D-Day: The Battle for Normandy by Antony Beevor - The Dark Historical Anecdote

Antony Beevor is the renowned author of Stalingrad, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature, and Berlin, which received the first Longman-History Today Trustees’ Award. Antony is also known as a master of narrative, expertly blending the grand sweep with the telling anecdote.

“D-Day: The Battle for Normandy” is another historical narration of the War by the author Antony where the Normandy Landings that took place on D-Day involved by far the largest invasion fleet ever is been brought out in a dramatic, exciting, well-paced and lucid manner. The very scale of the undertaking and the meticulous planning were unparallel, but although the beachheads were established, it soon became clear that the next stage of the battle would be far more difficult than anyone had imagined.

The thick hedgerows of Normandy were ideal for the defender and the Germans, especially the Waffen-SS divisions, fought with cunning and a desperate ferocity. Making use of overlooked or new material from over thirty archives in half a dozen countries, Beevor shows how the British, Canadian and American forces became involved in battles whose savagery was often comparable to the Eastern Front. Casualties began to mount and so did the tension between the principal commanders on both sides. French civilians, caught in the middle of these battlefields or under Allied bombing, endured terrible suffering. Even the joys of Liberation had their darker side. The war in northern France marked not just a generation but the whole of the post-war world, profoundly influencing relations between America and Europe.

In this book, the writer’s gripping narrative conveys the true experience of war. He brings back the true story of that war and also reveals the heroism of the soldiers who fought bravely to save their country from the invasion.

[ D-Day The Battle for Normandy by Antony Beevor ]