Book reviews -- D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II by Stephen E. Ambrose

Stephen E. Ambrose. D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994, $30.00.

Since its appearance in 1959, war correspondent Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day has been the popular American account of the June 1944 Allied invasion of Normandy that began the liberation of France from Nazi control. Made into a movie, the book was initially commissioned by the Reader's Digest, which featured a condensation in the June 1994 issue commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day and called the work "the definitive account of this epic event." They were wrong. The definitive account of American's landing on the French coast is now Stephen E. Ambrose's D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II.

Ambrose is the Boyd Professor of History at the University of New Orleans and director of the Eisenhower Center, which has been gathering oral histories of American veterans for over a decade. Ambrose draws freely on the 1,380 personal accounts in the Eisenhower Center, many of them collected by Ronald J. Drez, the assistant director of the Center, who edited a selection published this year as Voices of D-Day: The Story of the Allied Invasion Told by Those Who Were There. These oral histories give Ambrose's book a breadth and intimacy of the American experience not achieved by Ryan, although he, too, used personal accounts.

Ambrose also writes from the perspective of five decades and of a historian who has worked closely with General Dwight Eisenhower's papers. He is the author of a biographical study of the wartime Supreme Commander. Although Ambrose uses Ryan's technique of moving back and forth between Allied and German scenes, Ryan is much stronger in portraying the German side than Ambrose, who concentrates on the Allied armies, especially the American soldiers. Only occasionally does he switch to the German view of events.

Ambrose contends that the Allied military operation was successful because the young Americans who landed on that hostile shore were young and "magnificently trained and equipped and supported" (25). Few of them had ever been in combat before and were not terrified as experienced infantrymen often were. They were citizens of democracy, not professional soldiers, and in the chaos of battle when nothing went according to plan, they directed their own actions, used initiative and common sense, and assumed leadership roles.

Today Omaha Beach is changed from the way it was to American soldiers in June 1944--the wood and masonry seawall is gone and the bank of shingle, which prevented vehicles from moving inland, has mostly vanished. When I visited the area three days before the 50th anniversary of D-Day and watched the calm sea at low tide roll up on the golden sands of the wide beach, it was hard to imagine what it must have looked like with all of Erwin Rommell's mines, wooden and metal spikes, and barbed wire protruding from the sand. It was a long way for a man to run for the cover of the slopes below the bluff to avoid the fire from German gun emplacements above.

Ambrose often shows little respect for the German troops in Normandy, many of them Ost battalions composed of "volunteers" from countries occupied by Germany--Ukrainians, Muslims, Tartars, Poles, Finns, and so forth. Ambrose quotes a German general staff officer's report that it was too much to "expect Russians to fight in France for Germany against the Americans" (518). Ambrose's conclusions are different from those of Max Hastings (Overlord: D-Day and the Battle of Normandy), who includes the entire summer campaign his book and whose central theme is that "the inescapable reality of the battle for Normandy was that when Allied troops met Germans on anything like equal terms, the Germans almost always prevailed" (369). To Hastings it "was the Allies' superiority of materiel" (373), not the mettle and training of the soldiers that enabled the Allies to succeed.

In the final analysis Ambrose judges Hitler's Atlantic Wall, which took enormous German materiel and manpower, a waste because it slowed down the Allies only by hours. He also views the Allied nighttime drop of the 82nd and 101st Airborne in the boscage country and flooded marshlands of the Cotentin a mistake and believes it would have been better to have landed them at first light. He faults Allied intelligence for not recognizing the difficulty of fighting in the hedgerows, thick bushes with entrenched roots that grew on elevated dirt walls and enclosed every Normandy field and farm and provided natural defenses for the Germans.

Ambrose recognizes that the success of the Allied forces was aided by German blunders. Hitler's decision to defend everywhere resulted in the Wehrmacht being "incapable of defending anywhere" (578). The conflicting strategies of Rommel, Rundstedt, and Hitler and a confused chain of command kept the Germans from responding quickly to the news of the invasion. In the end Ambrose determined that the Wehrmacht's leaders were simply "afraid to take the initiative" (579). The Luftwaffe never flew, the U-boats were in the Atlantic, and the E-boats made only a minor attack. When the V-1s were finally ready to fly the week after D-Day, Hitler aimed them in vengeance at London, not at the supply ships and men on the beaches of Normandy--targets Ambrose believed more strategic for the German cause.

D-Day is not a quick read, but it is a satisfying one. The bloody tales of carnage are thankfully relieved by Ambrose's selection of humorous anecdotes and perceptive quotations that linger in the reader's mind. He concludes that the "unquestioning obedience expected of Wehrmacht personnel from field marshal down to private" worked "against the Germans on D-Day" (579). The "men fighting for democracy were able to make quick, on-site decisions and act on them; the men fighting for the totalitarian regime were not" (579). Ambrose compares the D-Day invasion to the Charge of the Light Brigade, when once more "all the world wondered," and contends that it illustrates, as General Eisenhower said, "what free men will do rather than be slaves." (583) The white marble crosses and stars of David at St. Laurent on the bluff above Omaha beach are silent witness to the true cost.

Leah Rawls Atkins is the Director of the Center for the Arts and Humanities at Auburn University.

Copyright National Forum: Phi Kappa Phi Journal Fall 1994
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