Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7274 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 656 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Published to mark the 50th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy, Stephen E. Ambrose's D-Day: June 6, 1944 relies on over 1,400 interviews with veterans, as well as prodigious research in military archives on both sides of the Atlantic. He provides a comprehensive history of the invasion which also eloquently testifies as to how common soldiers performed extraordinary feats. A major theme of the book, upon which Ambrose would later expand in Citizen Soldiers, is how the soldiers from the democratic Allied nations rose to the occasion and outperformed German troops thought to be invincible. The many small stories that Ambrose collected from paratroopers, sailors, infantrymen, and civilians make the excitement, confusion, and sheer terror of D-day come alive on the page. --Robert McNamara

Synopsis
"It is the young men born into the false prosperity of the 1920s and brought up in the bitter realities of the Depression of the 1930s that this book is about. The literature they read as youngsters was anti-war and cynical, portraying patriots as suckers, slackers and heroes. None of them wanted to be part of another war. They wanted to be throwing baseballs, not handgrenades; shooting .22s at rabbits, not M-1s at other young men. But when the test came, when freedom had to be fought for or abandoned, they fought" (from the Prologue). On the basis of 1400 oral histories from the men who were there, this account reveals how the intricate plan for the invasion of France in June 1944 had to be abandoned before the first shot was fired. The true story of D-Day, as Stephen Ambrose relates it, is about the citizen soldiers - junior officers and enlisted men - taking the initiative to act on their own to break through Hitler's Atlantic Wall when they realized that nothing was as they had been told it would be.

Customer Reviews

d-day
I'm just over half way through this book and I'm very disappointed. I don't think Stephen Ambrose is a very good writer, he seems to repeat himself quite a bit and the personal accounts are handled in a rather clunky manner. I started reading this book after reading his Pegasus Bridge account and although that had the same style of writing at least he didn't spend the entire time comparing American superiority against British inferiority. No, after checking out other reviews here, I'm moving on to something new and will wait for Rick Atkinsons third book in his liberation trilogy or I'll read Max Hastings 'Overlord'. However, I am left with one question. How did Ambrose allow so many British actors to act as Americans in the series Band of Brothers, including the lead part? Obviously he's an author who doesn't care about what happens with his work once he's sold the rights to it. I hope that really annoyed him.

Putting the Record Straight
Ambrose described an alleged incident on Omaha Beach in which a Captain Zappacosta threatened the British coxswain of his landing craft with a pistol in order to make him move closer inshore. Private Robert Sales, the only survivor of that landing craft has since stated that this was a complete invention. It never happened. Sales, who was angered by the allegation, challenged Ambrose in person and asked him to correct it but the writer just brushed it off. There is much more in this vein - Ambrose rarely missed an opportunity to disparage the British individually and collectively. If this is representative of the standard of his research, then this book should be treated with extreme caution. His sections on the Anglo-Canadian contribution to D-Day are in any case lamentably brief. This is just bad history. There are many excellent works about D-Day, but this isn't one of them.

The greatest day
Good book with a nice description of the facts ocurred on that great day. Being american, the writter focus on the action from that quarter. nevertheless it's well written and one more book for world war II readers not to loose.