Normandy ‘44: D-Day and the Battle for France

by James Holland

'A devastating new account..Holland knows his stuff when it comes to military matters' Daily Mail, Book of the Week'A superb account of the invasion that deserves immense praise. To convey the human drama of Normandy requires great knowledge and sensitivity. Holland has both in spades' The Times________________Renowned World War Two historian James Holland presents an entirely new perspective on one of the most important moments in recent history, unflinchingly examining the brutality and violence that characterised the campaign.D-Day and the 76 days of bitter fighting in Normandy that followed have come to be seen as a defining episode in the Second World War. Its story has been endlessly retold, and yet it remains a narrative burdened by both myth and assumed knowledge.In this reexamined history, James Holland presents a broader overview, one that challenges much of what we think we know about D-Day and the Normandy campaign. The sheer size and scale of the Allies' war machine ultimately dominates the strategic, operational and tactical limitations of the German forces.Drawing on unseen archives and testimonies from around the world and introducing a cast of eye-witnesses including foot soldiers, tank men, fighter pilots and more, James Holland's epic telling profoundly recalibrates our understanding of its true place in the tide of human history.The new, sweeping World War II book from James Holland, THE SAVAGE STORM, is available now.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World War II, Military History, War, Military Fiction, Historical

812 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 4, 2019

About the author

Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name

James Holland was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, and studied history at Durham University. He has worked for several London publishing houses and has also written for a number of national newspapers and magazines. Married with a son, he lives near Salisbury.

Reviews

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dancing with the Devil

The Battle for Normandy is perhaps one of the most famous episodes of the Second World War. It had gained attention from authors and more crucially Hollywood ever since the end of the conflict in 1945. There are countless, books, films, series and documentaries of the subject. It is easy to see why. It is almost a masterclass of an invasion and an advance. The ground covered and the victories won for the allies is not matched in WWII or perhaps any war. There is no stagnation in the Ardennes, set back, like in Holland or questionable meaning such as Burma or Iwo Jima for example. The war is just, the fight of the Nazis and doesn’t include the darker and more brutal elements of the Holocaust or eastern theatres. The allies won and they won well. The Battle for Normandy really was the beginning of the end of the Nazi domination of Europe.

Normandy ‘44 was written for the 75th anniversary of D-Day, in 2019. One might ask, is there a need for another account on the subject? The answer is always ‘yes’. With so much to say, with so many myths which have built up over the years to correct and so many preconceptions to reset. Holland does what he does best and delivers first class military history to tell us how it really was. Holland shows how the allies fought the war differently from the Nazis or Soviets. Equally important to those at the front were the thousands involved in engineering, manufacturing, planning and logistics. Far less personal were put into fighting, which inevitably caused them far less casualties. It also enabled them to wage war for longer. These men and women were in the background keeping the war machine going. This dispels the myth of Russia doing all of the bleeding to defeat the Third Reich, to some extent. If they fought it like the allies far less would have died. Only Germany was a war for longer than Britain and then that was only for a further two days.

Another way they fought differently is the command structure. Germany’s commanders who were taught to think on their feet and be flexible in the early stages were stifled by the autocracy of the Führer by 1944. Everything had to go through him, who never visited the front and so insane decisions were made with little logic. There was also an unclear command structure, with many of those at the top fighting for supremacy, an old despotic trick of divide and rule. The allies on the other hand knew who their superiors were and who to report to. Orders filtered up and down clearly. These commanders were also unwilling to create unnecessary risks to their men and always seemed to live to fight another day. Holland also exposes the myth or Germany equipment being superior to that of the allies. He states that nothing was in the small arms, a Colt .45 was superior to a Luger pistol, the Sten was easy to use being so simple, the MG44 widely inaccurate, but had the greatest rate of fire, the Lee Enfield fired ten rounds (twice as the Kar98) which could be loaded at any point and the M1 Garand had to fire off all eight rounds before a re-load. The point being they all had strengths and weaknesses. Undoubtedly British artillery was their strongest and Tiger and Panzer Tanks were the bigger and more powerful than the Sherman or Cromwell. The Panzershreck was where the Germans excelled. However, as everyone was fighting in the front, production could not keep up with the power of the West, which became so evident over the campaign. Tiger tanks had to be abandoned for lack of spare parts where hit Sherman’s could be repaired and put back out in the field. This industrial war really was a total war of nations.

The campaign in Normandy was a showcase of this industry, engineering and planning. 26,600 tanks, 85,000 aircraft were built in the US alone in 1943, with the British manufacturing 49,000 tanks and 28,000 aircraft. All would descend on Normandy, with fighting also taking place in the air and from the sea. A huge amount of bombs were dropped across northern France. But Holland also shows that men and women still had to fight it and the battles were driven by individuals such as Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower and Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, but also those on the ground such as Lieutenant Dick Winters or Hans, Freiherr von Luck und Witten. Their fighting, their bravery, their leadership drove the battles. With Field Marshall Erwin Rommel being knocked out with a head injury, again events were unpredictably influenced. The desperation of Charles de Gaulle to become the leader of the free French, being outraged at not being informed of the invasion or the pragmatism of the allies. The French resistance as Holland explains was an ineffective afterthought.

Perspectives from all sides are provided in Normandy ‘44. At 700 pages, it flew by, unputdownable and truest gripping. The scale of the invasion and the battles is staggering. Holland shows it was a bloody as any of those of the First World War. In focusing in on the humans caught up in this, the devastation and horror are not lost either. Holland has really shown here that he is the master of WWII military history. There won’t be a better book out there on the Battle for Normandy. Truly excellent.

[Jonny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much criticism has been poured on to the Allied efforts in Normandy, but this has often been made by armchair historians too quick to be dazzled by rapid-firing machine guns, big tanks, fiendish anti-tank guns and the supposed tactical acuity of the Germans. The British and Canadians have been blamed for being too stodgy, too ponderous and too scared to take risks. Even the Americans have come under the cosh for unimaginative tactics and for being too slow in the hedgerows. This criticism is, however, both misplaced and unfair. For all the Allies’ fire-power and incredible logistics arm, it was the infantry and the armour who had to take most of the ground and no one can justifiably criticize these men – mostly conscripts from democratic countries rather than from totalitarian militaristic states – for being slow. The risks were simply enormous, the sacrifice immense. The Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, for example, lost 44 officers even though the full establishment was only 36. A further 175 men of other ranks were lost from 200 in tanks in the regiment during the Normandy campaign. The 116th Infantry lost 100 per cent of its fighting strength. The incredible conveyor belt of replacements kept them going, but these units in the front line in Normandy suffered appallingly. Of course mistakes were made, and different decisions might have made a difference, but, on the whole, these citizen armies performed incredibly well.

James Holland's "warts and all" examination of D-Day and the subsequent Normandy Campaign expands on the themes applied in the first two books of his War In The West series, and his examination of the air war, Big Week; namely that a proper examination of a campaign needs to look beyond the purely personal history (which has a tenancy to promote the "cult of the ace" and the primacy of certain weapons systems) and examine the operational level of warfare, which means that this book goes beyond Paratroops, tanks and 88's and includes testimony from medical staff, and examinations of strategy and how this has coloured popular perception of the campaign.

While all the usual incidents of the campaign are present, from Montgomery's "interesting" personality to the oft-told incident in Villers-Bocage, but are viewed through a prism of grand strategy; hence there is a degree of myth-busting (and not before time) in amongst the tale of German forces battering themselves to oblivion against the brick wall of British and U.S. forces. Innovations in tactics and logistics are also discussed, and their implications in both long and short terms.

This is an important text, recommended to anyone interested in World War Two in general, or the Normandy Campaign in particular. It is extremely readable, has a interesting message and will certainly provoke thought and, hopefully, some debate, as well as going a long way to setting the record straight on the Allies' performance 75 years ago. Highly recommended.

