D4

By JOHN WARD
The Canadian Press

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OTTAWA - Historian Antony Beevor, whose accounts of the grisly battles for Stalingrad and Berlin were award-winning bestsellers, has now turned his vision to the crucial Normandy campaign of 1944.

His new book, D-Day: The Battle for Normandy (Penguin Group), is a gripping and powerful account of a campaign that became one of the great hinges of history.

The story of Normandy has been told many times before, by the likes of John Keegan and Carlo D'Este, but Beevor combines vivid, eyewitness recollections with archival material to craft a riveting tale.

Beevor, himself a former officer in Britain's 11th Hussars, brings to life the courage and suffering of the men on the ground - on both sides - and the hapless French civilians caught in a bloody, three-month crossfire.

He said in a recent interview that the idea of writing about Normandy came out of a conversation he had in 2002 with Martin Blumenson, who for 20 years was chief historian for the U.S. army.

Beevor at the time was fresh from writing Stalingrad and the Fall of Berlin, and Blumenson suggested Normandy might provide a contrast.

"He said you should really look at it and compare the fighting on the eastern front with Normandy."

In looking at Normandy, Beevor found that the combat was in many ways just as horrific as the great Russian-German clashes in the East. Many accounts have glossed over the magnitude of the fighting in Normandy, he said.

"I was struck by the way that the fighting in Normandy was very much more intense than the impression generally given," he said. "The iconic images of D-Day and all the rest of it gave the impression that once they were ashore, that was more or less it and the next thing we knew was the liberation of Paris.

"But it wasn't that at all. The actual fighting on D-Day led to far fewer Allied casualties than they'd expected, but the fighting afterwards produced far, far more."

While maintaining the larger picture, Beevor takes the fighting right down to the exhausted, filthy, hungry men in the foxholes. His account of Omaha beach is as gripping as Steven Spielberg's filmed version in Saving Private Ryan. But Beevor carries on, through the bitter fighting in the "bocage," the hedgerow country which slowed the American army to a bloodstained crawl, and the long struggle to break out of the bridgehead.

He's just as grim in his depiction of the British and Canadian battles on the eastern side of the line, where they faced the bulk of the German armoured strength in vicious, toe-to-toe fighting that dragged through eight weeks at enormous cost.

The Canadians found themselves fighting fanatical SS tank divisions backed by batteries of deadly 88-mm anti-tank guns, which took a chilling toll.

There was no breakthrough by the Canadians, and some critics have blamed them for failing to close the notorious Falaise Gap, which allowed thousands of German soldiers to escape what might have a sealed pocket.

Beevor, though, puts much of the blame for the failure on poor communications between British Gen. Bernard Montgomery and American Gen. Omar Bradley. The two never did nail down where, exactly, they wanted to close the trap.

"I don't think the Canadians have got anything, far from it, to reproach themselves for, because the bravery and the effectiveness of the Canadian troops in Normandy was absolutely clear," Beevor says.

His book also focuses on the plight of the French civilians, with piteous accounts of their struggles to escape the meshing gears of two great war machines.

Almost 20,000 were killed during the liberation of Normandy, with thousands more wounded. Another 15,000 civilians were killed during the preliminary Allied bombing that battered a swath across northern France.

Yet, he says, the destruction of the German fighting power in Normandy prevented a prolonged fighting retreat across France which could have been far worse.

"The cruel martyrdom of Normandy had, indeed, saved the rest of France," Beevor writes.

While his account details the enormous organization and logistical effort that moved hundreds of thousands of men and machines across the English Channel and supported them with countless tonnes of supplies, he also details the failures that dogged the Allies.