Stephen E. Ambrose: D-Day: June 6, 1944 (1994 / 2002)•
Stephen E. Ambrose (1977)Stephen E. Ambrose: D-Day: June 6, 1944 (1994)
[Hospice Shop, Warkworth - 22/9/22]:
Stephen E. Ambrose. D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II. 1994. Pocket Books. London: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd., 2002.
When you've collected a bunch of different books about the same historical event, it can be quite disconcerting to see just how much their respective accounts diverge. Stephen E. Ambrose and Antony Beevor are, I suppose, the best known modern historians of D-Day, but each of them had large boots to fill.
Nevertheless, it's rather telling that their publishers have managed to select the same Robert Capa image for the paperback editions of both books.
Here's my selection of authors to discuss:
- Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002)
- Antony Beevor (1946- )
- Max Hastings (1945- )
- David Howarth (1912-1991)
- Cornelius Ryan (1920-1974)
Books I own are marked in bold:
The first book I myself read on the subject was David Howarth's Dawn of D-Day. I'd already read his accounts of the Battles of Waterloo and Trafalgar, so I was familiar with his mole's-eye, minute-by-minute approach to such narratives.
It still seems to me a brilliantly successful book. True, a lot more is now known about the invasion and the Normandy campaign in general, but Howarth had the advantage of being a lot closer to the action he was describing.
He wasn't there himself, but he did serve as a British Naval officer during World War II, and was instrumental in setting up a clandestine network between Shetland and Norway. His book on the subject, The Shetland Bus, was subsequently filmed as Suicide Mission (1954). We Die Alone was also made into the Oscar-nominated Norwegian film Nine Lives (1957). In 1991, Norwegian television audiences voted it the greatest Norwegian film ever made.
I find that I myself own no fewer than 10 of his 28 books, so much is his approach to historiography (not to mention his choice of subjects) to my taste.
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Non-fiction:
- The Shetland Bus: A WWII Epic of Escape, Survival, and Adventure [aka Across to Norway] (1951)
- The Shetland Bus. [aka 'The Shetland Bus: A WWII Epic of Escape, Survival, and Adventure, or Across to Norway']. 1951. London: Fontana / Collins, 1974.
- We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance (1955)
- Escape Alone. [aka 'We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance'] 1955. London: Fontana / Collins, 1974.
- The Sledge Patrol: The True Story of the Strangest Battle Front of All [aka The Sledge Patrol: A WWII Epic of Escape, Survival, and Victory] (1957)
- Dawn of D-Day: These Men Were There, 6 June 1944 (1959)
- Dawn of D-Day. [aka 'Dawn of D-Day: These Men Were There, 6 June 1944']. 1959. Fontana Books. London: Collins, 1966.
- The Shadow of the Dam (1961)
- The Desert King: A Life of Ibn Saud (1964)
- Panama: Four Hundred Years of Dreams and Cruelty [aka The Golden Isthmus] (1966)
- The Golden Isthmus. [aka 'Panama: Four Hundred Years of Dreams and Cruelty']. London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1966.
- Waterloo: A Near Run Thing [aka Waterloo: Day of Battle] (1968)
- Waterloo: Day of Battle. [aka 'Waterloo: A Near Run Thing']. New York City: Galahad Books, 1968.
- Trafalgar: The Nelson Touch (1969)
- Trafalgar: The Nelson Touch. London: Collins, 1969.
- Sovereign of the Seas: The Story of British Sea Power [aka British Sea Power: How Britain Became Sovereign of the Seas] (1974)
- Sovereign of the Seas: The Story of British Sea Power. [aka 'British Sea Power: How Britain Became Sovereign of the Seas']. 1974. London: Quartet Books, 1980.
- Waterloo: A Guide to the Battlefield [aka Waterloo: A Guide] (1974)
- The Greek Adventure (1976)
- The Greek Adventure: Lord Byron and Other Eccentrics in the War of Independence. London: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1976.
- 1066: The Year of the Conquest (1977)
- 1066: The Year of the Conquest. 1977. Milton Keynes: Robin Clark, 1980.