The following day, Thursday, 13 July, the New York Times reporter Hanson Baldwin arrived at Bradley’s headquarters and proceeded to lecture Chet Hansen and other staff, making little effort to conceal his contempt for the Allies’ limited progress inland. ‘Disregarding the bocage country we fight in,’ noted Hansen, ‘and the terrain which hinders our movements, the swamps which canalize our advance, the lack of space in which to maneuver and the necessity for build-up before we break out, he asks why we haven’t gone more quickly.’ Hansen was quite right to feel indignant. Baldwin was doing what others back in England were doing: looking at a two-dimensional map and comparing the Normandy battle with that raging on the Eastern Front, where the rapid Soviet advances had already cost the Red Army hundreds of thousands of casualties – the kind of losses that could only be absorbed by a totalitarian regime like that of Stalin’s, where the lives of his men counted for nothing. The democratic Allies, with their conscript armies, were simply not going to squander the lives of their young boys so recklessly, and their commanders and war leaders were better people for taking this approach. Huge materiel support was the way to go, with ever-improving technology and tactics. For all Baldwin’s contemptible and arrogant lecturing, the Allied way was working. If Eisenhower, Montgomery, Bradley and others could have been flies on the walls within the HQs and command posts of their adversaries, they would have taken great heart. The dam had not broken yet, and there were still disappointments to come over the course of the next week, but they were close.

[Stefania Dzhanamova · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Holland's work is a brilliant study of D-Day and the Allied invasion of France, one of the most important, at least for the Western powers, episodes of World War II. Despite its enormous popularity, remarks Holland, little has been told about its "mechanics" – economics and logistics – so he sets out to examine the whole 77-day Normandy campaign at its tactical level.

The objective of Operation OVERLORD, as the invasion of Normandy was codenamed, was to get foothold in France, build up sufficient weight of force, then drive the German armies out of the country, back into the Third Reich itself, and finally force them to surrender.
In World War I, Germany had eventually signed an armistice because it had run out of supplies and cash and had no hope for winning. That moment had passed once again in 1941 when Operation BARBAROSSA, the Wehrmacht's invasion of the Soviet Union, had failed; yet, two and a half years on the Germans, in retreat and materially with no hope of ever regaining the initiative, were still fighting on. The Allies knew enough about Hitler and his monstrous regime to accept that Germany would most likely slug it out to the bitter end. They also recognized that, despite their decline, German forces still posed a major threat, and that if a cross-Channel invasion took place, it could not, under any circumstances, fail.
That didn’t just mean a success on D-Day itself, when, if deception plans worked, they would achieve tactical surprise, explains Holland, but also on D plus 1, D plus 2, D plus 3 and D plus 4. Ensuring enough men and materiel were landed quickly enough to secure a lodgement before any concentrated enemy counter-attack could be mounted was the absolute number-one priority of Allied planners.
This is why James Holland underscores how crucial the planning, organization and scale of OVERLORD were for the overall operation. "The level of detailed planning involved, and the many different strands that all needed to be pulled together by men and women of different nationalities is quite astonishing," writes Holland. As he argues further, it was not just a matter of training enough men and making enough rifles and machine guns, but of keeping them fed, supporting them with the right amount of medical assistance, fuel, clothing, ammunition. Between January and June 1944, for example, Britain alone produced 7 million 5-gallon jerry fuel cans. They then had to be stored, transported, and filled. It was also estimated that the Allies would need a staggering 8,000 tons of fuel every single day, so oil terminals, largely out of reach of the Luftwaffe by this stage of the war, were specially built around Liverpool and Bristol. Meanwhile, the fuel had to come from the US and the Caribbean and could only do so by ship across the Atlantic. Some 1,720,900 tons of fuel had reached Britain in the first five months of the year, three times the amount already used by Germany.
Vast depots of munitions and food also had to be established, describes Holland. Enormous numbers of warehouses were designed, built and filled throughout Britain, but especially around the ports. Every port in southern England was crammed for the invasion, while enormous quantities of shipping continued to cross the Atlantic.

Another key factor for the success of OVERLORD, asserts Holland, was air superiority – the troops needed it in order to land without interference from the air because for all the millions of men and massive amounts of weaponry and supplies being built up in Britain, shipping and port restrictions limited the number of men and amount of materiel that could be landed in Normandy on D-Day and the days immediately after. If the Germans were to have any chance of throwing them back into the sea, they would need to launch a coordinated counter-attack with all their mobile forces as quickly as possible. Intelligence had shown there were ten German panzer and mobile divisions in the West, so it was vital for the Allies that these units should be delayed and obstructed as much as possible in their efforts to reach Normandy by bombing every vehicle of theirs that moved during the nine weeks leading up to D-Day. "This was why winning air superiority was so important to the Allies," describes Holland the situation. "Without it, OVERLORD was a non-starter."
(Meanwhile, like the rest of Nazi Germany, the Luftwaffe was in terminal decline. General der Flieger Adolf Galland mourned: "The fighter arm and the defence of the Reich, which had seen in the jet fighter the saviour from an untenable situation, now had to bury all hopes.")

Yet, while those were definitely dark days for the Wehrmacht, the Allies had their own "headaches", continues Holland. One of them was the failure to take control over the French Resistance, on which the Allies relied and which Eisenhower hoped to arm. When it dawned on Général Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French and the self-proclaimed head of the French government-in-exile in London, that all liberated areas in France would be administered by the Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories, AMGOT, which had run civil affairs in Italy, and he could hope neither to have a part in the invasion, nor to return to his country as its head, he flew into a rage, forbidding Général Pierre Koenig, a Free French commander who in 1942 had led their heroic stand against Rommel’s forces at Bir Hacheim in Libya, to have any more communications with Eisenhower or his staff. This was an additional problem for Eisenhower, who needed the cooperation of Koenig because of the role of the Résistance and other French forces in OVERLORD.

Another "headache," narrates Holland, was the continual fear of an intelligence leak by which the Germans would learn when and where the invasion was to be launched. To keep the Germans guessing, an elaborate deception plan had been put into action, known collectively as Plan FORTITUDE. Every German agent attempting to infiltrate Britain had been caught, imprisoned and either turned or executed, but German intelligence was not aware of that. Double agents, overseen by the MI5, were busily spinning large amounts of false information in amongst the real but unimportant intelligence.
As Holland explains, in the field of wartime intelligence, it unquestionably helped that the western Allies were democracies; in Nazi Germany, intelligence organizations tended to operate independently of one another and generally mistrusted each other – intelligence was power and so all too often jealously guarded. The British and Americans, on the other hand, pooled their intelligence very effectively. The code-breakers and cryptanalysts joined forces to swiftly and effectively pull together all the information they received. Even civilian help was sought: via the BBC, British civilians had also been asked to send in any postcards and photographs people might have kept from France before the war; millions poured in and those from Normandy were carefully put to one side and analysed to help create a clearer picture of the cities, towns, villages, beaches and countryside from the ground.

Consequently, narrates Holland in his elaborate account of D-Day itself, while the Allies assaulted the Normandy coastline on June 6, 1944, the German
reaction to what was happening was "a chaotic mess." Achieving tactical surprise had been such a key objective for the Allied planners that, despite the hints, leaks and signals, this was exactly what had happened. As General Miles Dempsey, the commander of British Second Army, pointed out, assuming surprise was achieved, D-Day would always favour the attacker. ‘Everything is in his favour,’ he noted. ‘Detailed plans, rehearsals, tactical surprise, morale.’ The Nazi command was, indeed, in disarray. The Allied forces made great progress.

Nevertheless, D-Day was a very sad day, one of unfathomable violence. As Holland reveals, the success of the Allies was largely due to the fact that they had come up against the very old and the very young, German men recovered from debilitating wounds or unwilling to fight. "Once, there had been infantry divisions brimming with young, lean, fit, motivated men," describes the author, "but by this fifth year of the war they had gone, consumed by long years of fighting in far-off lands – in the Soviet Union, in North Africa, in the Mediterranean." Yet, converging on Normandy were not only many more Allied troops and supplies, but also among the very best troops in the entire German Armed Forces – the panzer divisions. While they weren't defending the coast, they were deployed inland, and still represented a potent threat to anyone taking them on – and especially in the difficult, hedgy terrain of Normandy. In the weeks to follow, there would be a massive concentration of panzer divisions in Normandy. D-Day, for all its awfulness, was only the first of what would stretch out for another seventy-six long, difficult and brutal days until the battle for Normandy was finally done.

Holland continues his meticulously researched work with an overview of the rest of the campaign, exploring questions such as "Why was it taking the Allies so long if the claim that German soldiers were well-trained has been disproved?" In fact, as he explains, it was largely because it didn’t require a huge amount of training to sit in a foxhole behind a hedge and fire a machine gun, rifle, mortar or Panzerfaust while the Allied soldiers battled through the hedgerows. What was needed was discipline and courage, and the Germans, soldiers under a totalitarian regime, had these in abundance.

