Beevor causes controversy....again

Kyt · May 29, 2009

To be fair, it seems more than likely that the controversy is caused by sensationalist media interpretations rather than Beevor. Based on the previous outcries against his books, I am sure that what he actually says in the latest book is nowhere as sensationalist or controversial as is being made out below. Max Hastings has had the same problems with media reviewers interpreting his works wrongly:

D-Day bomb raids were 'close to a war crime' says author | Mail Online

The RAF bombing raids in Normandy following the D-Day invasion were 'close to a war crime', a leading British historian has claimed.

Antony Beevor has singled out Bomber Command's massive raids on the key city of Caen for particular criticism, describing the terrible suffering of French civilians trapped in the city as it was virtually destroyed.

But veterans and other historians attacked his comments - made ahead of next week's 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

Beevor was accused of trying to generate publicity for his latest book, which covers the Normandy campaign.

Caen became a crucible of ferocious fighting during the campaign due to its vital strategic position controlling key roads and bridges at the eastern flank of the invasion beaches.

Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery hoped his troops would capture Caen on D-Day, June 6, 1944, but desperate German defenders repelled repeated attacks.

It was almost two months before the city was safely in Allied hands by which time they had lost some 50,000 troops in the assault.

The RAF carried out two major bombing raids on Caen, once on D-Day and again a month later on July 7 - to open the way for a major assault.

But a huge formation of British Lancaster and Halifax bombers missed virtually all the German positions on the edge of the city and instead reduced the centre to rubble, killing large numbers of French residents.

The number of deaths from both raids is disputed, but may have totalled as many as 5,000.

In his book, D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, Beevor argues that the bombing was a military blunder, as Caen's rubble-strewn ruins blocked the advance of Allied tanks and were relatively easy for the Germans to defend.

Asked in an interview with BBC History magazine whether the Allies could have reduced civilian deaths, Beevor said: 'Yes, I'm afraid they could.

'The British bombing of Caen beginning on D-Day in particular was stupid, counter-productive and above all very close to a war crime.

'There was an assumption, I think, that Caen must have been evacuated beforehand. That was wishful thinking on the part of the British.'

Peter Hodge, secretary of the Normandy Veterans' Association, said: 'It serves no purpose to make these accusations now and I for one take exception to it. I think it will cause sadness among veterans.'

Gary Weight, who runs a travel company specialising in battlefield tours of Normandy, said: 'What more is there to say about D-Day? The only way you can see him selling this book is by coming up with controversial claims. I'm a little bit saddened by it.'

Last night, Beevor, a former Army officer whose books on the battles of Stalingrad and Berlin won widespread acclaim, defended his comments and said accusations that he was merely seeking publicity were 'grotesque'.

'The bombing of Caen has been controversial for years,' he said. 'Many soldiers at the time were deeply shocked when they entered the city.

'The whole thing is a grey area, and I don't say it was definitely a war crime.'
Click to expand...

The bombing of Caen was a disaster, and this isn't the first book to have said so. Nor is this the first book to highlight that the Normandy civilians were very antagonistic towards the Allied soldiers after the invasion - even official advice to troops at the time warned them to be careful because the civilians hated them for the death and damage that was inflicted,

Kyt · May 30, 2009

A good review - seems that the book isn't as bad as some claim

Review: D-Day: The Battle for Normandy by Antony Beevor | Books | The Guardian

In the early hours of 6 June 1944, the allies launched the greatest amphibious assault of the second world war. Assisted by bombers and airborne troops, Operation Neptune, the first phase of Overlord, was the precursor to a campaign intended to drive the Germans out of France and the Low Countries. The attack took place during a brief break in unseasonally bad weather. Antony Beevor begins his account of this now almost mythic narrative five days earlier, by describing the head of the allied weather forecasting team, James Stagg, receiving a broadside from General Harold Bull, assistant chief of staff to the supreme commander, Dwight D Eisenhower. Stagg's meteorologists could not agree whether the weather for the invasion, originally planned for 5 June and various dates in May, would be suitable:

"For heaven's sake, Stagg," Bull exploded. "Get it sorted out by tomorrow morning before you come to the supreme commander's conference. General Eisenhower is a very worried man."

One of the many strengths of Beevor's book is his presentation of the nervous but philosophic personality of Eisenhower in the face of the "appalling responsibility" of deciding at what point he should trust the views of these meteorologists and give the order to go (in the event, a "very great risk" was taken with the weather, as Churchill said later in parliament). But although many other characters are equally well portrayed, from Churchill himself to US generals Bradley - with his specs and "hayseed expression" - and Patton, famous for his profanity, to Montgomery with his terseness and conceit, and De Gaulle with his arrogance and his long arms, it is the personal narratives of ordinary servicemen that drive this book.