- Great Britons (1978)
- [with the Editors of Time-Life] The Men-of-War. The Seafarers Series (1978)
- [with the Editors of Time-Life] The Dreadnoughts. The Seafarers Series (1979)
- Famous Sea Battles (1981)
- The Voyage of the Armada [aka The Voyage of the Armada: The Spanish Story] (1981)
- Tahiti: A Paradise Lost (1983)
- [with John Keegan & Paddy Griffith] Wellington Commander: The Iron Duke's Generalship (1985)
- [with Stephen Howarth] The Story of P & O: The Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company (1986)
- Pursued by a Bear: An Autobiography (1986)
- [with Stephen Howarth] Nelson: The Immortal Memory (1988)
- Group Flashing Two (1952)
- One Night in Styria (1953)
- Thieves' Hole (1954)
- My Land and My People: The Autobiography of His Holiness the Dalai Lama (1962)
- Great Escapes (1969)
- [ed.] Great Escapes. 1969. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970.
Fiction:
Edited:
And here I'll announce my principal theme: the American version and the British version. It's a little like all the competing accounts of the Gallipoli campaign. Here downunder it was largely a New Zealand and Australian affair, with a few Brits sitting on the beach drinking tea while our brave boys died thanks to the arrogance and inefficiency of Higher Command. All the derring-do at Anzac cove is hardly mentioned in British accounts, though, which concentrate on the main landings at Cape Helles. Who's right? Who's to say?
'Chunuk Bair' remains a name of primeval significance to Kiwis. It's of no great importance to Australians, who prefer to stress Lone Pine. The Brits intone legends of King Edward VII's own Norfolk Regiment disappearing into the mist, never to be seen again. The Turks, who had overwhelmingly more casualties and, moreover, were fighting for their own land, have their own version of the story - even more harrowing: men buying their funeral shrouds as soon as they heard they were being sent to the peninsula.
By far the most famous account of D-Day is Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day. Although born in Ireland and trained as a journalist in London, Ryan emigrated to the United States after the war, and is now regarded as an American writer, witness the recent inclusion of his collected writings about the Second World War in the magisterial Library of America.
Even before the movie made it a household name, Ryan's concise, pared-back account gave the picture of the day's events we probably all remember best. Darryl F. Zanuck certainly made no bones about the basic heroism of all concerned, played by a galaxy of Hollywood's biggest stars; John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, and Sean Connery among them.
There's no doubt, here, who really won the war. It was the Americans. They were there to kick butt and take names, and while the plucky little Brits are shown as plenty heroic, too, they're certainly in the minority.
Both Howarth's and Ryan's accounts remain of permanent value, thanks to their proximity to the events described. The fact that they appeared in the same year, 1959, makes them easy to compare. Both are brilliant, but there's perhaps a little more tone of the official version about Ryan's. Howarth, by contrast, conveys a more improvisatory, chaotic picture of this vast, shambolic day of great (and small) events.
- [with Frank Kelley] Star-Spangled Mikado (1946)
- [with Frank Kelley] MacArthur: Man of Action (1950)
- One Minute to Ditch! (1957)
- The Longest Day: 6 June 1944 D-Day (1959)
- Included in: The Longest Day / A Bridge Too Far / Other World War II Writings. 1959, 1974. Ed. Rick Atkinson. The Library of America, 318. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2019.
- The Last Battle (1966)
- The Last Battle. London: Collins, 1966.
- A Bridge Too Far (1974)
- Included in: The Longest Day / A Bridge Too Far / Other World War II Writings. 1959, 1974. Ed. Rick Atkinson. The Library of America, 318. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2019.
- [with Kathryn Morgan Ryan] A Private Battle (1979)
I bought the book above in a tiny second hand shop in Whangamatā. Bronwyn and I were staying at the Michael King House in Ōpoutere with our friend Tracey Slaughter at the time. I recall the latter commenting on my lack of impulse control as I made a beeline for the bookshelves. All I can say is, if you snooze you lose, and it's hard to regret such graceless acquisitiveness when it results in good loot like this.