He also disproves the myth that despite materiel wealth, the Allies were facing a German Army equipped with far better weaponry. According to him, in terms of small arms – pistols, rifles, sub-machine guns and machine guns – there really wasn’t much of a difference. In addition, some important innovations were adopted by both the Americans and British, including improved means of communication between infantry and armor; for instance, telephones had been placed on the back of tanks. Interestingly, Americans especially had a willingness to soak up new tactics and absorb lessons, narrates Holland. For all the concerns about how long it was taking them to grapple their way through the bocage, actually it was only around six weeks from D-Day until the middle of July and in that time they had captured the Cotentin and Cherbourg – all of which had been done in dense hedgerow country and with only gradually increased armour, artillery and tank destroyer support. "And what was six weeks in the big scheme of things? Before the invasion, Montgomery had reckoned it would take them ninety days to get to Paris. They were currently about halfway through that," remarks the author with a tinge of humor.

James Holland's Normandy '44 is an outstanding work that clearly and compellingly covers its vast subject. The author does a wonderful job studying the operational level of the invasion and reinserting it into his narrative, thus creating an exciting picture of what actually happened in that corner of north-west France in 1944. Recommendable for all WWII buffs.

[Mike Mason · Rating 5 out of 5]

After a couple of Beevor’s - Stalingrad and The Spanish Civil War. Time for another non-fiction read. This one covering the period just before the 6 June 1944 D-Day invasion upto the 25th August and the liberation of Paris.

Whilst not having the visceral violence of ‘Saving Private Ryan’ or ‘Band of Brothers.’ James Holland portrays the horror of this campaign through eye witness statements from both the Allied and German sides. 700 pages of narrative, maps and photos. Particularly liked the postscript that followed up on many of the fighting characters.

Some interesting observations on Bradbury, Churchill, Eisenhower and Patton as well as the German commanders. My favourite being the portrait of Montgomery as a tetchy, on the spectrum spikey individual. Lovely story of him with de Gaulle:

‘On arrival, de Gaulle spoke to Montgomery at length in French. It was a good job Monty couldn’t understand, because de Gaulle was explaining how, now he was in France, he was in charge. Eventually, when he abruptly stopped talking , his ADC stepped forward and said, ‘The General thanks you for your gallant liberation of France.’

The authors writing style makes 700 pages flash by. Comments like:

‘Dietrich was a good Nazi and brave soldier, but not the sharpest tool in the shed.’

‘The roasting of human flesh and the combustion of ammunition and the defecation of a million voracious flies created an aura of such sense-assaulting horror that we recoiled.’

make the real life story flow. Wonderful stories of heroism, ineptitude and sacrifice on both sides.
Inside the back cover it mentions the Author has a 3 part documentary on Prime - Normandy ‘44 that I will dig out.

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Firstly, I have to say this is a really excellent book, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. James Holland has not only done a huge amount of research but, more importantly, has not taken for granted what he found; he has gone over it all thoroughly and come up with his own conclusions, which refute many of the myths and incorrect/one dimensional beliefs that have been repeated many times in other histories. I will discuss these later.

One of the things I like about this book is that it is very well laid out. At the front is the Contents section, then the map section. There are 25 maps! (yay!), and they are all together – with an index of maps – so this means you can easily find the map you want without having to remember which chapter it’s in or keep flicking through to book to find it. One of the main criticisms I have (and have read other people also have) of war histories is a lack of maps, but this book is excellent on that point, even though not all the villages mentioned in the text are on them, which is a bit frustrating. To be fair, if all of them were marked, the maps would probably look too cluttered, although Antony Beevor's D-Day book has better maps with more places marked. It helps to have both books to hand while reading either one.

Then comes a section listing Principal Personalities, those being both those important to the campaign, e.g. the generals, but also many of the ordinary soldiers, sailors and airmen mentioned in the narrative and whose stories are described. This section gives their names, ranks and units, and they are grouped by nationality. At the end of that section is a double page of photographs of (24) of these men, and this again adds to the enjoyment of the book. It is always great to be able to see a picture of the people you are reading about. Sure, we have probably all seen photos of Ike and Monty before, but not Major Hans von Luck or Flight Sergeant Ken Adam, for example.

This is followed by the author’s Foreword and Prologue before he gets into the main narrative. This has many chapters, beginning with pre-invasion planning, the bombing of infrastructure and trains to ensure the Germans would have mobility problems before and after the invasion, and Allied logistics.

This last is a theme Holland comes back to again and again, and it is a very important one. He reminds us that this was primarily an industrial war, and one where logistics were of paramount importance. Indeed, without the industrial might of all the Allies, but especially the USA, either we would have lost the war or it would have gone on for far longer and cost exponentially more lives. He draws attention to some truly astonishing facts, e.g. in 1939, the USA only had 72 fighter planes, an army of 189,000 men and in that year built a total of 18 tanks: yes, eighteen! In 1943 alone, they built 26,608 tanks and 85,000 aircraft, stunning figures that demonstrate the truly awesome capacity of American industry to gear up for war from scratch in a very short time.

The Allied armies in Normandy needed food, fuel, ammunition, clothing, water, replacement equipment and vehicles. When I think of some of the logistical problems modern countries face when unexpected things happen (hurricanes or volcanoes, for example) and how they struggle to get enough supplies to an affected area, it is all the more impressive to read about what we achieved in 1944. Prior to D-Day the British built two ‘portable’ harbours (the Mulberries) so they could land supplies off any beach – each was the size of the port of Dover, a major port on the south-east coast of England – what foresight. To quote the book, By 4 September, Mulberry B had delivered 39,743 vehicles, 220,231 personnel and, in total, 517,844 tons of supplies. After D-Day they even sank a fuel pipeline under the English Channel so they could pump petrol straight to France to supplement that arriving by ship. They also ran a pipeline inland, which was necessary because, On average, a tank used 8,000 gallons of fuel a week, and an entire armoured division some 60,000 a day. These statistics are truly amazing and demonstrate the amount of pre-invasion planning, foresight, creativity and hard work that had gone into it. The Germans, by contrast, were woefully under-supplied and even if they had had the resources to resupply their divisions, by summer 1944 the Allied air supremacy would have prevented much of it from happening.

There are chapters for each of the major operations to defeat the Axis forces, as well as on the air war, as well as sections devoted to chain-of-command and control, and political control.

At the end is a Postscript where Holland gives us a short synopsis of what happened to some of the men mentioned in the book – whether they lived or died, and in some cases what careers they had after the war. What a lovely addition to the story.

Page 540 is the last page of the main narrative but then comes a short Glossary and the appendices. These give details of the composition of a British infantry battalion, artillery regiment and armoured regiment, followed by those of the German SS. After this there is a Timeline for the campaign (dates of each action/operation), and then comes a detailed timeline for D-Day itself, from 00.07 hours until 23.00. Finally, Selected Sources and Index complete this great book.

Don’t be fooled, this is no dry tome of facts; Holland’s writing is clear, interesting and colloquial. He tells it like it is, in a fashion that is easy to understand but does not talk down to you. He intersperses every description of a battle, operation or action with the personal stories of the men who fought them: British, American, Canadian, Polish, German and French, on the ground, at sea and in the air. They are both amazing and exciting to read, as well as giving you an appreciation of the horrors the men on both sides went through. Here is an example of the story of a German machine gun loader in a bunker on D-Day:

A Churchill [tank] emerged and came forward to within a few yards [of an 88 mm gun that had just destroyed a Sherman (my brackets)] firing at point-blank range at the 88, destroying both the gun and the inside of the casement.
Briefly blinded by smoke and dust, Eineg heard the Churchill firing over and over. Frantically, he tried to change ammunition belts, but then came face to face with a Tommy, covered in grey concrete dust, charging towards them. The soldier flung a grenade, which bounced off the wall and exploded in the corridor. Eineg ducked, crouching a split second before the Tommy opened fire with his Sten sub-machine gun. The gunner, however, was not so quick. Eineg saw the bullets punch holes in his chest, then emerge from his back and ricochet wildly around the concrete walls. Several hit Eineg, but their energy was spent and, miraculously, he remained uninjured. Suddenly, the Tommy trod on a mine and bits of him and his uniform flew through the slit. Eineg ran out into the corridor. Mayhem reigned, but despite this, the same officer who had stopped him before now motioned for him to follow him back to the MG post. As the officer stepped inside, first a burst of Sten-gun fire and then another explosion rocked the room. ‘I looked into the MG room and the scene was terrible,’ said Eineg. ‘The officer and my gunner were on fire, with their limbs burned away, and the room full of burning powder which coated the walls and was dripping from the ceiling. I was sickened by the sight'.