This is the same approach Beevor took in his justly acclaimed Stalingrad, Berlin: The Downfall and other books. Once again a gripping narrative is the result. But with D-Day he was faced with a great problem, in that many more writers have tackled the subject previously. What has he found new that Chester Wilmot, John Keegan (under whom Beevor studied), Max Hastings and Carlo D'Este didn't?

Though it is hard to match Hastings's Overlord in particular, the fact is that Beevor has indeed added to the account. Accruing greater detail, he has made use of overlooked and new material from more than 30 archives in half a dozen countries. His skill with German archives (a former Hussars officer, he served in the British Army of the Rhine) is especially evident. He addresses controversies in military history - were the British in Normandy tired out from fighting elsewhere? How badly were the Canadians led? Was Montgomery a hero or a hindrance? - and other questions with balance and judgment. The main reasons for allied success are pinpointed as the speed of advance by US motorised divisions and Hitler's refusal to allow a flexible defence.

The pleasure of this book lies in the vividness of an episodic narrative, backed up by judicious use of quotation. Moving from the weather drama to surveillance of the assault beaches, to individual accounts of each beach, to the breakout for Paris, the action never lets up. Beevor follows personalities from one location to another. One moment we are with Captain Scott-Bowden swimming ashore from a midget submarine to Omaha Beach to take a soil sample, armed only with a commando knife, a Colt .45 and an auger, the next we are seeing him make his report to an intimidating room full of generals back in Whitehall: "Sir, I hope you don't mind me saying but this beach is a very formidable proposition indeed and there are bound to be tremendous casualties." So it would prove, with the ramps of landing craft dropping and German machine guns opening fire so that "men were tumbling just like corn cobs off a conveyor belt".

Many of the assault troops knew this was to be their fate, not least because their officers kept telling them so. Beevor is very good on how heavily the burden of premonition weighed on men. A large number took their minds off what lay ahead with frenetic betting, first with dubious-looking invasion money (une fausse monnaie as De Gaulle sneeringly called it), then with saved dollars and pound notes. Other eve of battle rituals included shaving heads, with some Americans deciding "to leave a strip of hair down the middle in Mohican style". This contributed to the German idea that US troops were recruited from Sing-Sing.

The Germans themselves are fairly treated throughout, with a proper view of the difference between those who retained a moral sense and those in whom it had long disappeared. There is a wonderful vignette of an old, one-legged, one-eyed Prussian general called Erich Marcks refusing whipped cream at dinner: "I do not wish to see this again as long as our country is starving." Equally, there are many depictions of the brutality of retreating SS troops.

A former novelist (it is now often forgotten that before concentrating on his historical work in the 1990s, this author published four works of fiction), Beevor is very good on what might in a novel or film be called the kitbag scene, in which equipment is assembled, in this case in preparation for jumping from the C-47 aircraft that would deliver paratroopers to the assault zone: "Dog tags were taped together to prevent them making a noise. Cigarettes and lighters, together with other essentials, such as a washing and shaving kit, water-purifying tablets, 24 sheets of toilet paper and a French phrase book, went into the musette bag slung around the neck, along with an escape kit consisting of a map printed on silk, hacksaw blade, compass and money."

This was only a tiny part of the burden that airborne troops carried. Once weapons and other equipment were taken into account, they often needed help to get up the steps of the planes, "almost like knights in armour trying to mount their horses".

Such a telling phrase is typical, whether it relates to grand strategy (on the eve of invasion "Churchill sent a signal to Stalin with the feeling that the blood debt which the western allies owed the Soviet people was being paid at last") or to domestic feeling on the home front once the assault was under way: "People in their nightclothes went out into their gardens to stare up at the seemingly endless air armada silhouetted against the scudding clouds. 'This is it' was their instinctive thought."

Landing in thickly hedged country known as bocage, often separated from their units, paratroopers resorted in vain to artificial duck calls or cheap children's "clickers" (familiar from the film The Longest Day). Many planes were flying too low, and those paratroopers who had landed successfully witnessed the sickening sound of bodies hitting the ground around them, which they compared to "watermelons falling off the back of a truck".

As well as the grotesque, there were moments of comedy, such as when an allied soldier asked a French farmer "Ou es Alamon?" "He shrugged and pointed north, then south, east and west." Against these humorous moments must be set strange ones, such as watching heavy shells fired from offshore battleships create a vacuum in their wake, causing the water to "rise up and follow the shells in and then drop back into the sea". And, of course, there are many pictures of horror, including a description of cleaning human remains from the inside of a tank with a mess tin and spoon.

