D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II Review

Published 15 years ago for the 50th Anniversary of the start of Operation Overlord, Stephen E Ambrose's D-Day June 6, 1944: THe Climactic Battle of World War II reawakened interest in America's participation in the Second World War and in the rapidly dwindling numbers of the men and women Tom Brokaw would later call "the greatest generation."

And after reading this book either for the first or the twentieth time, it's easy to see why Ambrose's World War II books Band of Brothers, The Wild Blue, and Citizen Soldiers have had such a profound effect on the nation's psyche.

D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II begins with a moving prologue that describes the start of the invasion -- the night airborne assault on the far eastern and western flanks of the initial landing zones. Ambrose tells the stories of British Lieut. Den Brotheridge of the British 6th Airborne Division, who landed with Maj. John Howard on the easternmost landing zone, and Lieut. Bob Matthias of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division.

 Both were young junior officers in their respective armies, both products of democratic societies, and both had a bright future ahead of them if they survived the war. They went to France not to conquer, but to liberate Europe from tyranny.

Tragically, neither of these two young men survived to even see the seaborne invasion. Den Brotheridge died minutes into the first fight near the Caen Canal, the first Allied soldier to be killed by German fire on D-Day; Bob Matthias was wounded by flak while still aboard his C-47 transport plane, but still led his men out the door and into the Normandy night. His body was found, still in his parachute, half an hour after the jump, the first American soldier killed by German fire on D-Day.

Ambrose doesn't just focus on the 24-hour period of June 6, 1944; he sets the stage for the reader with nine chapters that explain the competing strategies of the Allies and Nazi Germany, the defenders, the attackers, the commanders, the choice of where and when the invasion would take place, training, and other pre-invasion issues -- for instance, the understandable British reluctance to undertake a frontal attack against the Continent vs. the Americans' realization that only an invasion of Northwest Europe would lead to a quicker end of the war against the Third Reich. Ambrose also compares and contrasts the two commanders who would oppose each other in the Normandy campaign: Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.

The bulk of the book -- 22 of the 32 chapters -- focuses on the events of June 5/6, 1944, from the tense moment when Ike finally says, "O.K., we'll go," to the end of the day.

Basing his clear and engrossing narrative on oral histories and over 1,400 interviews with veterans from Britain, Canada, France, and Germany, Ambrose lays out the complex, awe-inspiring, horrifying, yet fascinating spectacle of D-Day. He takes the reader along for the ride on the C-47s and gliders of the airborne night assaults that secured the flanks of the invasion area.

Ambrose also describes vividly the scenes aboard the bobbing Higgins boats, LSTs, LCIs, and LCTs that carried the first few thousand men of the American, British, and Canadian divisions onto beaches whose names will be forever remembered as Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. In his conversational and engaging style, the author takes his audience up the cliffs at Pointe du Hoe with the 2nd Ranger Battalion, onto the "wrong" beach with Brig. Gen. Teddy Roosevelt, Jr. at Utah Beach, and wade into the red-stained surf at Bloody Omaha with the men of the Big Red One and the Fighting 29th Divisions.

Although the focus is, obviously, on the battlefield, Ambrose also looks at the reaction in the various home fronts:

D-Day for the young women who had husbands they hardly knew stationed in the (European Theater of Operations) was an especially trying experience, but then few Americans were without personal worries. Nearly every American knew someone in the Army, Navy, or Coast Guard stationed in the European theater. Only a handful knew if the soldier or sailor or airman was in action on D-Day or if he was going in later, but they all knew that before the war was won their loved one would be in a combat zone.

Now it had started. The buildup phase was over. The United States was committed to throwing into the battle all the vast forces she had brought into existence over the past three years. That meant their boy, brother, husband, employee, fellow student, cousin, nephew was either already in combat or soon would be.

In Helena and New York, throughout the nation, they sat and wondered and listened to the radio and dashed out on the street for the latest edition of the newspaper with a front-page map of the French coast. The home front heard and read about World War II. What Americans heard and read on D-Day was dismayingly lacking in details.

There are many maps to help the reader visualize the geography, terrain, and military dispositions of the opposing forces, and the book includes 32 pages of black-and-white photographs.

My Viewpoint: Living at a time when the United States is at war in not one but two countries (Afghanistan and Iraq), I think that reading about American history - particularly its military history - is something that every thinking adult should do.  The contrasts between American attitudes in 1944 and the early 21st Century are so sharp that it's hard to believe that we're talking about the same country and its citizens.

When I first read D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, only four years had passed since the first President Bush had bravely formed an international coalition which, along with 500,000 American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, evicted Saddam Hussein's Iraq from the tiny emirate of Kuwait.  For a while, at least, America was proud of having used its military for a good reason; later, of course, a weak economy and the continued presence of Saddam in his Presidential palaces soured the public's view of Operation Desert Storm, but we had shaken the Vietnam Syndrome off after almost two decades and the armed forces were once again held in high esteem/

It was around this time, too, that books such as the aforementioned The Greatest Generation and movies such as Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan brought on a wave of World War II nostalgia-slash-appreciation.  Families who had never really paid attention to their now elderly grandparents or parents began to discover that the "old folks" had either served in the military or contributed to the war effort at home.  Old letters, diaries, souvenirs, medals and even uniforms were unearthed from closets and basements, and Baby Boomers and Generation Xers finally began asking questions and hearing war stories they had never heard before.

Now, with thousands of our men and women in uniform in harm's way overseas, it is perhaps more important that we read books such as D-Day and Band of Brothers.  Though they are books written by an author who died with accusations of shoddy scholarship and even plagiarism hovering over his head like dark clouds, Ambrose's works serve as a reminder that the Greatest Generation earned its moniker by stepping up to the plate and putting petty political divisions aside to get a very difficult and unsavory job done, no matter what the cost.