The bloodiest days

Antony Beevor tells Richard Fitzpatrick that Normandy was the bloodiest ‘front’ of the Second World War.

D-Day, the Battle for Normandy, Antony Beevor, Viking, €28.99.

ROMMEL called it “the longest day.” On June 6, 1944, the largest fleet that ever put to sea landed on the northern shores of France as part of D-Day.

“In the whole history of war,” wrote Stalin to Churchill, “there has never been such an undertaking.” It was awesome, and, as Antony Beevor details in D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, incredibly brutal, the fulfilment of “the blood debt” the Allies owed to Stalin for the Russians’ steadfastness in carrying the fight to the Nazis on the eastern front for so long.

The Allied forces set off with a sense of dread, knowing that most of them were heading for death. “Look to the right of you and look to the left of you,” warned one commanding officer of an American Airborne division before departure. “There’s only going to be one of you left after the first week in Normandy.”

What is overwhelming in Beevor’s study — another blistering read comparable to his landmark military histories, such as Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall — is the chaos that reigned. Those who landed on shore were met by a hail of bullets. One young engineer, driven crazy by terror, “started running up and down the beach,” recorded one witness, until “a bullet killed him.”

Many of the airmen who landed were dropped so low that they didn’t have time to open their parachutes. One surviving paratrooper compared the dull sound of bodies hitting the ground to “watermelons falling off the back of a truck.” The Allies who were dropped in under cover of darkness behind enemy lines could, they claimed, smell German soldiers by the strong odour of their tobacco, or make out that a detachment was nearby by the creaking of their leather equipment. When both sides engaged, the fighting was horrendous; the most ferocious of the whole war on the western front.

One German soldier, justifying the obliteration of an American platoon that landed on his battalion’s heavy-weapons company, remarked later, “they didn’t come down to give us candies, you know. They came down to kill us, to fight.”

“The Germans fought a very, very effective battle,” says Beevor. “It’s quite interesting that throughout the Cold War, all of the military colleges were coming to Normandy to study the battle, not to study what the Allies did, but to study how the Germans managed to fight such an effective defence, because this was going to be the NATO strategy in case the Russians invaded Western Europe.”

“Considering how much they were outnumbered, and they had no air support, really, their fighting capacity was astonishing, but a lot of that was due to their, if you like, ideological preparation, indoctrination and propaganda, which kept them fighting. They’d been persuaded that Germany would be totally destroyed unless they managed to fight off the Allies in Normandy.”

“Then, you have the Waffen-SS, who would pull out their drip saying they didn’t want any English blood; they wanted to die for Hitler. One couldn’t imagine British or Canadian troops saying they wanted to die for Winston Churchill or King George VI. They had a totally different attitude, which underlines the difference between armies of democracy and the armies of a totalitarian power.”

“It’s very striking how British and American psychiatrists after the war, having studied battle shock and nervous breakdowns in Normandy, found Americans suffered over 30,000 psychological casualties and the British and Canadians a fairly similar proportion, but the Germans remarkably few. What we know, of course, is that they’d be shot on the spot for cowardice if they tried to claim they had a nervous breakdown.”

“On the other hand, the British and American psychiatrists were struck by how few of the German prisoners-of-war, who had suffered far worse bombardments and air attacks than the Allied soldiers, had and yet they suffered from a far lower rate of psychological stress or breakdown. They attributed this to the years of German and Nazi indoctrination.”

“It had prepared them much more psychologically; whereas the armies of a democracy are basically a citizen army doing their duty, trying to get a war over. They weren’t like the Germans — fighting desperately to prevent what they thought would be the destruction of their homeland.”

The fighting was relentless. The “intensity and savagery” of it, along with the numbers of French civilian casualties, is what surprised Beevor most as a result of his three-and-a-half years of labour. The average losses per division on both sides in Normandy exceeded those for Soviet and German divisions during an equivalent period on the eastern front.

“People have always talked about D-Day itself without realising quite how vicious the Battle for Normandy itself was,” he says. “The other thing that has been underestimated, of course, by British and American historians — when one thinks of the major books by John Keegan, Max Hastings and Carlo D-Este — was the scale of civilian casualties. There were as many French killed on D-Day as there were Allied soldiers. During the preparation for Normandy, 15,000 were killed, which of course alarmed Churchill. He was horrified, but the Americans said, ‘No, we gotta do this’.”

“I think this, in a way, brings out the paradox of democracies at war, because they have to be that bit more responsive to the reactions of the public at home and they cannot risk the huge casualties which a dictatorship can. As a result, they therefore use more high explosive arms in the form of bombs and shells, which sadly will kill many more civilians.”

Churchill wanted to be in the vanguard of the assault. It took an intercession from the King to dissuade him from watching the bombardment from the bridge of the cruiser, HMS Belfast.

“My dear Winston,” he wrote in a letter on June 2. “I want to make one more appeal to you not to go to sea on D-Day. Please consider my own position. I am a younger man than you. I am a sailor, and, as King, I am the head of all the services. There is nothing I would like better than to go to sea but I have agreed to stay at home; is it fair that you should then do exactly what I should have liked to do myself?”