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D-Day: The Battle for Normandy. By Antony Beevor. New York: Viking, 2009. 608 pages. $32.95.
Antony Beevor's D-Day: The Battle for Normandy covers events that span roughly three months of some of the most intense fighting on the Western Front during World War II. Written as a campaign history, the book focuses on the operational level of war and the phases of the campaign. The distributed battles from the landings along the Normandy coastline to the march on Paris make up the building blocks of the story.
In doctrine, campaigns are targeted on strategic ends. In this instance, the strategic ends begin with the establishment of a lodgment in France and are directed toward subsequent operations aimed at defeating Nazi Germany. Intermediate objectives vital to the success of the campaign include seizing beaches, enlarging the beachheads to permit the buildup of men and material, as well as securing ports to sustain efforts as the armies move inland. Campaigns, because of their scope and complexities, require phasing, or incremental efforts to ensure appropriate allocation of resources and "troops to tasks" as the fighting progresses. In the Normandy campaign, the final phase line, which Allied armies expected to achieve within 90 days, ran along the Seine River. Whether Paris was to be liberated as the final phase line was reached was an open question in the minds of Eisenhower and his generals, as well as his military and civilian bosses-the Combined Chiefs of Staff, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill. On the question of liberating Paris, Charles de Gaulle never harbored any doubts, a consideration that makes Beevor's account of this familiar history especially interesting.
Readers in search of tactical detail will be disappointed at not finding a narrative flush with granular detail. Beevor has far more ground to...