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Six Armies in Normandy: From D-Day to the Liberation of Paris; June 6 - Aug. 5, 1944; Revised
by
John Keegan
The man "who writes about the war better than almost anyone in our century" ( The Washington Post Book World) here details how the armies of six nations met on the battlefields of Normandy in what was to be the greatest allied achievement of World War II.
Mass Market Paperbound, 416 pages
Published
June 1st 1994
by Penguin Books
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Stan Bebbington
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John Keegan has his reputation and lives up to it in this rather unusual look at the early stages of the Normandy landings. Unusual because it is selective in choosing the breakout as the main theme and grafts on to this the liberation of Paris! The latter enables him to include the Free French as one of the participants and to write a deserved thank you to the German commander who disobeyed Hitler's orders to destroy the city. He covers the usual debates over Montgomery and the Americans and in...more
I’m fully aware that history can be dry, but isn’t that what makes a great non-fiction writer? The ability to take a story that teachers skim in your history class and dive into it, revealing all of the emotion, thought, and personality that went into every decision leading up to major events? Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there are many different kinds of history buffs; some prefer pure pathos, some prefer a mixture of facts, emotion, and story (me), and then there are the researchers: those who ju...more
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I picked up this book because I was preparing to go on a trip to visit the D-Day beaches and my knowledge of the invasion was embarrassingly scant. I had only what I remembered from high school history (next to nothing) and what I gathered from watching Band of Brothers all the way through at least seven times (more than I realized). What drew me to this book was its length, I was going to be backpacking and couldn't afford the weight of most surveys of the subject, and its perspective. I wante...more
As good of a writer as Keegan is, much of the book consists of mere re-hashings of the work of other historians. The chapter on the US Airborne troops, for example, qoutes so liberally from Stephen Ambrose that one might as well just bite the bullet and read Ambrose's Band of Brothers or D-Day, instead of passages from them, sporadically interrupted by Keegan's commentary. The section on the British troops before Caen, likewise, is unfortunately brief and has little new to add to the body of wor...more
"Six Armies in Normandy" tries to highlight the experiences of particular units from the armed forces of the nations which sent large numbers of men into battle in Normandy and Central France in 1944. While Mr. Keegan does not fail in this task, he merely passes a quick hand over the contributions of each of the six nations he chooses to include, leaving the reader with only an impression of the identities and struggles associated with each unit detailed. Mr. Keegan also borrows heavil...more
Excellent overview of the American, British, Canadian, Polish, German and French at Normandy. Unique insights, sometimes his prose is a bit daunting and esoteric. He also tends to digress. Takehome message is this gives a very nice view of the entire normandy campaign and not just the D-Day landings.
One of Keegan's earlier works before he jumped the shark. It details the familiar ground of the D-Day invasion from preparation to end of the war. It's structure is slightly unusual in that it's not a traditional narrative history, but rather more streams of consciousness that can go from battle in the trenches all the way to grand strategy. Should not be your first D-Day book.
A good read dealing with the reactions and experiances of 6 different units in D-Day and its aftermath. It provides an elightening look at the different nationalities involved in the invasion and breakout towards Paris.
And "A Polish Battlefield" still tears me up.
And "A Polish Battlefield" still tears me up.
World War II and the D-Day invasion seem so pat nowadays - a sort of grand inevitability - but it took a huge maount of coalition building and horse trading among FDR, Churchil, Marshall, Malenkov, and Brit generals to make it happen.
Alex
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Six Armies in Normandy : From D-Day to the Liberation of Paris; June 6 - Aug. 5, 1944; Revised by John Keegan (1994)
If you have the time to read only two books about WW II then you read this one and Deighton's "Blood, sweat...".
Deighton gives a summary of the war, in a thick, enjoyable volume, while Keegan tells you how exactly that war was different from other wars, by focusing on the Normandy campaign. This is Keegan at his very best. I think that only his "The face of battle" is better, but it does not deal with WW II.
Deighton gives a summary of the war, in a thick, enjoyable volume, while Keegan tells you how exactly that war was different from other wars, by focusing on the Normandy campaign. This is Keegan at his very best. I think that only his "The face of battle" is better, but it does not deal with WW II.
Gives an enlightening view of the many experiences and contributions of the several nations involved in the effort to re-take Western Europe from the Germans.
A misconception-cleansing read for those of us who've been taught the oversimplified story that the Americans single-handedly liberated Europe.
A misconception-cleansing read for those of us who've been taught the oversimplified story that the Americans single-handedly liberated Europe.
The organization of the book is a bit clunky, but one of the sections does a good job describing the Canadian contribution. Keegan is not Canadian; his approach is more dispassionate than more home-spun and gushing/patriotic stories I've read about Juno and the Falaise Gap.
These are the unvarnished facts!
Begining was slow and the end in French was hard to follow sometimes, but the middle was good and interesting.
Alice
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Sir John Desmond Patrick Keegan OBE is a British military historian, lecturer and journalist. He has published many works on the nature of combat between the 14th and 21st centuries concerning land, air, maritime and intelligence warfare as well as the psychology of battle.
-Wikipedia
More about John Keegan...
-Wikipedia
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