Stalin’s admirers wanted it sooner, to help our Soviet allies. Others wanted it sooner, to give us a chance of beating the Russkies to Berlin (as we didn’t). But time and tide set the date, and the invasion of occupied France had to be in spring, at low ebb, after many months of planning, training, accumulating resources, spying, and the brilliant spinning of lies to divert the enemy from the real target. Since the main ally was the United States with all its men, guns and oil, and the Germans had used up their fuel and pilots on the eastern front, success was likely. Yet the Nazis’ army, in an evil cause and stuffed but not strengthened by foreign recruits, fought on with desperate courage.
Sixtieth anniversaries excite publishers and television producers, who find plenty of great-grandpas eager to tell all, and more, about the time when they did things the young cannot imagine. Books and programmes are plentiful, revelations not expected. Everything about the campaign was written down — it had to be, with so many involved — and when it comes to the truth the winners take all.
This reviewer’s postman dolefully delivered a short shelf-load of books, several of them heavy. The reviewer himself had planned to ignore the mediocre ones, but unfortunately for him most deserved attention. Brevity, with apologies to those so quickly passed over, is the necessary trick. The books are not arranged by merit.
1. D-DAY 6.6.44 by Dan Parry (BBC Books, £12.99, pp. 192, ISBN 0563521163). Television spin-off. The ‘Book of the Epic BBC film’ is also the ‘Official Book of the Exhibition’ (at the Imperial War Museum until May 2005), and is thoroughly well done, with outstanding contemporary photographs. Confusingly, though, the old black-and-whites are intermingled with colour shots of better-nourished soldiers carrying the right weapons. With persistence one can discover that these are colour stills of Royal Marines re-enacting the landings. Entertainment and reality run into each other. That’s one way the world has changed.
2. D-DAY TO BERLIN by Andrew Williams (Hodder, £20, pp. 370, ISBN 0340833963). More television spin-off. Confusingly, Andrew Wilson is described as the producer of the BBC anniversary film, although the above ‘Book of the Epic’ gives him no credit and his narrative is not a picture-book. He follows the British campaign all the way to the German surrender on L
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