Max Hastings's account of the Overlord operation concentrates more on the Normandy campaign as a whole than the specific events of D-Day. Nevertheless, it came as a bit of a shock to me when I started reading it later that day.
All my assumptions about the success or failure of certain parts of the plan had to be turned on their head. Hastings' apparently well-evidenced contention than German soldiers were more than a match for Allied troops whenever the two were matched against each other on approximately even terms certainly contradicted everything I'd learned from my study of triumphalist tomes such as Chester Wilmot's The Struggle for Europe (1952) or the various self-vaunting memoirs of Field-Marshal Montgomery.
It's written rather in the spirit of Lissa Evan's 2009 novel Their Finest Hour and a Half, satirising the work of the British Ministry of Information in concocting uplifting propaganda about the indomitable spirit shown by the people of the UK during the Blitz, after the (so-called) Miracle of Dunkirk.
There's certainly nothing particularly Longest Day-like about Hastings' account of the very bloody and chaotic Normandy campaign. He certainly gives short shrift to any claims that Montgomery had somehow planned out the whole thing in advance, and was carefully diverting German strength to Caen in order to allow the Americans to break out in the south.
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Reportage:
- America 1968: The Fire this Time (1969)
- Ulster 1969: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland (1970)
- [with Simon Jenkins] The Battle for the Falklands (1983)
- Montrose: The King's Champion (1977)
- Yoni: Hero of Entebbe: Life of Yonathan Netanyahu (1980)
- Going to the Wars (2000)
- Editor: A Memoir (2002)
- Did You Really Shoot the Television?: A Family Fable (2010)
- Bomber Command (1979)
- [with Len Deighton] The Battle of Britain (1980)
- Das Reich: Resistance and the March of the Second SS Panzer Division Through France, June 1944 (1981)
- Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy (1984)
- Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy 1944. London: Michael Joseph Ltd., 1984.
- Victory in Europe (1985)
- The Korean War (1987)
- Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944–45 (2004)
- Warriors: Exceptional Tales from the Battlefield (2005)
- Nemesis: The Battle for Japan 1944–45 [aka Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45] (2007)
- Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45 [aka Winston's War: Churchill, 1940–1945] (2009)
- All Hell Let Loose: The World At War 1939–1945 [aka Inferno: The World At War, 1939–1945] (2011)
- Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914 (2013)
- Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914. William Collins. London: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 2013.
- The Secret War: Spies, Codes And Guerrillas 1939–45 (2015)
- Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945–1975 (2018)
- Chastise: The Dambusters Story 1943 (2019)
- Operation Pedestal: The Fleet that Battled to Malta 1942 (2021)
- Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 (2022)
- Outside Days (1989)
- Scattered Shots (1999)
- Country Fair (2005)
- The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes (1985)
- The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes. Book Club Associates by arrangement with Oxford University Press. London: Guild Publishing, 1985.
- Soldiers: Great Stories of War and Peace (2021)
Biography:
Autobiography:
History:
Countryside writing:
Edited:
Stephen Ambrose offered the following defence to those who accused him of plagiarism in some of his later books (fortunately, neither of the ones we're discussing here):
I tell stories. I don't discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation. I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't. I am not out there stealing other people's writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I want to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people's writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote.While it's hard to see this as much of an excuse, really, the fact remains that he is a great storyteller. Band of Brothers is certainly a gripping work. Even better, though, I would say, is his blow-by-blow account of D-Day.
Ambrose successfully (I would say) disputes Max Hastings' claim of the inherent superiority of German soldiers over their allied counterparts. I note with a certain dismay, however, his reliance for large parts of the German side of his narrative on discredited British historian David Irving's biography of Rommel, The Trail of the Fox (1977).
True, Ambrose's book appeared in 1994, well before Irving's 1996 libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt for some passages in her 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust, in which he was described as "a Holocaust denier, falsifier and bigot, who ... manipulated and distorted real documents." Irving lost his case, and was ordered to pay costs to Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books. A report by expert witness Richard E. Evans described his work as follows:
Not one of [Irving's] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject. All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about ... if we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian.
