What feats we did that day

Nicholas Harman

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-andwhites 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 Liineberg Heath, so has to cram in too much too sketchily. Neither his prose nor his choice of material makes his effort better than worthy.

3. THE D-DAY EXPERIENCE by Richard Holmes (Carlton, £30, pp. 64, ISBN 1844428052). Another exhibition spinoff. This multimedia bundle, published in association with the Imperial War Museum, contains 'rare removeable documents, memorabilia, and an audio compact disk'. Its publicists jokily stamp their hand-out as 'Top Secret' plans for a 'media invasion' commanded by the (perfectly respectable) author, Richard Holmes. Have they no idea of what they liken their salesmanship to? For bad taste they earn from me not a D-day but a B-day, and B stands for Boycott.

4. THE D-DAY COMPANION, edited by Jane Penrose (Osprey, £20, pp. 288, ISBN 1841767794). American museum job. A dozen historians, American and British, look at aspects of the invasion, with proceeds to the National D-day Museum in New Orleans. The result, expertly edited, is sober but admirable. Andrew Gordon of the British staff college is particularly good on the maritime operations under Admiral Ramsay, who died early and never really got the credit for first extricating the British army from Dunkirk, then putting it back in Normandy.

5. THE D-DAY ATLAS by Charles Messenger (Thames & Hudson, £24.95, pp. 176, ISBN 0500251231). The varicoloured arrows that war cartographers love are here more than usually confusing, and often made more so by lists of unexplained abbreviations and acronyms. The ugly colour printing blurs some significant distinctions, but the drawings of weapons, vehicles and aircraft are nice.

6. FIGHTING THE INVASION: THE GERMAN ARMY AT D-DAY, edited by David C. Isby (Greenhill Books, £12.99, pp. 250, ISBN 1853674273). Losers' excuses. When the war was over Hitler's surviving officers told their neck-preserving stories to Allied interrogators. Here they again explain that they were patriotic professionals who really wanted peace (with the Western allies, anyway), and that if they lost it was Hitler's fault, not theirs. The best of the bunch was Rommel, the field-marshal mainly responsible for defending Normandy; he could not get his sound plan implemented, and had to kill himself before the war ended. If he had lived he would probably have said much the same as his mates.

7. THE BEDFORD BOYS by Alex Kershaw (Pocket Books, £7.99, pp. 300, ISBN 074347791X). Small-town tragedy. Only (only!) some 6,000 Allied soldiers were killed on D-day, almost half of them in the landing on Omaha beach by untried American troops — a botched job, relieved by individual heroism. The National Guard (Territorial) contingent from the small Virginia town of Bedford lost 198 young men there that day, and several more soon afterwards. Their story is craftily woven into a reliable narrative of the campaign, perhaps best for American readers.

8. TO THE VICTOR THE SPOILS by Sean Longden (Arris, £25, pp. 390, ISBN 184370380). Old men remember. British old soldiers tell of their 'real' — that is, mainly disgraceful — experiences as they advanced towards Germany. The women are loose, the Calvados looted, the prisoners shot. The pages are numerous and the type small, to cram in lots of the stuff, true or false but picturesque, that cheered up reunions of the Old Comrades who are fast fading away.

9. TEN DAYS TO D-DAY by David Stafford (Abacus, £7.99, pp. 366, ISBN 0349115974). Level-headed guide. David Stafford's intelligent and lively account of the preparations would stand out if it were' not for all the others. He is especially good on the weird Catalan double agent `Pujol', who did so much to lead the German high command astray, and skilfully exploits General de Gaulle's wonderful memoirs.

10. D-DAY: THE GREATEST INVASION by Dan van der Vat (Bloomsbury, £25, pp. 176, ISBN 1582343144). Illustrated guide. Van der Vat, a reliable AngloDutch journalist, tells the story well, but his narrative is made needlessly hard to follow by a bewildering array of pictures (many of them recent, in colour), anecdotes and typographical tricks.

11. D-DAY: NORMANDY REVISITED by Richard Bougaart (Chaucer Press, £20, pp. 192, ISBN 1904449298). Photoart, maybe. Photographs of Normandy beaches and fields now, plus others of then, muddily printed in black-andwhite, reveal a glum landscape with carefully preserved litter.

12. D-DAY by Martin Gilbert (John Wiley, 113.99, pp. 220, ISBN 0471423408). Good, short, excellent. Sir Martin Gilbert, the Churchill man, writes what looks like an ordinary smallish book but isn't. It is exceptionally clear and lively, both on grand strategy and on soldiers' experiences, with first-class maps and well chosen photographs. Gilbert rightly doubts whether, if the huge endeavour had failed, he 'would be alive to write this book, or free to express my opinions without fear of imprisonment — or death'. If you want just one D-day book, this should be it.