Early on Tuesday June 6 1944, an armada crossed the English Channel to deposit an army consisting almost entirely of Britons, Americans and Canadians on five beaches on the Normandy coast. By that time, an airborne force of paratroopers had landed in German-occupied territory, aiming to draw the fire of those who would try to slaughter the armies coming up the beaches. According to figures in Churchill’s D-Day, by Lord Dannatt and Allen Packwood (★★★★), one of several books published to mark the anniversary of the invasion, on D-Day itself “over 5,000 ships had landed 133,000 Allied troops, supported by 14,674 air sorties and immense naval gunfire”.
Among the 20,000 airborne troops, according to Dannatt and Packwood, casualties were “small”; but of the initial ground force, which eventually swelled to nearly a million and a half men, “there were just under 11,000 Allied casualties, including around 3,800 killed, of which slightly over 1,000 were British”. On that first day, the Americans suffered a disproportionate number of dead, thanks to the carnage on Omaha Beach, from which the surrounding cliffs provided little means of advance.
The first notable D-Day chronicle was Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day, published in 1959. (It was made into a film memorable for a truly preposterous turn by John Wayne as a wounded American commander.) The shelves of military historians, and those with an amateur interest in the question, now creak with 65 years’ worth of books about the invasion of Normandy. Many have made contributions to our knowledge, thanks to the greater availability of state archives and private collections, and in detailing such an operation as the invasion, greater and more formidable in its execution than anything the world had seen, there are plenty of angles to be had. How interesting they are, and how keen the reading public’s appetite remains for another round of D-Day books, is another matter.
Dannatt and Packwood’s book is well judged and well resourced, and one of the better of the latest crop. Dannatt is a former Chief of the General Staff, and brings a soldier’s expertise to the technical digressions in the narrative; Packwood is director of the archive at Churchill College, Cambridge, which includes the wartime prime minister’s papers. He is well aware of the distinction between the familiar and the less familiar. The book is candid in dealing with Churchill’s comparative impotence in the build-up to D-Day: his realisation not just that he was a junior partner in the Western alliance with Roosevelt, but that his military commanders were increasingly calling the shots. Concerned about how to get equipment across the Channel, he was angered when he heard decisions had been taken by Montgomery without consulting him. It brought home Churchill’s lack of absolute power.
From the familiar material comes the old story about Churchill’s absurd determination to join the armada, and the equal determination of George VI to go, too. Each thought it impossible the other could go; “Tommy” Lascelles, the King’s private secretary, was horrified, wondering aloud who would advise the 18-year-old Princess Elizabeth, who would have become Queen, on whom to appoint prime minister if both the King and Churchill were killed. (In the event, both visited several days after the successful invasion.) Churchill’s petulance and the sometimes impossible demands he made on his court are also familiar. But for new readers, the book will be a superb primer – and one of impeccable historical accuracy – on the events around D-Day.