Here is an account from mid-July, describing Operation Jupiter, one of the operations the British launched to take the Orne valley and the high ground beyond it:

Although much of Caen had now fallen, the Germans were still stubbornly holding the ground to the south-east on the far side of the River Orne and they still held Hill 112, which both General Miles Dempsey [British Second Army] and General Hans Eberbach [Panzergruppe West], Geyr’s replacement, were well aware was a vital piece of high ground. And while General O’Connor’s decision to pull back from the hill ten days earlier might well have been the right one, there was no denying it was going to be a tougher nut to crack for a second time. Holding the line were the 9. SS- and 10. SS-Panzer divisions, both in far better condition than 12. SS and now with all their units arrived at the front. Additionally, they had the Schwere SS-Panzerabteilung-102 – Heavy Tank Battalion-102 of Tigers attached, as well as an array of 88 mm and anti-tank guns and the 277. Infanterie-Division also joining II. SS-Panzerkorps. It was the 43rd Wessex Division who were to assault the hill, supported by Churchills and flame-throwing Crocodiles. [A Crocodile is a Churchill tank with not only its main gun but also a flamethrower that could project a jet of burning oil and rubber up to 100 yards, and the Germans were terrified of them – who wouldn’t be!]
Supporting the Wessexmen was the usual heavy artillery. Sergeant Walter Caines had never experienced anything like it. He could hardly hear himself think. The barrage was followed by the arrival of Typhoons overhead, strafing enemy positions with rockets, bombs and cannons. The first objectives were taken easily, largely because Eberbach had already ordered his men back to a line straddling Hill 112. Caines had set up the signals equipment near the battalion’s start line. Enemy ‘Moaning Minnies’ [German rockets] and shells screamed over, but the first prisoners were also being brought in; Caines thought they looked exhausted and terrified. A few hours later, word reached the battalion CP that Éterville, right on the Évrecy-Caen road, had been successfully captured, so Caines and the rest of the Signals Platoon moved up with Battalion Headquarters to the shattered remains of the village church. ‘Shells rained down upon us as we entered’, noted Caines, ‘and it was truly terrifying and most nerve-racking. It appeared to us that we would not have an easy stay in this village and to be quite honest, I thought that if every attack was to be like this, I could not guarantee my life longer than a few days’.
Vicious fighting continued all day. With their thick 150 mm frontal armour, 30 mm greater than any other tank on the battlefields, the Churchills were, on paper, a good option for supporting the advancing infantry, and to begin with progress was good. Not only was Éterville taken, so was Maltot beyond, while both tanks and infantry managed to rumble up the shallow, steady and wide incline to the ridge of Hill 112. As they neared the summit, however, the waiting array of Tigers and 88s on the far side was able to blast them at short range. Not even the Churchills’ frontal armour was enough. The 31st Armoured Brigade lost 39 tanks that day, most left strewn and burning amid the crater-pitted open ground of the hill.
Later, 43rd Division commander Major-General Ivor ‘Butcher’ Thomas ordered another brigade of tanks, this time thinner-skinned Shermans, to push on through the Churchills, but the new and young Brigadier Michael Carver point-blank refused, leading to an angry exchange between the two. Carver, though, was in situ, and could see that his Shermans would be entering an attack more suicidal than that of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. He unquestionably made the right decision.

All the chapters in the main section contain narratives of this kind – exciting, harrowing and giving an excellent idea of the trauma, fear, exhilaration and incredible bravery felt and exercised by the men on both sides.

Holland doesn’t pull his punches, and he gives criticism where it is due. He does not indulge in character-assassination, however, and is fair. For example, Montgomery had few social skills and not many people liked him all that much, and the same was said of the Air Chief, Leigh-Mallory. Holland, however, states that people not liking them or being rubbed up the wrong way by them has influenced how they were viewed in terms of performance. While he is quite scathing of Leigh-Mallory at times, he states unequivocally that Montgomery was a very good general and does not deserve the poor reputation he acquired. It must be remembered that Monty had been fighting the Germans for years, in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia before Normandy, and he knew that the way to beat the Germans was to use technology and good tactics – artillery, air power and tactics to draw them out and fight – in other words to grind them down and deny them the use of space and manoeuvrability that had served them so well at the beginning of the war.

Patton, of course, whose Third Army landed quite some time after the invasion, was a Blitzkreig kind of guy, but he was far more ready to accept high casualty rates than Monty, hence his view that Monty was weak, slow and not as committed. The soldiers on the ground may not have agreed with him. Nevertheless, he was also a fine general who got results and whose men loved him, though Patton was not as good as Bradley.

There are also three sections of black and white photographs in the book, which again add to the enjoyment. I did notice, however, that there were two photos labelled as Panther tanks, at least one of which was, in fact, of King Tigers (I'm not 100% sure about the other one), so they need to correct that for a future second edition. I think we can forgive them.

Regarding the myths/wrong impressions I mentioned at the beginning, those addressed in this book are, in brief:

1) German machine guns were fundamentally better than those of the Allies.
While it is true that Allied soldiers were terrified of the MG42 (particularly) because of its very high rate of fire, it was not very accurate, the barrel needed changing often (because it got so hot) and, as a result, in practice was not usually fired at its highest rate or it would jam.
The American .30 calibre machine gun (M1919) was a solid, reliable, practical weapon with a decent rate of fire; likewise the British/Canadian/Australian Bren gun, another reliable, dependable weapon that needed minimal maintenance {Update: I was told recently by someone that knows his stuff, that inaccuracy is desirable in a machine gun, and that after testing the Bren had to be altered to make it a bit less accurate. As it was explained to me, that's because a machine gun is there to suppress and frighten the enemy into halting their advance, as well as killing them – a Bren gun putting loads of holes in the same target does not stop everyone else from charging forward, whereas an MG42 spraying bullets all over the place is highly effective in that regard];

2) German tanks were better than ours. When people say that, they are usually referring to the Tiger, Panther and, later on in the war, the Tiger II (aka the King Tiger), and the reason is that at the time of their introduction they had bigger guns and thicker armour protection than those of the Allies, and this did mean that they were difficult to destroy unless you got pretty close to them. On the downside, however, they were big, heavy and complicated (over-engineered), so were expensive, took a long time to build and needed more complicated maintenance in the field than Allied tanks. In practice, therefore, often a Tiger regiment would almost never have all of its vehicles available to fight because some would be in the shop. Another important point is that the vast majority of tanks available to the Heeres (Nazi army) were Panzer Mk IVs, which were good tanks but not any better than those of the Allies.
The Sherman tank was built by Ford and GM, people who knew a bit about building vehicles, and they were reliable, easy to maintain, and cheap and quick to manufacture, so the Allies could replace lost units very quickly once America had geared up for the war, which it did incredibly quickly. That may not have been much consolation to the crews, however.
The British Cromwell was one of the fastest tanks in WWII and had a low profile, so was great for spearheading attacks or scouting ahead. The Churchill could climb muddy slopes at a much greater angle than the Sherman so was great for getting over obstacles or up steep hills. It also had the thickest frontal armour of any tank in Normandy – 150 mm. Earlier on in the war, however, the British Cruiser tanks were somewhat unreliable and under-gunned, so were inferior to the Panzer IIIs and IVs, but by 1944 the situation was different;

3) The Americans took too long to fight through the Normandy Bocage (hedgerow) country, and
4) The British were way too slow capturing Caen and breaking out. While it was true that Caen was slated for capture on D-Day itself, if you look at the Normandy campaign in the round, the Allies secured all of Montgomery’s original objectives for the campaign two weeks earlier than anticipated before the invasion. The bocage country was very difficult to fight in, and the British/Canadians were often up against seven divisions (they had three of their own much of the time), five of which were SS divisions. The main reason they didn’t go faster, however, was that the Allied generals were not prepared to needlessly throw away thousands of lives by continuous frontal attacks, so used artillery and air power to an enormous extent to degrade the German defence prior to sending in the tanks and infantry. Nevertheless, they still suffered huge numbers of casualties, but not as many as they would have. The Russians advanced so fast on the Eastern Front because they didn’t care how many men they lost – and they lost vastly more than we did;

5) The Germans were more skilful at tactics than the Allies. It is true that the Germans were very good at what they did, and they often won battles because they were clever, manoeuvrable, quick to react and brought to bear their best and most powerful weapons and men at one schwerpunkt; but they did tend to rely more on a smaller (and shrinking) number of elite units to support the bulk of their armies, which were composed of ordinary troops and ‘foreigners’ from the Greater German Reich who did not necessarily have the skills, training, equipment or commitment. This meant that their elite units became exhausted and depleted and, as they were gradually destroyed owing to attrition, the ability of the Germans to counter-attack was diminished. Thankfully, Hitler’s orders to never give ground meant they could not withdraw and reorganise.

