A review by nelsta
D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Battle for the Normandy Beaches by Stephen E. Ambrose
3.0
This book was good, but it wasn't as good as it could have been. It was pitched as the end-all-be-all of books on D-Day, but I just felt like it missed the mark. The book begins weakly and grows in strength, but even at its greatest strength the book never matched the quality of Band of Brothers, Ambrose's other famous work. This book is popular history, short and simple. It's entertaining to read, but I would rather read another work to properly understand the history.
To give a few examples, Stephen Ambrose makes the correct claim that the armada gathered off Normandy on June 6, 1944 was the largest armada ever assembled. But then he never justifies it with numbers or any other explanation. Even though it's correct, I feel like some kind of show-and-tell is necessary to prove it to posterity. Additionally, Ambrose dedicates about 8/10 of the book to the American efforts and the German counter-efforts. Only 2/10 is left to explain the valiant efforts of the British and Canadian forces on Sword and Juno beaches. That seems disingenuous. Even if the Americans did provide 80% of the effort that day, this needs to be justified in some way in the text. Ambrose needs to explain why you only begin to read about the British and Canadians after the vast majority of the book has already been read. He even explains that Juno beach was almost as stoutly defended as Omaha and yet the Canadians get a handful of chapters compared to the nearly 50% of the book that was spent describing the horrors of Omaha beach. The Commonwealth forces deserved a more detailed section than they received.
To add insult to injury, this book begins with a criminal amount of assumption. Ambrose says things like (and I'm paraphrasing), "if D-Day had failed, Germany would have won the war." Statements like these are gross exaggerations of the truth and don't belong anywhere near a work of history. These assumptions dissipated after a while, but it got to the point that I nearly put the book down in favor of something else.
The book is thoroughly entertaining, however. I felt like I could see and hear the battles through Ambrose's descriptive imagery. This might have been because I have recently seen HBO's Band of Brothers, though. I can't recommend this book without reservation, but it's probably worth picking up at a garage sale or the library.
To give a few examples, Stephen Ambrose makes the correct claim that the armada gathered off Normandy on June 6, 1944 was the largest armada ever assembled. But then he never justifies it with numbers or any other explanation. Even though it's correct, I feel like some kind of show-and-tell is necessary to prove it to posterity. Additionally, Ambrose dedicates about 8/10 of the book to the American efforts and the German counter-efforts. Only 2/10 is left to explain the valiant efforts of the British and Canadian forces on Sword and Juno beaches. That seems disingenuous. Even if the Americans did provide 80% of the effort that day, this needs to be justified in some way in the text. Ambrose needs to explain why you only begin to read about the British and Canadians after the vast majority of the book has already been read. He even explains that Juno beach was almost as stoutly defended as Omaha and yet the Canadians get a handful of chapters compared to the nearly 50% of the book that was spent describing the horrors of Omaha beach. The Commonwealth forces deserved a more detailed section than they received.
To add insult to injury, this book begins with a criminal amount of assumption. Ambrose says things like (and I'm paraphrasing), "if D-Day had failed, Germany would have won the war." Statements like these are gross exaggerations of the truth and don't belong anywhere near a work of history. These assumptions dissipated after a while, but it got to the point that I nearly put the book down in favor of something else.
The book is thoroughly entertaining, however. I felt like I could see and hear the battles through Ambrose's descriptive imagery. This might have been because I have recently seen HBO's Band of Brothers, though. I can't recommend this book without reservation, but it's probably worth picking up at a garage sale or the library.