D-Day
The Battle for Normandy: Discover the incredible true story of WW2’s pivotal battle on the 80th anniversary of D-Day
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4.4 • 8 Ratings
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER
'Magnificent, vivid, moving, superb' Max Hastings, Sunday Times
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This is the closest you will ever get to war - the taste, the smell, the noise and the fear
The Normandy Landings that took place on D-Day involved by far the largest invasion fleet ever known. The scale of the undertaking was awesome and what followed was some of the most cunning and ferocious fighting of the war. As casualties mounted, so too did the tensions between the principal commanders on both sides. Meanwhile, 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.
Antony Beevor's inimitably gripping narrative conveys the true experience of war. He lands the reader on the beach alongside the heroes whose stories he so masterfully renders in their full terrifying glory.
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'A thrilling story, with all Beevor's narrative mastery' Chris Patten, Financial Times
'Beevor's D-Day has all the qualities that have made his earlier works so successful: an eye for telling and unusual detail, an ability to make complex events understandable, and a wonderful graphic style' Ian Kershaw, Guardian, Books of the Year
'D-Day's phenomenal success is both understandable and justified' James Holland
'D-Day is a triumph . . . on almost every page there's some little detail that sticks in the mind or tweaks the heart. This is a terrific, inspiring, heart-breaking book' Sam Leith, Daily Mail
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Beevor has established a solid reputation as a chronicler of WWII's great eastern front battles: Stalingrad and Berlin. In addressing D-Day, he faces much wider competition with historians like Stephen Ambrose and Max Hastings, who also use his method of integrating personal experiences, tactical engagements, operational intentions and strategic plans. Beevor combines extensive archival research with a remarkable sense of the telling anecdote: he quotes, for example, an officer's description of the "bloody mass of arms and legs and heads, cremated corpses" created by artillery fire as the Germans tried to escape the Allied breakout. He is sharply critical of senior commanders on both sides: Bernard Montgomery's conceit; Adolf Hitler's self-delusion; Dwight Eisenhower's mediocrity. His heroes are the men who took the invasion ashore and carried it forward into Normandy in the teeth of a German defense whose skill and determination deserved a better cause. The result was a battle of attrition: a "bloody slog" that tested British and American fighting power to the limit but not beyond. Beevor says that it wasn't Allied forces' material superiority but their successful use of combined arms and their high learning curve that were decisive in a victory that shaped postwar Europe. Maps, illus.