The last third of the book is concerned mainly with the rush to Paris, which was not in the original plan for the campaign. It is almost impossible for a reader not to get caught up in the excitement. The historian must always make a choice between the work of depiction and the work of analysis. Even though Beevor is well capable of the latter, we should be glad he has chosen the former. By doing so he has overleaped the barrier of hindsight, getting us as near as possible to experiencing what it was like to be there, that fateful summer, 65 years ago.

• Giles Foden's Turbulence is published next week by Faber. Antony Beevor is at the Hay festival today.
Click to expand...

Kyt · May 30, 2009

And Max Hastings seems to like it too I think I will buy a copy

D-Day: The Battle for Normandy by Antony Beevor review | Non-fiction book reviews - Times Online

Some years after the second world war, an early book on the Normandy campaign featured a photograph of a handsome young German officer surrendering to Canadian troops at Falaise. Its publication prompted a letter to the Canadian embassy in Bonn. The correspondent cited the picture, and said she would be glad of any information about the fate of the German depicted with his hands up. He was her son, and had never been heard of since.

Though that story is not Antony Beevor’s, one of many bleak revelations in his latest *battlefield epic is that the killing of enemy prisoners was a commonplace of the 1944 *struggle for Normandy. Amid fighting that at times cost casualties as heavy as those on the eastern front, more than a few allied units refused quarter to their enemies. The most fanatical Nazi formation on the battlefield, 12th SS Panzer division, killed Canadian prisoners in significant numbers in June. Thereafter, their opponents responded in kind. So, too, did many British and American units. Some soldiers were merely reluctant to run the gauntlet of fire to escort PoWs to the rear. *Others resented the notion that enemy *captives might escape the risk of death while they themselves could not. Others again vented special rage against snipers, in *flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention. Enemies who particularised the business of killing seemed more hateworthy than those who merely *participated in indiscriminate mayhem.

The story of D-Day and the campaign for Normandy has been told many times. But Beevor is a master of the art of casting *brilliant new illumination upon familiar themes. I find it galling that he has contrived to write a book that resurrects virtually no scrap of material that I used in a book of my own about the Normandy campaign 25 years ago. Instead, he has assembled a mass of unfamiliar sources, fresh voices and untold anecdotes to create a saga as impressive as his earlier narratives of Stalingrad and the battle for Berlin. He makes my version, and those of many other historians, seem old hat.

Describing D-Day itself, he focuses *special attention upon events on Omaha beach, the most fiercely contested of the June 6 landing zones. American legend holds that the landing was a bloodbath. Yet in truth, some units got ashore and scaled the bluffs behind the sands with amazingly little difficulty. C Company of the 116th Infantry lost only 20 out of 194 men, and were soon overrunning German positions from the rear. By contrast, A Company of the same unit suffered a massacre, losing almost half its strength killed, and many more wounded.

More than 17,000 Americans were ashore by noon, flooding the coastline. Some were *slaughtered, impaling themselves on the German defences, but enough trickled or blasted a path through the cracks to gain the high ground and win the day. The US Army lost well under 1,000 dead taking Omaha, a negligible “butcher’s bill” by eastern-front standards — and even compared with the frightful losses suffered by many allied units in the battles *following D-Day.

Beevor’s account of June 6 is exemplary. Thereafter, he describes the struggle to break the German army in the west. This required the most painful attritional fighting British and American forces *experienced, as costly for some units as the Somme or Ypres a world war earlier. Again and again, infantry and tanks were thrown forward against Hitler’s panzers and infantry units. Again and again, they achieved small gains only at shocking cost. The beauty of the Norman countryside mocked the dreadful human tragedy for which it provided a setting.

Montgomery had brought home from the Mediterranean three veteran formations to spearhead his assault. But the book is unsparing in its acknowledgment of the poor performances in Normandy of the 51st Highland, 7th Armoured and 50th Northumbrian divisions. Far from being “battle-hardened” — almost always a foolish cliché — many of their men were worn out and cautious, and their commanders had to be sacked. Beevor quotes a Canadian who was shocked in one action to see how “Scotties threw their weapons and equipment away and fled”.

Tank crews who had fought in north Africa were much dismayed by the close countryside of Normandy. A trooper of the Sherwood Rangers wrote: “We could see the buggers in the desert and they could see us. Here they can see us but I’ll be buggered if we can see them.” It is hard to *overstate the impact on allied performance and morale of engaging *German Tiger and Panther tanks with *British and American tank guns whose shells usually bounced off.

