Peter Tsouras - Disaster at D-Day: The Germans Defeat the Allies, June 1944 Review

When I first owned a personal computer - an Apple IIe - back in the late 1980s, I really got into computer war games, especially the user-friendly "You Are in Command" series of "real-time strategy" simulations by the late, great MicroProse Games.

Of the three - there were also Decision in the Desert and Conflict in Vietnam - games designed by Sid Meier and Ed Beever, my favorite one was Crusade in Europe: D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge.  Bearing almost the same title as Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous war memoirs published in 1948, Crusade in Europe was a map-and-symbols strategic simulation of the Northwesr Europe campaigns from the invasion of Normandy to Hitler's final counteroffensive in the Ardennes.

One of the reasons that game was one of my favorites was that, by its very nature, it allowed me to engage in the parlor game every World War II buff likes to engage in: the "what-if scenario."  Even in the "historically-based" mini-campaigns where the computer placed units in their starting "positions" the actions of human and artificial intelligence often twisted the fabric of history.  By choosing different tactical approaches or employing strategic assets in ways which varied from the real Allied or German commanders, I sometimes, well, altered history.  (For instance, where Field Marshal Montgomery failed to capture the bridge at Arnhem in Operation Market-Garden, I managed to grab it and vault the Allied armies across the Rhine.  Not every time, and sometimes not spectacularly, but I did it.)

Pivotal battles, such as the Normandy campaign that began with the D-Day landings, seem in retrospect to have been preordained, as if the Fates had decided that the Allies would win and the Germans would be defeated. But what if questions have always been tossed around by historians and readers alike. What if Rommel had had just one armored division close to Omaha Beach? What if the Germans had seen through the Fortitude ruse and released badly needed troops and tanks from the Pas de Calais to Normandy? What if the powerful German batteries at the Pointe du Hoc had been installed? What if the Nazi V-1s had not been launched fruitlessly at the city of London but rather at the ports in southern England, where the Anglo-American armies were being embarked to reinforce the beachhead carved out by the D-Day invaders?

On the sixth day of the sixth month of 1944, elements of six Allied infantry divisions and three airborne divisions began the assault on Hitler's Fortress Europe on the northern coast of France. Within 24 hours, despite horrible losses at some points, the first wave of invaders breached the German line and a huge Allied host began pouring ashore at Normandy.

In Disaster at D-Day: The Germans Defeat the Allies, June 1944 Peter G. Tsouras, tweaks history's reality by presenting a plausible chain of alternate events and paints a chilling picture of a German victory over the invading Allies.

In Tsouras' fictional history, German armored units destroy the Omaha Beach landings, Hitler and his generals react much faster than they actually did, and nothing the Allies attempt to do in order to save Operation Overlord works. An airborne assault by the 1st Airborne Division runs into heavy German resistance, and every effort by Gen. Bernard L. Montgomery to mount an offensive and unite the isolated American beachhead at Utah Beach with the three British beaches fails. Overlord teeters on the edge of disaster as Field Marshal Erwin Rommel escapes from a small band of American paratroopers in the hedgerows of the Cotentin peninsula and conducts a series of German counteroffensives that promise to win the day for Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.

Tsouras uses the techniques of a traditional historian. His prose is straightforward and never veers into novelistic style, even though this is, indeed, a novel by any other name. The use of maps, photographs and footnotes gives the book the feel of a "real" history book.

Now, considering how inefficient the Nazis really were when it came to the business of making war and ruling an empire, it doesn't seem very likely that a German victory at Normandy would have ensured Hitler's Germany's survival.  Indeed, the very existence of an honest historical account of a disaster at D-Day speaks volumes about the fate of the Third Reich.  That's addressed by the book's final twist, and Tsouras' ending is pretty good.

Though I had typeface problems with my 1990s Greenhill Military Paperbacks edition which made it a bit difficult to read, the book has been reissued in a 2006 deluxe edition.