Holland goes into all this in much more detail, and it makes fascinating reading. I like his style of writing and the presentation of the book. I recommend this as one of the best books on WWII.
5 stars.

[Creighton · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Hollands book Normandy '44 is a 652 page epic on the battle to liberate France, and the people involved in this daunting objective. Holland writes about the planning, the build up of opposing forces, the storming of all Five beaches, and the subsequent battles to expand the allied foothold and eventually breakout and defeat the German forces. This book ends at the closing of the Falaise pocket and the surrender of German forces in this pocket.

I have to be honest, before this book, I didn't really focus on the western front of WW2 much (I was more of an eastern front aficionado), but after reading this book, that has changed. Now I want to read a lot of books on the western front, and learn as much as I can about this theatre of the conflict.

Holland writes about many things that impressed me and that I was glad to see mentioned; I like how he mentioned the "Materialkrieg" which I remember Robert Citino reiterating over and over again about the war in his trilogy, and how the Germans couldn't win against an enemy that could outproduce them. I like how he calls out the armchair historians who love to boast and brag about how "superior" the German army was in tactics, weaponry, generalship, tanks, and training, when it was the allies who had great tanks, adaptive tactics, efficient weaponry, and generals who were great for their positions and not constantly being sacked because they faced disapproval from Hitler. I like how he notes the allies strategy and tactics as a whole were to grind the Germans down, while trying to minimize their losses and then launch attacks against them. He points out how the western democracies were keen to minimize their casualties, and how they wanted to maximize the use of effective weaponry, and this is partly because unlike totalitarian nations, the western allies had to deal with the political ramifications of launching costly and daring attacks.

Holland discusses the experiences of both sides, and he tries to give an honest and objective analysis of the operations, the generals, and he dispels some myths and/or beliefs about this campaign.

I would say this book deserves Five-stars, and I would gladly re-read it again, as it was a wonderful piece of literature on the conflict. I think I would recommend this book for those who don't know much about the campaign and want to know more.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over the past couple of decades James Holland has built for himself a reputation as one of the foremost chroniclers of the Second World War. Focusing on the campaigns and battles in which the British fought, his books excel at providing a comprehensible overview of events while incorporating the voices of the men on both sides who fought in them. His history of the Normandy invasion and the campaign that followed offers a prime example of his approach, one that balances the operational and personal accounts of the fighting to give an effective and balanced sense of events.

Using this approach, Holland stresses a number of points often missing or obscured in previous accounts. The first of these that the reader encounters is the fragility of the German position. Though daunting in a number of respects, the defenses the British, American, and Canadian forces encountered on D-Day were essentially a “crust” covering a hollow core. By 1944, Germany was too depleted to provide more than a few divisions to fill that core, with many of them consisting of older draftees and 17-year olds with only limited training. By contrast, the Allied divisions in England preparing for the invasion had been training for two years, and were eager to get on with winning the war.

Manpower was not the only advantage possessed by the Allies, as they also enjoyed command of the air. Nobody appreciated the edge this gave them better than Erwin Rommel, the commander of Germany’s defenses. His experience in North Africa gave him an appreciation of the overwhelming power of Allied air forces that his colleagues from the Eastern Front did not possess, and fueled his conviction that the panzer divisions in France needed to be stationed close to the beaches. Though the campaign would demonstrate the validity of his concerns, he was overruled by his superiors. Holland stresses the constraints under which Rommel operated, with much of the authority to deploy his forces concentrated in Adolf Hitler’s hands. This ensured delays that proved fatal to Germany’s hopes to drive the invasion back into the sea.

Nevertheless, the D-Day operation was no easy affair for the Allies, as they faced formidable positions that constrained their ability to deploy their superior forces. Here Holland pushes back against some of the popular conceptions of the invasion, most notably the “bloody Omaha” image. While not minimizing the difficulty the Americans faced there or the sacrifices of the men involved, he notes that the landings there were nonetheless regarded at that time by Omar Bradley, the commander of the First United States Army, as a success. This is a point that Holland stresses for the other landings as well, all of which established beachheads that were expanded steadily in the days that followed. He gives considerable credit for this success to Bernard Montgomery, the overall commander of the invasion forces, whose poor reputation he attributes to “Monty”’s lamentable interpersonal skills. Holland credits Montgomery with appreciating the Allied armies’ advantages in firepower, and employing them for maximum effect, though as he notes elsewhere in the book, the British general was hardly unique in his understanding of this.

As Holland argues, Montgomery’s preference for using firepower instead of sacrificing manpower reflected both the Allies’ advantages and the political demands faced by democracies waging war. Facing no such constraints, German forces sacrificed considerable numbers of men in their efforts to defeat the invasion. While this slowed the expansion of the beachhead, it came at a considerable and unsustainable cost. Even as the Germans threw divisions into the battle, their ranks were debilitated by Allied air power even before reaching the front. Once there, the advantages granted by the terrain inhibited the Allies’ advance, adding to the political pressure Montgomery faced to break out. Yet Holland notes that when they finally did so, it was ahead of the timetable he had set out prior to the invasion, reflecting the overall success of the operation.

These conclusions are set against the toll of this success. Holland’s use of the personal accounts of dozens of survivors on both sides, collected from memoirs and oral histories, underscores the personal costs paid by the men and women to achieve it. The balance he achieved in conveying this is among his book’s greatest strengths, making it an effective account of the Normandy campaign. While tighter editing would have helped with the annoying repetition of some details he provides repeatedly throughout the text, this does nothing to detract from his approach to recounting the invasion and the insights he draws from it.

[Gram · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating in depth account of the D-Day landings on June 6th 1944 and the subsequent Allied breakout from Normandy which lasted throughout June, July and August - a total of 77 days in a bloody war of attrition which saw Allied daily casualties surpass those of some of the greatest battles of World War I.
In this eminently readable book, author James Holland uses diary entries and notes written by dozens of fighting men from American, British, Canadian, French and German armies. There's also the daily experience of the leader of one French resistance group and an Irish nurse working just behind the advancing Allied lines. Equally compelling are the stories of Allied airmen who flew countless missions in fighter bombers and heavy bombers to such devastating effect throughout this campaign.
The pace of the book is unrelenting as front line troops describe endless attacks and counter attacks which turned the breakthrough from the Normandy beaches into a bloody, hard fought slog. The attention to detail means the reader isn't spared many of the horrific scenes which followed these brutal encounters.
The story opens with senior military staff from Britain and the USA - joined by Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchil and King George VI - listening to a lecture by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, detailing the plans for D-Day and the targets to be captured in the days and weeks to follow.
There are "mindboggling" statistics as to the amount of men, weapons and supplies used by the Allies from D-Day onwards, including amazing innovations such as PLUTO (the undersea oil pipeline which traversed the English Channel) and the two massive "Mulberry" harbours which allowed massive amounts of trucks, tanks and other war material to be unloaded directly on to the beaches mere days after the initial landings.
The Allies slow advance was supported for weeks by shelling from US and Royal Navy's ships lying just off the French coast and large artillery batteries which almost continually pounded Wehrmacht positions until the last two or three weeks of the campaign when the remnants of Germany's army finally escaped from Normandy.
Despite the large numbers of killed and wounded suffered by both sides, Holland points to the effectiveness of the Allies "steel not flesh" strategy which did ensure their casualty lists were not higher. Words such as "grind", "ground down" and "chewed up" are liberally sprinkled throughout this story, describing the sometimes painfully slow advance through the winding roads, fields and hedgerows of the Normandy countryside, . We learn how both the Wehrmacht's raw recruits and battle hardened veterans were terrified by the destruction of men, trucks, guns and tanks by American Mustang fighter bombers and the RAF's deadly rocket-firing Typhoons which only let up when there was bad weather. Throughout the fighting, the Allies enjoyed almost complete air superiority - despite repeated promises from Hitler and the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW - the High Command of the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany throughout World War II) of Luftwaffe support. Hitler and OKW's repeated orders that their soldiers stand their ground served only to add to the plight of the German military, handicapping major figures such as Field Marshall Erwin Rommel in conducting battles as they saw fit. That said, one has to wonder at the slavish devotion to Hitler given by experienced military men when it was obvious his orders would lead only to defeat.
Overall, Holland emphasises that the Allies won principally because, at that stage, they were better at fighting a war on every single level - planning, intelligence, logistics.
The book's final chapter is given over to what happened to the various people whose eyewitness accounts make this a must read for those interested in the history of the Second World War.
My thanks to the publishers, Grove Atlantic and to NetGalley for a copy of this book in return for an unbiased review.

