Sword Beach
D-Day Baptism by Fire
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
One of Bookbub's Best Nonfiction of 2025
From the best-selling military historian, a thrilling account of the valiant British role in the D-Day invasion.
Between 1941 and 1944, the British army contributed relatively little to World War II. On the unremittingly bloody Eastern Front, no Russian or German soldier had experienced the luxury of having four years to prepare and train for a resumption of the European continental campaign. But on D-Day—June 6, 1944—the lives of British soldiers changed. Thiry-five thousand infantrymen, airmen, and special service operatives were sent headfirst into the whitest heat of war, almost overnight.
Max Hastings’s Sword Beach tells the story of a handful of British soldiers and their critical role in D-Day’s parachute and seaborne offensive. On Sword, the codename of one of the two beaches assaulted by the British, scores of soldiers were killed by the first shots that they ever heard fired in anger. One British corporal insisted on apologizing to his enemy prisoners, and the Free French troops, 120-men strong, suffered 60 percent losses in the first days of fighting. With his signature blend of drama and detail, Hastings shows how the men who landed on Sword played a critical role in Britain’s preeminent landmark victory and the most spectacular battlefield event of World War II in the West.
Sword Beach fills in many of the missing pieces and human stories that have long been left out of the sweeping macro-stories of the Normandy invasion. Based on published memoirs, interviews with D-Day veterans, and rigorous research, Hastings lends color and shade to the climactic action of the Western Front’s most famous battle. Sword Beach describes the lives of a small number of men, on a single day, who faced the immediate transition from make-believe battle to the war’s most violent circumstances.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The British Army's triumphs—and many failings—on D-Day are reexamined in this elegant account. Historian Hastings (Operation Biting) recaps the British landing at Sword Beach, several miles east of the American landing sites. He highlights some extraordinary successes: glider-borne troops crash-landed their flimsy plywood aircraft right beside key bridges and seized them from astonished Germans; innovative amphibious tanks chugged through the waves and came up shooting on the beach. But Hastings also investigates serious flaws. Commanding general Bernard Montgomery's objective of taking the city of Caen, nine miles inland, on June 6 was too ambitious, he contends, and the general leading the push, K.P. Smith, was too feckless to carry it out. Traffic jams slowed the movement of men and tanks, and lousy radio communications left them uncertain where to go. British infantry, Hastings observes, often froze and went to ground when fired upon; indeed, he paints the typical soldier as "cautious, hesitant, slow, dilatory, fearful of loss," and extremely reluctant to follow their officers into an attack. Hastings somewhat lamely excuses this timidity as a virtue of democratic "moderation," with immoderate courage, daring, and self-sacrifice being too German, the product of "suicidalist" Nazi "fanaticism." Still, with its clear-eyed eschewal of hero-worship, this makes for a rich exploration of a WWII turning point and of the complex psychology of men in battle.
