beaches and related airborne operations to secure vital features inland. I think it’s fair to say that the focus on the everyman soldier decreases in proportion to the intensity of the actions described. The Sword area was not as intense as the ill-famed Omaha beach responsible for the most common perceptions of D-Day, thanks to depictions in movies such as Saving Private Ryan. Nearly 29,000 British troops, accompanied by more than 200 tanks and many other vehicles landed at Sword on D-Day. By nightfall the British forces had suffered 683 casualties, while at Omaha the Americans suffered more than 4,000.
The final part of the book sees Hastings returning to what he does best—examining the conduct of operations in detail and then making judgements about the appropriateness or otherwise of the command decisions made at the time. Here a major focus is the what been called a ‘failure’ to reach and take Caen by the end of D-Day, as Montgomery had promised Churchill. Hastings makes a strong case that the promise was simply unrealistic and that such a rate of advance would have required everything to work seamlessly, which of course it did not. His conclusion is sharp:
It is hard to imagine that 3rd Division could have done much better than it did on D-Day, without embracing a military culture quite different from that of the 1944 British Army. It would have needed senior officers with Rommel’s inspiration and dash, together with a suicidalist spirit such as lay far outside its doctrine and tradition.
Consistent with that, Hastings describes many British units as ‘cautious, hesitant, slow, dilatory, fearful of loss’, citing the low overall casualty figures as ‘incontestable evidence of this’. He does not condemn the army for that, noting that the perceived inevitably of an Allied victory in the war greatly reduced the incentive for risk taking.
There were a couple of observations in this book that I found especially interesting. One was the value of the oft-maligned Military Police in this very large-scale operation—for maintaining order generally and particularly for sorting out the road blocks of vehicles trying to move away from the immediate landing area to support the infantry who had gone ahead.
The other passage of great interest concerned the air operations late in the day. Though I was aware that there was a great deal of allied air traffic in the Normandy area, I can’t recall previously reading about the dusk fly-in of almost 250 heavy transport gliders—each towed by a heavy bomber—to reinforce the airborne forces landed earlier and to consolidate the British front line. Hastings describes it a sight
… which many eyewitnesses, though previously thinking themselves sated with spectacle, afterwards judged to have been the most awesome of the Day of Days.