Nobody knows better than Beevor how to translate the dry stuff of military history into human drama of the most vivid and moving kind. His book offers a thousand vignettes of drama, terror, cruelty, compassion, courage and cowardice. He is especially good in describing the sufferings of civilians on the *battlefield, whose plight is often ignored.

As many French people died on D-Day as did allied soldiers — around 3,000, most from their *liberators’ bombs and shells. In the course of the campaign, 20,000 civilians perished. Many survivors said afterwards that the German occupiers had behaved better than the British and American *deliverers, who looted and destroyed mercilessly.

I quibble with Beevor’s respectful account of the *contribution of maquisards, especially in Brittany. The legend of Resistance contributed much to the spiritual resurrection of France after 1945, but nowhere did the maquis significantly influence *military outcomes. The Resistance staged noisy and vengeful demonstrations as the allied armies approached, but local populations paid extravagantly for a belated patriotic pantomime.

This is a detail, however. The book paints a *magnificent portrait of the horrors, splendours and absurdities of the greatest campaign of the western war. A British infantryman cranking the telephone on the back of a Sherman tank under machine-gun fire was only marginally amused by the Coldstream Guards officer in the safety of its turret who answered wittily: “Sloane 4929.” In the desperate fighting for Hill 112, a soldier of the Somerset Light Infantry hung crucified on German wire, suffering agonies after a *bullet detonated a phosphorus grenade in his pouch. He screamed “Shoot me! Shoot me!” until a compassionate officer did so. A corporal noted that only nine of 36 men in his platoon survived that action. One of these then shot himself in the foot, rather than fight on.

There is a wry description of General de Gaulle paying his first visit to liberated Bayeux. An overexcited local cried out “Vive le Marechal!”, confusing the lofty eminence with Marshal Pétain, who had ruled from Vichy since 1940. De Gaulle muttered to an aide with his usual drollery: “Another person who does not read the newsapers.”

The climax of the book is a superb account of the race for Paris by Leclerc’s Free French 2nd Armoured Division, which provided one of the most moving melo*dramas of the war. As Leclerc’s *columns advanced on Paris, they were so short of men that they cheerfully enlisted volunteers who offered themselves on the road. An Alsatian deserter from the SS joined up in time to share in the triumphal scenes on the Champs Elysées 10 days later, in French uniform. The joy of the French nation, granted a charade that allowed it to pretend that Frenchmen liberated their own *capital on August 24-25, 1944, was irresistible.

This is as powerful and authoritative an account of the battle for Normandy as we are likely to get in this generation. It cannot be said that victory in the west sealed the fate of Hitler’s Germany — the Red Army achieved that. But Eisenhower’s forces in France between June and August 1944 fought the greatest battles of the Anglo-American war. Here is a worthy memorial to their sacrifice and final triumph.
Click to expand...

Adrian Roberts · Jun 2, 2009

This is Charles Moore's review of Beevor's book in the Telegraph - he seems to approve of the book as well.

He starts by contrasting it with Alan Clark's review of Max Hasting's book in which he expresses some bizarre views. Keith : please don't get too cross about this; I'm sure none of us would agree with Alan Clark's views, and he was not really taken seriously as a historian, or in any other aspect!

D-Day: The Battle for Normandy: fear and cruelty in sun-dappled orchards - Telegraph

For the 40th anniversary of D-Day, 25 years ago, there appeared on this page of The Daily Telegraph what must surely have been the most extraordinary article written by a serving British government minister.

Reviewing Max Hastings's history of "Overlord", Alan Clark was then a junior minister at the Department of Employment, and was later to gain fame as the most amusing political diarist of our time. But he was also a military historian, hence the article.

Clark noted that in the Battle of Normandy "whole British units collapsed under pressure". He then launched into an elegy for the elite German troops. He wrote of the SS's "physical splendour even as they lay lifeless". He quoted the SS general, Kurt Meyer, who told his interrogators that Hitler was "the best thing that has ever happened to Germany", and described that "thing" as "bewitching".

Clark ended by saying that we must never have another European "civil war" because the result would be "a barbarian annexation still more degrading than the ascendancy of material corruption – chewing gum and Chesterfields – that filled the vacuum of devastated Europe in 1945."

Even at the time, it seemed strange that this article caused so little fuss. Today, it seems incredible: our 24-hour media would have had Clark out of office that morning. He was let off, perhaps because the press liked his indiscretion, and thought that his sympathy for the Nazis was a sort of tease.