Nevertheless, despite these provisos, I would certainly recommend Ambrose's book as the best single account of D-Day available at present. There will always be a need for Howarth's and Ryan's books, but the fact that both Max Hastings and Antony Beevor (discussed below) use most of their space to discuss the Normany campaign as a whole means that they cannot compete with Ambrose's expert deployment of detail on the day itself.
In fact, it's probably no exaggeration to say that his book, together with the 1998 Steven Spielberg film Saving Private Ryan, have defined our picture of this great event for the last quarter of a century, just as the movie The Longest Day did for four decades after its release in 1962.
- Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff (1962)
- Upton and the Army (1964)
- Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point (1966)
- Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe (1967)
- The Supreme Commander: the War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower (1970)
- Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (1975)
- Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment (1981)
- Eisenhower. Volume 1: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890-1952 (1983)
- Eisenhower. Volume 2: The President (1984)
- Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944 (1985)
- Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1913-1962 (1987)
- Eisenhower: Soldier and President. 1983-84 (1990)
- Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962-1972 (1990)
- Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990 (1991)
- Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (1992)
- Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest. 1992. Pocket Books. London: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd., 2001.
- D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (1994)
- D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II. 1994. Pocket Books. London: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd., 2002.
- Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (1996)
- Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 - May 7, 1945 (1997)
- Citizen Soldiers: The US Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Surrender of Germany. 1997. Pocket Books. London: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd., 2002.
- Americans at War (1997)
- The Victors: Eisenhower and his Boys - The Men of World War II (1998)
- The Victors: The Men of World War II. 1998. Pocket Books. London: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd., 2004.
- Comrades: Brothers, Fathers, Heroes, Sons, Pals (1999)
- Nothing Like It in the World: The Men who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869 (2000)
- The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys who Flew the B-24s over Germany (2001)
- To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian (2002)
- This Vast Land (2003)
- [with Richard H. Immerman] Milton S. Eisenhower, Educational Statesman (1983)
- [with Douglas Brinkley] Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938 (1997)
- [with Sam Abell] Lewis and Clark: Voyage of Discovery (1998, 2002)
- [with Douglas Brinkley] Witness to America (1999)
- [with Douglas Brinkley] The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation: From the Louisiana Purchase to Today (2002)
- Institutions in Modern America: Innovation in Structure and Process (1967)
- [with James A. Barber] The Military and American Society: Essays and Readings (1972)
- [with Gunter Bischoff] Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts Against Falsehood (1992)
- [with Gunter Bischoff] Eisenhower: A Centenary Assessment (1995)
- C.L. Sulzberger: American Heritage New History of World War II (1997)
In Collaboration:
Edited:
What, then, of Antony Beevor? Since the publication of his wildly successful account of the Battle of Stalingrad in 1998, Beevor has gradually taken on the role of the foremost military historian of the Second World War.
It's a bit hard to say why. Much though I enjoy reading his books, I can't deny that they contain a weight of detail which is hard to penetrate for historical amateurs such as myself. However, they continue to appear, and each one has a way of automatically becoming the most readily available work on the subject.
His 2012, one-volume account of the Second World War as a whole is undoubtedly a masterpiece. I've read many such summaries, and for sheer grasp of detail and expert deployment of evidence from all - not just some - of the theatres of war, from the Japanese annexation of "Manchukuo" (Manchuria) to the fall of Hitler and Hirohito, his book remains definitely the most useful and the easiest to follow for contemporary readers.
The focus of his D-Day book, as I mentioned above, is less the day itself than the progress of the campaign as a whole. He takes the opportunity to continue, with devastating effectiveness, the demolition of Montgomery's reputation as a master strategist begun by Hastings and Ambrose.
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Non-fiction:
- The Spanish Civil War (1982)
- The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. ['The Spanish Civil War', 1982]. Rev. ed. A Phoenix Paperback. London: Orion Books Ltd., 2006.