[Chris Wray · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a magnificent account of Operation Overlord and the subsequent campaign in Normandy. As well as being a rigorous historian, James Holland is a skilful writer who has crafted his material into an entertaining, enjoyable, coherent and persuasive narrative. The events themselves are recounted with clarity, and the historical outline is stitched together with several illustrative personal accounts. Something that I particularly enjoy about his writing is the fact that he uses a relatively small number of these and draws on them repeatedly. Rather than isolated quotes, we are introduced to a cast of characters and follow them throughout the campaign.

It's fair to say that James Holland draws different conclusions on the martial competence of the Allies and their conduct of the war than some other prominent popular historians (D'Este, Hastings and Beevor, to name three). It would be too much to call him a revisionist, but I think he does a great job of challenging some of the popular assumptions about the war that are held in the West, and sees them as resulting as much from a post-war reappraisal of (especially) Britain's place in the world as much as they do from analysing and synthesising the available evidence.

One of these, which he rightly sees as crucial to understanding the Allies' whole approach to the war, is the idea of 'steel, not flesh.' Steel, not flesh, was "A strategy Britain had been determined to pursue long before war had been declared and one to which the United States had been equally wedded. This meant using their global muscle and reach, their modernity and technological know-how to the greatest possible effect, allowing industrialised mass-production and mechanisation to do as much of the hard work as possible and limiting the number of those in the firing line to the absolute minimum." This meant that, while casualty rates in frontline infantry and armoured units were very high, higher even than those from the First World War, the overall proportion of men in those units was low, and so the number of casualties was also kept lower than in the German, Japanese or Soviet armies. The Germans and Japanese had "vast armies because they had neither the global reach nor industrial muscle to fight any other way. Boots on the ground have to compensate for a shortage in mechanisation. It was, however, a deeply inefficient way to fight a war in the 1940s and cost them millions of lives."

He also takes a slightly more positive view than many on Montgomery. Bernard Montgomery is what I would call a difficult hero, and his reputation has undoubtedly been tarnished by his vain, arrogant and generally unpleasant personality. But he was an able general, and more to the point a general who understood what could reasonably be achieved with the resources at his disposal: "Montgomery's reputation had been founded on the build-up of overwhelming materiel and a steady and methodical drive forward using heavy fire-power to support the infantry and armour, and precisely this approach enabled the number of front-line troops to be kept comparatively small, which in turn saved lots of lives. It was a method that suited machine and technology-heavy armies made up largely from conscripts from western democracies...From Monty's perspective, it was methodical, it took time, but it was within the realms of what could realistically be expected from the armies under his command. Central to this approach was the firepower he could bring to bear, both from the air and from the artillery, to grind the enemy into the dust. It was no use trying to ape the small-scale tactical versatility of the Germans, because both the British and Americans were bringing large-scale industrialisation to their modus operandi. This meant that the bigger the operation and the greater the number of component parts, the harder it was to operate with tactical agility...It was the constraints of wealth against the freedom of poverty; the Germans could organise themselves more quickly because they had so much less to organise."

These are critically important insights, as the Allies' citizen soldiers simply could not be driven to action in the same way as their German, Japanese, or Soviet counterparts. The Allied armies depended on the maintenance of morale and the consent of their soldiers to continue fighting; mere discipline enforced with the threat or reality of violence was not an option for liberal Western democracies. I would argue that this is a very good thing, reflecting the same values they had gone to war to defend in the first place. The Germans in Normandy were not better soldiers than the Allies, but they did fight in a way that reflected the dictatorial and militaristic regime that sent them there. It is also important to remember that the Normandy landscape favours the defender and that the Germans, for all their alleged superiority, fared just as badly when they launched counterattacks against the Allies. Similarly, both the German and Allied armies were much more of a tapestry than is sometimes implied; not every German division was made up of crack Panzer-grenadiers, while the Allies had their fair share of elite and high-performing units (such as the Paratroopers, Commandos and Rangers).

Several aspects of the “Allies performed poorly” are comprehensively dismantled. Villers Bocage is put in context and rightly shown to be a minor and relatively insignificant episode, at best a tactical victory that the Germans were simply unable to exploit. We are also reminded that only 50,000 Germans escaped the Falaise Pocket: as a proportion of the German soldiers who had been present in Normandy, and compared to the numbers who escaped from the Germans in similar circumstances (such as the 340,000 evacuated from Dunkirk), this was an incredibly low number. To make this even more pointed, of the seven Panzer divisions trapped in the Falaise pocket, only 1300 men and two dozen tanks escaped, "out of 140,000 of the best equipped and best trained divisions the Germans had and a total of around 2500 panzers that had been sent to Normandy." This should rightly be seen as a crushing defeat for the Germans, rather than as an example of Allied bungling.

A similar point is made about equipment, as he contends that, "There is a persistent myth that despite material wealth, the Allies were facing a German Army equipped with far better weaponry. It is a myth that needs to be knocked on the head”. In terms of small arms and artillery, there wasn't much of a difference. With tanks, there was a difference resulting from differing requirements, priorities and military philosophies. An important and related point is that the Germans fought the war in an overwhelmingly land-centric manner, and that in terms of air and sea power, the Allies held an insurmountable advantage in both quantity and quality of arms and equipment.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is the consideration James Holland gives to the operational level of war. Simply put, this relates to the economics and logistics of war and was something in which the Allies undoubtedly excelled: "Time, however, allows a more nuanced and balanced picture, and one in which the operational level of war, so often ignored, is reinserted. The management of these armies, air forces and navies was truly astonishing. As the Germans discovered, it was challenging indeed to fight offensively in Normandy, especially when their enemy was so much better at fighting wars than they were. As Michael Wittmann's blaze of glory showed at Villers-Bocage, it was not much use pulling off a small tactical engagement if every other part of the war effort was found wanting. At almost every level, the Germans were failed by their high command. They simply never had enough of anything and were forced to dance to the Allies' tune, not the other way around"

James Holland is surely right when he looks back from the the middle of August 1944 and reflects that, "for all the frustrations of the Allied high command, eight weeks was really nor very long, especially not in the context of the entire war, and what had been achieved deserves greater accolades that have often been awarded...much criticism has been poured on to the Allied efforts in Normandy, but this has often been made by armchair historians too quick to be dazzled by rapid-firing machine guns, big tanks, fiendish anti-tank guns and the supposed tactical acuity of the Germans. The British and Canadians have been blamed for being too stodgy, too ponderous and too scared to take risks. Even the Americans have come under the cosh for unimaginative tactics and for being too slow in the hedgerows. This criticism is, however, both misplaced and unfair. For all the Allies' firepower and incredible logistics arm, it was the infantry and the armour who had to take most of the ground, and no one can justifiably criticise these men - mostly conscripts from democratic countries rather than from totalitarian militaristic states - for being slow. The risks were simply enormous, the sacrifice immense...Of course mistakes were made, and different decisions might have made a difference, but, on the whole, these citizen armies performed incredibly well."

[Deacon Tom (Feeling Better) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Without a doubt, the best World War II book I have ever read. The author does incredible research and then documents all of it in this rather long book.

What was unique in this book was that it gave the German perspective of the battles – – I’ve never seen that before.

Outstanding book for history, buffs like me, but pack a lunch because it’s a long one.

I highly recommend

[Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of many books being released this year on the 75th anniversary of D-Day. The book was well written and researched. The author does a very good job of presenting what was happening on both sides of the invasion and aftermath. What I most enjoyed about the book was that he countered some frequent myths (the Germans had superior weaponry for one) and comfirmed others (Montgomery was a popous ass) along with the detail about the individuals fighting on both sides. The book itself is engaging and reads more like a novel that a dry recitation of history.

I recomend this book for those looking for an interesting read about D-Day and the events immediately after with a slightly different perspective than others.