Twenty-five years on, though written from a much more conventional and humane point of view, Antony Beevor's new book about D-Day (published by Penguin Viking, £25) confirms some of what Clark was talking about. Beevor relates how the Americans had very high levels of what they euphemised as "combat exhaustion", but which their General Patton preferred to call cowardice. The British, though acknowledged by the Germans to be stubborn in defence, were not bold in attack. The Germans, said the US General Barton, "are staying in there just by the guts of their soldiers. We outnumber them 10 to 1 in infantry, 50 to 1 in artillery and in infinite number in the air". They were brave, and the SS were the bravest.

Although the D-Day operation was perilous, the eventual outcome, once the Allies had landed, was not in doubt. Given that Germany was already losing the war in the East, the fact that the Germans were able to resist so fiercely was remarkable. In the three months from June 1944, the Allies sustained roughly 220,000 casualties; the Germans suffered 240,000, plus 200,000 captured.

General Montgomery, who does not emerge well from this book, declared, in late August, that victory had been "definite, complete and decisive". Actually, 20,000 Germans, with 25 tanks, escaped the encirclement. The German retreat was not a rout. The war dragged on until May the following year.

Normandy in summer is such a pretty, tranquil place. It is easy to understand mass suffering in the Russian winter or the mud of Flanders, much harder to imagine it among those sun-dappled orchards. But Beevor skilfully evokes the fear of ambush that lurked behind the high hedges, the smell of dead cattle, the effect of unripe apples falling through the hatches of the tanks. He pictures the cruel disruption of the rural scene. Unmilked cows stood in agony. One medical officer saw "a little foal walking in a small circle round his recently killed mother. He had worn a path in the grass and refused to leave her." Such small things accentuate the greater, human losses.

Beevor makes a good case that Normandy was "martyred" for France. He is also sympathetic to the French psyche. There was something perfectly absurd about the idea that it was the French, rather than the Americans, who liberated Paris; and yet these operatic effects were absolutely necessary, and also moving. Beevor describes them with gusto.

But I come back to the point first put into my mind by Alan Clark's article. Beevor makes it clear that the majority of German generals – most famously, Rommel – thought that the war was lost. He also shows how Hitler's self-belief led him to catastrophic misjudgments. Yet it remains remarkable that, even when facing annihilation, so many Germans could fight so well, and with such devotion.

It is not quite enough to attribute this, as Beevor tends to do, to "fanaticism" alone, though the Nazis certainly were fanatical. One wants to understand more of how people could think as the Germans did. To us, it seems so obvious that Western democracy, even including "chewing gum and Chesterfields", was preferable to the alternatives.

We still underrate how, for Germans, the idea that Soviet Russia might destroy everything, dominated their thinking. We also do not understand how millions of people believed that Hitler had rescued their country from an appalling disgrace. Why did so many cling to this idea long after the facts had disproved it.

Antony Beevor has written three distinguished books – on Stalingrad, Berlin and, now, Normandy – which show how the events that led to the end of the Second World War were tragic in the proper sense: they were necessary, but also calamitous.

I would love to read a book by him which explained why both sides managed to believe that the future of civilisation was at stake.
Click to expand...

Kyt · Jun 3, 2009

The book just arrived, and as is usual with Beevor's books, it is a brick I found his other books very readable and this looks to be the same.

I do find it interesting that recent books have all been called controversial by the media, be they be by Hastings, Beevor, Roberts etc.

Why exactly?

Because they include new research? Not really. Even though most of these authors have had access to new archives, most of their sources have been around for years.

New intreprations?

Maybe. But some of the "new" intreprations have been voiced before in lesser known books and articles.

Media hype?

I think is the main reason for many of the so-called "controversies". Many of the newspaper reviewers (not the main ones above) don't really have a grasp of the subject. I often feel that some reviewers don't even read the entire books but rather dip into the index, looking for their particular interest/peeve, and read those passages out of context. From that little reading they spin an entire review and accuse the author of all sorts of things that don't reflect the book at all.

fenquat · Jun 8, 2009

I have dropped several hints that I am interested in this book. I will either get it on Father's day as a gift...or I will get it the nexxt day on my own. There must have been a half dozen or more seperate reviews and articles in the London papers prior to it's offical release.

Log in or Sign up

Beevor causes controversy....again

Kyt Άρης

Kyt Άρης

Kyt Άρης

Adrian Roberts Active Member

Kyt Άρης

fenquat New Member

Share This Page

Log in or Sign up

Beevor causes controversy....again

Thread Tools

Kyt Άρης

Kyt Άρης

Kyt Άρης

Adrian Roberts Active Member

Kyt Άρης

fenquat New Member

Share This Page

Useful Searches