Word: beevor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...shockingly vivid vignettes from the beaches and trenches. You won't soon forget the account of Bill Millin, bagpiper for the 1st Special Service Brigade of the British Army, who had to march out of the surf onto Sword Beach under rifle and mortar fire playing "Highland Laddie." And Beevor focuses on things other writers have neglected. For example, he doesn't gloss over the hideous costs paid by French civilians. The Allies, before liberating them, bombed them relentlessly in an attempt to paralyze the German army. Three thousand French civilians died during the first 24 hours...
...Beevor also gives considerable weight - two-thirds of the book - to the bloody fighting that took place in the weeks following D-day. Bad as the beach landings were, there was even worse to come...
...Beevor is a skillful guide through the complex jockeying for position, sketching thumbnail portraits of the senior officers with novelistic abandon. (Of the senior British commander, the exasperating Sir Bernard Montgomery, he writes, "His self-regard was almost comical.") He is willing to be graphic, though never gratuitously so, in his descriptions of battle. Maybe the most horrific weapon on the battlefield was the white phosphorus the Allies carried. During the bitter fighting for Hill 112, an English soldier tried to slip through barbed wire under machine-gun fire. A round clipped a phosphorus grenade in his pouch and ignited...
...Beevor is not a writer much given to profound reflection. His big-picture take on D-day could be summed up as, It could have gone better, but it's amazing that they did it at all. Yet with its rigorous research and its wealth of human detail, D-Day is a vibrant work of history that honors the sacrifice of tens of thousands of men and women. Which is serious praise...
...also the story of the destructive arrival of the modern age in Europe. The armies that rolled through Normandy obliterated an ancient land and way of life that would be rebuilt but never restored. At one point, Beevor describes the astonishment of an old Benedictine nun emerging from her convent during the evacuation of Caen: she had never seen a truck before. It took a world war to chivy out the last vestiges of the 19th century from where they still lived, peacefully sequestered in the bocage, and expunge them forever. The Germans and the Allies would eventually leave Normandy...