I received a free Kindle copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon and my fiction book review blog. I also posted it to my Facebook and Twitter pages.

[Gary. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent and informative.

[Jorge Morcillo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lo comencé a leer a mediados de diciembre, por lo que no es en su totalidad una lectura de este nuevo año. En todo caso es un buen libro, que consigue hacer interesante y hasta novedoso (con su particular modo de bajar hasta el soldado raso y poner ahí el radar) lo que ya hemos leído en otros libros.

[CD · Rating 3 out of 5]

[Last review of 2019. Catching up on some reviews].

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another fine book by one of the finest WW2 scholars we have today. This is another solid entry into his growing catalogue of the epic struggles throughout the global conflict in the 1940's. While Normandy is well covered and certainly one of if not THE most famous of WW2 battles, Holland does a superb job taking it step by step from right before the jumping off point to the final battle that ended in Germany's hopes becoming terminal on the Western Front. He peppers the narrative throughout with personal accounts from every front and foe involved. Very remarkable all the way around and while a lot of this isn't new, it is told in a way that forces the reader to understand the carnage beyond that of just Omaha, Utah, etc (beach landings). Most Americans think Normandy we think of the beach landings, but there was still another 70+ days of fighting before Normandy was retaken completely by the Allies. That is what I appreciated here, this is told as a COMPLETE account. You will be through the beach landings a quarter of the way in to the book. Why four and not five stars then? I don't think this is a must read. It's a fine book, but I think this is for the most thorough WW2 history buffs. I think anyone who knows little about this battle should also not start here, but on one that focuses solely on the beach landings and then move on to this and the battles that lie beyond.

[Singleton Mosby · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Holland delivers again. When you think there’s nothing new to add to the D-day story this narrative Holland proves differently.
Highly readable through a mix of personal narrative, strategic and tactical assessments, I wouldn’t have minded had this book been twice as long.

Best of all is the thorough analyses of the magnitude of the Allied success in difficult circumstances. I also found it very interesting how Holland dispels the myth of the superior German soldier and equipment.

Recommended read. Even if you think you’ve read all there’s to know about the battle for Normandy.

[Tanner Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is incredible that, 80 years since the end of the Second World War, we can still enjoy books as superlatively good as "Normandy '44." James Holland--long a favorite author of mine--absolutely knocked it out of the park with this one.

"Normandy '44" was originally published for D-Day's 75th anniversary (six years ago). I bought it two days after it released after speeding through its opening pages in a bookstore. (Coincidentally, my wife does not allow me to shop unsupervised in bookstores anymore.) Since 2016, Holland has capitalized on the world's never-ending hunger for World War II books, publishing five books in this a la carte series: "Burma '44" (2016), "Sicily '43" (2020), "Cassino '44" (2024), and "Victory '45" (2025). He is both gifted and prolific.

Holland writes popular history. His intended audience is people like me (and you, if you also like reading incredibly detailed military histories just for fun). Very little of what he writes is new, in other words. It's designed to introduce topics and conversations to the layperson. In that regard, he's like Stephen Ambrose. (Unlike Ambrose, however, Holland doesn't plagiarize.) One thing I appreciate about Holland's work is how cleanly he presents various arguments before offering his take. Several times in "Normandy '44," for example, he discusses multiple perspectives of an issue before stating something along the lines of, "but here's what I think happened because of X evidence." It is raw, engaging, and concise.

Most of us are familiar with D-Day. June 6, 1944. It's 81st anniversary just passed. But very few of us are familiar with the epic, 76-day campaign that followed. The fighting in Normandy was among the most intense of the Second World War and in an environment unlike almost any other. Not only is the campaign unfamiliar to many, but so is the makeup of its participants. Canadians and British troops made up the majority of the fighting men for a significant portion of the campaign. Americans didn't outnumber their allies until late June. By the end of the Normandy campaign, the Allies had committed 39 divisions, totaling approximately 850,000 men. The losses were considerable for both sides. Germany lost (killed, wounded, captured, or missing) between 300,000 and 450,000 troops, while the Allies lost about 210,000. The casualty rates on both sides were catastrophic, although the Allies proved more capable of absorbing and replacing those losses than the Germans.

One of my favorite parts of this book was the diversity of its perspectives. Holland drew on British, Canadian, French, and German sources (in addition to American ones). The German and British perspectives were absolutely riveting for me as their story is rarely told in American media. It is hard not to be overwhelmed by the emotions of helplessness and horror that filled this young men as they flung themselves against each other. Allied naval and air supremacy ensured Germany's defeat. The die was cast by the end of the first day. But Hitler required that the Germans sacrifice thousands of their youngest sons on his bloody altar.

I think books such as "Normandy '44" are essential because they force us to reckon with the hellish reality of war. War is not a game, nor is it a sport. It is a many-toothed machine whose ends rarely justify its means. Its outcome can only be influenced by its participants as well. Often, the scope of war ebbs and flows like the tide of battle, enveloping innocents in its waves of carnage. We should venture forth only with utmost caution and a firm recognition that the world on the other side of war is often far less beautiful.

[Harper Roderick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good account that aims to debunk some myths regarding Normandy. I enjoyed it and learned some lessons that apply to ministry leadership.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I won an advanced copy of this book on Goodreads. A detailed book about the June 6, 1944 Normandy D-Day landing during WW II. This book is long but interesting, it dispels the myths surrounding the war, such as Montgomery's role and weapons used by both sides. The book also discusses the strategy on both sides of the war and the mindset of the combatants. We must honor the sacrifice of our soldiers for everything that they gave to us and for us.

[Joe McCluney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fine book by all means, but it does a few things that keep it from being a really good book for me.

My main gripe is that the author spends most of the time covering the war at a medium resolution, somewhere between the strategic and the tactical. There's a lot of "this soldier was with this unit, which was attached to this larger unit, under this commander, near this town on this date." That doesn't tell me much about the overall campaign on the one hand, or what it was like to fight the specific battles on the other.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this approach, and I appreciate the research and effort to get the facts straight and indeed correct some common misunderstandings. But in contrast, the most memorable parts of the book are when the author retells a specific soldier's story at a specific moment: what it was like to capture that farmhouse, how they escaped a burning tank, what a field hospital was like, how they survived that one dogfight. These individual moments, more than the scale of the invasion and campaign itself, make the war "epic" in the sense that they show you what it was like to be in the thick of it. (And to be clear that this is not a glorification, these stories are what also most effectively convey the horrors or war and the sacrifices normal people were forced to make.)

When the author did cover the strategic, it often just wasn't captivating to me. Part of this was the result of, I think, the author's intent to not overdramatize the relations between the Allied command. And fair enough there, too; I appreciate his challenge to the typically American take on Monty's role, but there again it was mostly medium-resolution coverage. Whether Monty's predictions or comments were right or wrong, what about his decisions and their causal impact on the ground? I never felt a clear link (or clear dispelling of that notion) between command and the actual forces under control, particularly on the Allied side.

None of this is to say it's a bad book. For me it just doesn't quite find the right the balance between description, narrative, and analysis.

[Huw Rhys · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a very good book - but it is far, far, far too long.

I suspect it had to be to give a comprehensive view of the Battle for Normandy in 1944 from the perspective of, what is it, 40 or more people. But it just goes on far too long, one story and one character melding into another. The research is superb, it's as comprehensive a piece of writing as you coulod get, but it just gets too detailed, and not really organized enough to make it a coherent read. Maybe for people using it as a text book, with the time to cross check references...I don't know, it could work liker that, but as a historical read, it lost me after 300 or 400 pages I'm afraid, and I really struggled to get to the end - which I finally did with a huge sigh of relief.

Could it have benefited from being organized better? Possibly. But I think the main improvement would have been to cut the number of histories composing the narrative - too many of them didn't really have that much to say, and their contributions were somewhat lost in the fog of war - or the fog of too many words, I'm afraid.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extremely informative and clear, deep dive into D-Day and the Normandy campaign. James Holland goes about busting the myth of the Nazi ‘war machine’ and dispels the clouded biased view put forward by ‘armchair’ historians over the years criticising the Allied war effort and praising the German one.

The narrative follows certain characters on both sides and portrays the sheer madness and unnecessary slaughter of the conflict through their eyes. Holland also goes heavy into the logistics behind the Allied operations and lack thereof on the German side and it’s a fascinating account of the monumental planning and preparation that was undertaken for the invasion of Normandy.