- Inside the British Army (1990)
- Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (1991)
- Crete 1941: The Battle and the Resistance. 1991. New Introduction by the Author. New York: Penguin, 2014.
- [with Artemis Cooper] Paris After the Liberation, 1944–1949 (1994)
- [with Artemis Cooper] Paris After the Liberation, 1944-1949. 1994. Rev. ed. 2007. London: The Folio Society, 2012.
- Stalingrad (1998)
- Stalingrad. 1998. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
- Berlin: The Downfall 1945 [aka The Fall of Berlin 1945] (2002)
- Berlin: The Downfall 1945. 2002. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.
- The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (2004)
- The Mystery of Olga Chekhova. 2004. London: Penguin, 2005.
- The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 (2006)
- The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. ['The Spanish Civil War', 1982]. Rev. ed. A Phoenix Paperback. London: Orion Books Ltd., 2006.
- D-Day: The Battle for Normandy (2009)
- D-Day: The Battle for Normandy. 2009. Viking. Camberwell, Victoria: Penguin Group (Australia), 2010.
- The Second World War (2012)
- The Second World War. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 2012.
- The Second World War. 2012. A Phoenix Paperback. London: Orion Books Ltd., 2014.
- Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (2015)
- Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble. 2015. Viking. Melbourne VIC: Penguin Group (Australia), 2015.
- Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944 (2018)
- Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944. Viking. London: Penguin Random House UK, 2018.
- Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917—1921 (2022)
- Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 2022.
- Violent Brink (1975)
- For Reasons of State (1980)
- The Faustian Pact (1983)
- The Enchantment of Christina von Retzen (1989)
- The British Army, Manpower and Society into the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Hew Strachan (2000)
- [with Caleb Carr] What Ifs? of American History: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been. Ed Robert Cowley (2003)
- A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941–1945 (2006)
- Vasily Grossman. A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945. Trans. Luba Vinogradova. Pimlico. London: Random House, 2006.
Fiction:
Contributions:
Edited:
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How ought I to conclude? I've enjoyed reading all of these books, and would not be without any of them. It was, however, interesting when consulting the Amazon.com page on Stephen Ambrose's book, to find comments such as this:
How America Won on D Day
The chapter on naval operations sums up this book. The actions of each American warship is described almost shell by shell. This is followed by the statement - there was also a heavy bombardment of the British beaches. The vast majority of warships on D Day were RN.
D day from a mainly American view point
The book follows the mainly American soldiers on D Day, well written with lots of experiences related.
Authoritative but America-centric and perhaps tainted
This is a big work about a long, critical history-making day. That day saved our civilization and altered the course of history. In the main, Ambrose did a “page-turner” job of telling it.
Never mind for a moment that his own legacy is tainted by multiple claims of plagiarism in some of his many books ... However, as the husband of a Canadian native and son-in-law of an RCNVR sailor on convoy duty, one short chapter devoted to Juno Beach and Canadian sacrifice seems limited. Lesser treatment, though a bit more, was given to British sacrifice.
Ambrose was an American Southern professor who spent much of his career in New Orleans, where the Higgins landing craft were invented and built. He was a big reason, I believe, for the National D-Day Museum being sited in that city. So perhaps his American-centric viewpoint isn’t surprising.
I learned a lot from this book, but I’ll be looking for other viewpoints to broaden my understanding.
It's clear that any hope of a single history of D-Day which could satisfy all these myriad points-of-view is an illusory one. Probably Cornelius Ryan came as close as anyone, but subsequent history appears to have widened rather than narrowed the gap between British and American perceptions of the concluding stages of the Second World War.
The rather ugly controversy between Stephen Ambrose and Cornelius Ryan over the latter's criticism of Ike's decision not to advance on Berlin at the end of the war started with Ambrose's description of "popular amateur" Ryan's The Last Battle (1966) of exhibiting the unfortunate "shortcoming of simple inaccuracy." It culminated in a fairly substantive accusation of plagiarism by Ryan against Ambrose.
It seems that - as so often - it isn't just the Axis powers and the Allies who were at war, but also their chroniclers.
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- category - History: Authors
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