Seventy years ago, more than six thousand Allied ships carried more
than a million soldiers across the English Channel to a
fifty-mile-wide strip of the Normandy coast in German-occupied
France. It was the greatest sea-borne assault in human history. The
code names given to the beaches where the ships landed the soldiers
have become immortal: Gold, Juno, Sword, Utah, and especially
Omaha, the scene of almost unimaginable human tragedy. The sea of
crosses in the cemetery sitting today atop a bluff overlooking the
beaches recalls to us its cost. Most accounts of this epic story
begin with the landings on the morning of June 6, 1944. In fact,
however, D-Day was the culmination of months and years of planning
and intense debate. In the dark days after the evacuation of
Dunkirk in the summer of 1940, British officials and, soon enough,
their American counterparts, began to consider how, and, where, and
especially when, they could re-enter the European Continent in
force. The Americans, led by U.S. Army Chief of Staff General
George C. Marshall, wanted to invade as soon as possible; the
British, personified by their redoubtable prime minister, Winston
Churchill, were convinced that a premature landing would be
disastrous. The often-sharp negotiations between the
English-speaking allies led them first to North Africa, then into
Sicily, then Italy. Only in the spring of 1943, did the Combined
Chiefs of Staff commit themselves to an invasion of northern
France. The code name for this invasion was Overlord, but
everything that came before, including the landings themselves and
the supply system that made it possible for the invaders to stay
there, was code-named Neptune. Craig L. Symonds now offers the
complete story of this Olympian effort, involving transports,
escorts, gunfire support ships, and landing craft of every possible
size and function. The obstacles to success were many. In addition
to divergent strategic views and cultural frictions, the
Anglo-Americans had to overcome German U-boats, Russian impatience,
fierce competition for insufficient shipping, training disasters,
and a thousand other impediments, including logistical bottlenecks
and disinformation schemes. Symonds includes vivid portraits of the
key decision-makers, from Franklin Roosevelt and Churchill, to
Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, and Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, who
commanded the naval element of the invasion. Indeed, the critical
role of the naval forces-British and American, Coast Guard and
Navy-is central throughout. In the end, as Symonds shows in this
gripping account of D-Day, success depended mostly on the men
themselves: the junior officers and enlisted men who drove the
landing craft, cleared the mines, seized the beaches and assailed
the bluffs behind them, securing the foothold for the eventual
campaign to Berlin, and the end of the most terrible war in human
history.
General
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