James Holland is also not shy with the maps which is always a good thing. Some excellent maps showing unit dispositions and front line movements which is just essential to be able to picture the manoeuvrings of the two sides.

Can’t wait to read some more of James Holland’s works.

[Steve822 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I initially thought give this one a miss, not another book on D-Day, but there was not much to choose from on my mobile library. I like Holland's previous histories. He writes in a style I like, appears to make good valid points and makes you think about the "accepted" views eg the superiority of German armour. Although a long book, it fairly gallops along, doesn't get bogged down in the planning stage (you want war war not jaw jaw). His descriptions of the fighting are visceral, leaving me both in awe and sadness of what those of that generation (on both sides)endured. Did we really need another book on D-Day? No, unless it is this one. So if it is lurking at the back of your mobile library, grab it, you won't be disappointed.

[Chris Stacey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently read Giles Milton’s D Day book but this is way way way better. Although I enjoyed it, compared to Holland, Milton’s book was a soggy bag of chips waiting for a bus on a wet Wednesday night in Lewisham. Holland, on the other hand, is an extra large mixed doner kebab with ten chilies, lashings of chilli and yoghurt sauce being eaten from your warm 5 star Knightsbridge hotel bed draped in Egyptian cotton sheets whilst watching ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ on 58 inch 8K TV with Bose surround sound in nothing but your underwear.

[patrick Lorelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most in-depth book that I have ever read about D-Day. It actually reminds of some of the battles that I have read about from the Vietnam War. The author takes you through all of the different sides, American, British, Canadian, Scottish, and the Sherwood Rangers for one I had never heard or read about in the multiple books about D-Day that I have read. We have all heard of the paratroopers, I for one am a son of a WWII paratrooper from the 82nd 508, so got some more information about that. Really though you see how the German high command was hamstrung because of Hitler, and him not listening to Generals but just yes men. If they would have pulled their troops back out of range of naval guns they might have had a better chance. Also if Rommel or any of the others would have had command of the tanks but they sat for almost 24 hours as the attack was happening. As it was, the commander of the German force at Normandy did not think it was a full-scale attack so he did not report it for almost 12 hours after the paratroopers had landed and men were on the beach. You also get a look at the men at Normandy who most were either young or old with just a few veterans sparkled in here and there and those had just made it out of the Eastern front against Russia and were looking for rest and not another fight. You see the problems they had with the hedgerows and other problems but they would be worked out on the fly. One British commander sacked two of his tank commanders for not moving along. One of the biggest advantages the Allies had was supplies. Once beachheads were secured they began making supply depots and taking supplies from the beach to the front. A pipeline for fuel was lad across the channel which was another huge advantage along with the ability to fix tanks, not all of them were not out or destroyed. At night crews would go out bring the tanks back and most would be able to fight another day. The Germans could not do that. One of the biggest never written about was medical care. Most men that came in survived and some even went back out or would report back to their units later. Though the German high command was useless the ground troops fought and that is what would keep the battle going. Like the author stated it was infantry ground troops that won the war bit by bit and this book goes in detail the sacrifice they all made, weather ground, tank, or pilot. Very much worth the read. I received this book from Netgalley.com I gave it 5 stars. Follow us at www.1rad-readerreviews.com

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s a reason James Holland is almost certainly Britain’s number one WW2 historian…

Somehow Normandy ‘44 was the first of Holland’s extensive list of books on WW2 that I’ve read. Naturally, I went in with high expectations, and almost all were met.

What I particularly liked in this authoritative narrative of D-Day and the battle that followed is how it pivots seamlessly from the general’s POV to that of an ordinary infantrymen, tank commander, sailor, pilot or logistics officer (not just British, American, Canadian etc but plenty of German accounts too). The grasp of the ‘bigger picture’ ie. what Eisenhower, Monty et all were facing and making decisions on is superb. The strain on these commanders is not lost in this account, particularly the German ones (Rommel et all). I had no idea just how debilitating Hitler’s megalomaniac micromanaging was on the German forces. Increasingly paranoid after surviving an assassination attempt and addled by drugs, Hitler refused to allow his forces to retreat one inch, meaning they had to fight near the coast and within range of the allies devastating naval guns. When the Cotentin peninsula was cut off by the Americans (as would happen to several coastal cities) Hitler ordered they fight to the last man, a monstrous waste of life that would have no effect on the outcome of the invasion.

Nor was the strain on ordinary soldiers unlucky enough to be fighting in the ‘bocage’ country of Normandy lost, where death and injury rates were higher than that of the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele, terrible WW1 battles that usually set the benchmark for terrifying casualty statistics. Holland does not shy away from gruesome descriptions of what happened to thousands of these young men, which for the Germans included being incinerated by napalm fired from a tank to being blown apart by gigantic bomber raids. For the Allies, this included sniper bullets, mortar shrapnel wounds, drowning before even reaching the beach and, particularly on Omaha, devastating machine gun fire. Throughout the book it was clear to me Holland doesn’t include this stuff to shock but to make clear the misery of war and how it must be avoided at all costs, an admirable endeavour.

The final thing I really enjoyed was how throughout the book Holland engages with the popular perceptions of D-Day, usually disproving common beliefs with impunity. For example, the view the German defences in Normandy were manned by fanatical Nazi SS elite, when in actual fact much of the line was held by poorly trained, poorly equipped 17year olds who had little to no experience and knew they would be shot if they abandoned their posts.

As someone with a keen interest in the resistance, I would have liked more on the role of the underground guerillas on D-Day and the SOE but at 650 pages I don’t know where it would have gone. At times I also found it difficult to keep track of the many infantry and armour regiments named and where they were going/what they were doing. But these are minor criticisms in what is a brilliant, engaging and authoritative account of undoubtedly the best know operation of the war in Britain.

[Michael G · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very good book, a great read. I think James Holland is a better writer than his brother Tom. The book weaves individual stories across the Normandy campaign, from both German and Allied perspectives, from troops on the ground to the generals further away. These different perspectives help provide a clearer view overall.

Holland weaves his own views in too, which appear to be grounded in good evidence. He shows that the Germans were quite afraid of their Allied opponents; it wasn't a one way thing where Allied soliders feared the Germans more, for example, because of the largest and most powerful of German tanks. Germans were terrified by the napalm-spitting Crocodile tank. Similarly Holland shows that a good chunk of the German troops were not even, well, 'German', but Russians or Poles who were recruited-conscripted into the German army.

Holland also praises how the Allies undertake war. They did so in a way that maximised their logistics, organisational and material advantage, while seeking to minimise casualties. Only a very small proportion of Allied troops were actually at the front fighting, and those that were, were rotated in and out. The Allies had innovative and modern technology. The Germans were reliant upon donkeys, horses, and bicycles.

There is a realism about the horrors of war, as any good war book should note. It is sad to read, on both sides, of soldiers losing their friends, and of the revulsion of seeing rotting or charred corpses, or bodies becoming one with the ground after hundreds of tank movements over them. This was a sad and bloody affair.

[Jules · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the first James Holland book I’ve read and as cliched as it sounds, it won’t be my last. To read such a book one must have more than a passing interest in the subject as this is more than a light read for sure, but neither do you need to be a history professor to really find Holland’s style of writing totally engaging.

Often such books can feel like a text book you need to read for an exam but not so here. The real life accounts are seamlessly interwoven with factual detail providing the book a very real human touch; setting this book aside from others.

I’d encourage anyone who wants to learn more about not just the actual Normandy landings but also what proceeded and followed to read this book. It’s top draw.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oikeastaan parempi otteeltaan kuin esimerkiksi Beevorin järkäleet. Tulkinta toisesta maailmansodasta on modernimpi kuin muissa, vaikka Hollandkin sortuu lopulta aikamoiseen divisioona- ja rykmenttibriljeeraukseen. Parasta antia tilannetta ja sodan käännekohtia taustoittavat kohdat. Ymmärrettävästi, kun kirjoittaja on britti, on brittien ja kanadalaisten osuus taistelussa eniten keskiössä tällä kertaa.

[D · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started reading this book by accident, as I am hesitant to deviate from my Pacific War rabbit hole, especially along such well-worn territory as the Normandy campaign. While not the equal of Beevor or Hastings, I think that Holland is still worth a read. I enjoyed his ideas and the rich collection of eyewitness accounts. “The Constraints of Wealth and the Freedom of Poverty” was also an amusing chapter title. 3.5 stars