Product Description

The Allied assault on Normandy beaches was an almost flawless success, but it was to take three months of bitter fighting before the German defence of Normandy finally collapsed and Paris was liberated. In this masterly and highly individual account of that struggle, the reader is subjected to the gruelling ordeals confronted by the combatants - each encounter related from the point of view of a different nationality. In this was we learn precisely what it was like to take part in the American airborne landings, move up the Canadian beachhead under a blistering hail of fire, attack on foot across country with Scottish infantry, engage the enemy from a British tank, move into the German counter-attack at Morain, close the Falaise Pocket under Polish command and liberate Paris as a Free Frenchman. Six Armies in Normandy transcends conventional military history while providing an intensely vivid picture of one of the Second World War's most crucial campaigns.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #64463 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

About the Author
John Keegan is the Defence Editor of the Daily Telegraph and Britain's foremost military historian. The Reith Lecturer in 1998, he is the author of many bestselling books including The Face of Battle, The Mask of Command, Battle at Sea, The Second World War, A History of Warfare (awarded the Duff Cooper Prize), Warpaths, The Battle for History, The First World War, and most recently, Intelligence in War. For many years John Keegan was the Senior Lecturer in Military History at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and he has been a Fellow of Princeton University and Delmas Distinguished Professor of History at Vassar. He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He received the OBE in the Gulf War honours list, and was knighted in the Millennium honours list in 1999.

Customer Reviews

Not a complete history
This is not a complete history of the campaign in Normandy, nor does it profess to be. What Keegan does cover he covers very well and has achieved what I believe he set out to achieve very well.

I must however take issue with one or two prior reviwers comments. Many people say that this particular publication is exceptionally readable. I dont actually find this to be the case. I find Keegans prose rather too flowery at times and he certainly goes alittle too far in giving background to various aspects of the plot to the state I feel it drifts somewhat irrelevantly away fronm the subject matter in hand.

Having said that, to cover the German, British, Canadian, French, Polish and American input on an equal basis has given us a superb history which veers away from the Ambrose-esque over-emphasis of American involvement which leads many to believe the Americans won the battle all by themselves. A preconception believed by many which detracts from the efforts of the Coalition, of which the Americans were the Junior members on D-Day and wouldnt outnumber their allies until toward the end of the campaign in Normandy.

In summary; a fantastic history of the campaign in Normandy, if not a little flowery and maybe, in view of the numerous mentions of the cold war described as being in the modern day, in need of being brought up to date a little.

Six Armies, Six Stories
In “Six Armies In Normandy”, John Keegan tells the stories of the six armies which fought the battle of Normandy, from D-Day to the Liberation of Paris, viewed from the individual perspective of each army. Here we meet the generals and the GI Joes of the United States, Britain, Poland, Canada, France and Germany. Starting with Keegan’s personal boyhood observations of the American buildup in England, the reader is reminded that, for all the big stories, the war was fought by small groups of individual soldiers. The reader is introduced to the strategy sessions, both in Washington and at summit meetings, as well as to the small engagements in which ordinary soldiers fought the war.

Here we learn of Hitler’s command failures and German transportation problems. We read of the struggles within the American military over the competing needs of Europe and the Pacific. The stories of fathers and sons and their units in the two world wars are compared and contrasted.

I appreciate books which teach me something new. This book meets that test. I was surprised to learn of the intensity of support for the war across Canada, including in Quebec. The accounts of the rivalries within the French army are interesting. The reader is admitted to the interactions among the giants, Churchill and Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton and Montgomery, Petain, Leclerc and DeGaulle.

I enjoyed this book. At its end I felt that I knew more about the war in France than I had at its beginning. For this I recommend it.

A very good, if flawed, overview of the Normandy campaign
The author has succeeded in producing a very readable and informative overview of the Normandy campaign, told by focussing on elements of the contribution to the conflict made by the six armies of the title. Many of the major engagements of the campaign are brought to life by a series of vignettes, and the human interest that these capture are a particular strength of this account. For me, however, they also represent the principal weakness of the book. The author appears to have engaged so closely with the human participants of the conflict that he has become unable to assess their performance objectively, and the Allied forces in particular have been spared a great deal of the criticism that a more detached viewpoint would have generated. Although I realise that the British and American front line soldiers in general displayed great bravery on a daily basis, taken in the context of WW2 they were notably unwilling to risk their lives in a way that the combatants of other nations were not. Goodwood and Epsom failed, not because they were so fiercely opposed but because they were so poorly prosecuted, and this criticism applies to both the soldiers at the front and to the failure of the commanding generals to drive the offensive on. Cobra was the greatest breakthrough of the campaign, and heralded the collapse of effective German opposition in Normandy. However, Cobra was largely unopposed, and the greatest distinction of the operation lay not in any feats of arms of the American forces, but in Patton and Bradley's realisation that they could drive forward past their objective and capitalise on the weakened and out of position German forces. I suspect a British general in the same position would have halted the advance. I must stress that I greatly enjoyed this book, and it contributes a great deal to the history of the Normandy campaign, but the performance of the Allied forces with their overwhelming superiority in materiel must be viewed as disappointing, and the reasons for this poor performance are never properly explained in this account. For a more rigorous examination of this aspect of the battle I would recommend "Overlord; D-day and the Battle for Normandy 1944" by Max Hastings.