Book Review: D-Day, Philip Warner

Philip Warner's superb book is in fact mostly a compendium of accounts by men who took part in the manifold aspects of D-Day. The quality of these correspondent's writings is variable. But the best stuff is absolute gold.

Warner opts to deploy his sources in a chronological-cum-thematic manner, which is good, as we can concentrate on one strand of action at a time, such as airborne drops, or the naval contribution, tanks, infantry, and so on, and thereby see how the bigger picture unfolds through multiple colourful facets, adding up to an exciting kaleidoscopic view of the whole.

Here's a list of the chapter headings:
I  Invasion from the Air: The RAF, the Gliders and the Parachutists
II  The Navies
III  On The Beach - The Sappers and others
IV  The Armoured Corps
V  The Infantry
VI  Marines and Commandos
VII  Intelligence and Signals
VIII  The Medical Services
IX  The Royal Army Service Corps
X  The Canadians
XI  The Royal Artillery
XII  The Chaplains
The French Viewpoint

The above list conveys both the arrangement of the books contents, and the scale and scope of Overlord itself. One thing that consistently emerges from the many vivid and moving testimonies that appear here is awe at the scale of it all. The book appears under a banner for The Telegraph newspaper, as it was in their pages that Warner published a letter asking for survivors of D-Day to contact him.

Philip Warner's own part in the content is quite minimal, consisting of brief introductory remarks for each chapter, and the selection and arrangement of the firsthand testimonies. These are, unsurprisingly having been collected in the U.K., very much weighted towards the British perspective. Americans and Canadians are mentioned in passing (the latter even having their own very brief chapter), but this is an avowedly and unashamedly Anglo-centric account.

What makes this particular book really enjoyable - thrilling, I would say - is the patchwork quilt of very personal stories. These range from the drily formal 'At 06:00 hours, we...' etc, to the very colourfully anecdotal ('we breakfasted on whisky and Mars bars'!). But, whilst none are Pulitzer Prize winning professional journos, the quality is, by and large, superb. Sometimes poignant, often funny, filled with both pride and humility, and replete with fascinating detail, they bring this gargantuan operation vividly to life in a way little else can.

I absolutely loved this book, and highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in this most momentous day. In one word: brilliant!

Book Review: A Near Run Thing - David Howarth

I absolutely loved this book, it was right up there with Barbero's The Battle (also about Waterloo), and works like 1812 by Zamoyski, or Paul Britten Austin's superb 1812 trilogy (both about the disastrous invasion of Russia). In an assessment I'm entirely in agreement with, Napoleonic military book specialists Empire Books [1] describe it in their product listings as 'One of the most admired accounts ever written on the Waterloo campaign.'

Unlike a lot of books about Waterloo, which often cover all sorts of other aspects, such as Napoleon's return from Elba, the battles of Ligny & Quatre Bras, etc, Howarth confines himself to the day itself. I don't doubt that some fussy Napoleonic buffs out there could pick holes in his portrayal of the days events (written in the late 1960s), but as he himself quite rightly says on p.v of his introduction 'too much has been written about the arguments ... too little about the experience'.

Like Paul Britten Austin, whose trilogy on Napoleon's ill-fated Russian expedition is one of my favourite Napoleonic history books, Howarth based this account on the memoirs of the participants themselves, of whom he observes 'Behind all their stilted prose, and underneath their peacock uniforms, they were much the same ...' as we are. Unlike PBA, who uses his sources verbatim, Howarth chooses to reformulate the first hand accounts into his own prose. A job he does extremely well.

Pictured at the top of my post is the older hardback edition I own,

whilst shown above is the current 'Great Battles' series paperback.

Howarth indulges in some speculation, in particular regarding Napoléon's health. He pretty much seems to take the line that Napoleon was very unwell on the day of Waterloo, and that this was in large part responsible for his poor performance. This kind of speculation has become quite unpopular and unfashionable in modern scholarship, but, as he points out at the start of his book, this is not a work of scholarship, but a dramatic retelling of the days events, based on the words of the participants themselves.

The Napoleonic wars were amongst the first, as Howarth himself points out, in which, thanks to increasing levels of literacy, we get accounts from all levels, from generals down to rankers. Using many such contemporary accounts, from the personal narratives of officers and men to Captain Siborne's exhaustive work - 'which I suppose' writes Howarth 'is the most detailed, authoritative and boring account of the battle ever written' - itself based on a massive evidence-collecting correspondence with participants, Howarth's rendering is anything but dull.

When I read this I was glued to the book, for two days solid, reading it in every available spare moment. It's a highly accomplished telling of a tale that's very often been told, but very rarely with such verve. It's always exciting, and often very moving. The 'Night' section (he divides the battle into chronological periods of the day) is terribly poignant and affecting, the story of William Howe De Lancey being deserving of a tragic romance. This is the sort of book that could easily kindle a lifelong love of history.

William Howe De Lancey.

My copy is a 1969 Literary Guild hardback, heavily illustrated. I can't vouch for the 'Great Battles' edition, which is the version most easily available now from seller like Amazon. But if they've left the text as it is in the Literary Guild version then, unlike Napoleon, you can't lose. In a single word: brilliant

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NOTES:

[1] I found various listings for this companies books, in $, but I couldn't actually find them under the name Empire Books (that lead to a martial arts publisher!) as a company in their own right on the web. Do they still exist? Are they an Australian or an american outfit?