On 6 June 1944 when the Allied armies landed on D-Day, the Second World War had already lasted almost five years. Yet many of the British and American troops who invaded Normandy were virgin soldiers, never before committed to battle. They quit England in summertime to face within hours a storm of machine-gun and mortar fire. They witnessed scenes, above all of sudden death, such as no exercise had prepared them for.
In Sword, veteran chronicler of war Max Hastings explores with extraordinary vividness the actions of the Commando brigade and Montgomery’s 3rd Infantry and 6th Airborne divisions on and around a single beach. He describes their frustrations, hopes, loves and fears through the apparently interminable years training and preparing in England, then their triumphs and tragedies on the beach and beyond. Here are the airborne assaults on the Caen Canal bridge and Merville Battery, the battles on the shoreline and against the German strongpoints inland, narrated and explained with all the insights that Hastings’ decades of study, veterans’ interviews and new archive research enable him to deploy.
The book offers a searching analysis of why British troops did not reach Caen on 6 June, as Montgomery had promised Churchill that they would – and the story of the brigadier who was sacked for that failure. There is also a host of personal portraits of key figures from Commando leader Lord Lovat, famously brave but supremely arrogant, to Colonel Jim Eadie, whose tanks of the Staffordshire Yeomanry repulsed a panzer division in the last hours of 6 June, and some of the humbler participants to whom extraordinary things happened.
Review: On D-Day 6th June 1944, Allied troops invaded the coast of Normandy in German-occupied France in the biggest amphibious operation the world had seen. Max Hastings had written previously about the D-Day operation as a whole, but this book focuses on the easternmost of the five invasion beaches, code-named “Sword”, at which mainly British troops came ashore. In addition, airborne troops landed to the east of this area. The mission of these airborne troops was: to capture two bridges, over the Caen Canal and the River Orne respectively; to silence an artillery battery that overlooked the beach; and to establish defensive positions to secure the eastern flank of the invasion area against counterattacks.
The book covers: the preparations for the landings; the aerial and seaborne landings, including the specialised equipment used; and the subsequent battles of that first day. The objective of the invaders landed at Sword Beach was to capture the city of Caen some 10 miles inland by the end of the day. This was not achieved, for various reasons outlined in the book. As in his previous books, Max Hastings focuses on personal stories based on letters, regimental records and interviews. This results in the narrative appearing, at times, somewhat haphazard with the focus switching between different aspects of the action.
Illustrated with many photographs and a few maps, there are extensive reference and bibliography sections at the end. As an interesting account of one specific zone of the D-Day invasion, conveying the drama and chaos inherent in the planning and execution of a military operation, I would recommend this book to all enthusiasts of military history.
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