Overlord

Product Description

Max Hastings’s “exceptional”
(Kirkus Reviews, starred review) account of the famous World War II D-Day landings “[will] stand with that of the best journalists and writers who witnessed it” (The New York Times Book Review).

On June 6, 1944, the American and British armies staged the greatest amphibious landing in history—called Operation Overlord—the battle for the liberation of Europe. Despite the Allies’ absolute command of sea and air and vast firepower, it took ten weeks of fierce fighting for them to overpower the tenacious, superbly skilled German army. Forty years later, British war correspondent and military historian Max Hastings shares a dense, dramatic portrait of the Normandy invasion that overturns the traditional legends.

First published in 1984,
Overlord “will shock those who regard the invasion of Normandy and the subsequent battles as triumphs of American, British, and Canadian military heroism” (
The New York Times). Instead, Hastings provides a brilliant, controversial perspective on the devastating battles, based on the eyewitness accounts of survivors from both sides, plus a wealth of previously untapped sources and documents. “A masterly book, rich in insight, shrewd and weighty in judgement…Max Hastings stands in the first rank of writers on modern war” (
Financial Times).

About the Author

Max Hastings is the author of
Overlord and
Bomber Command and the coauthor of
Battle for the Falklands. Editor of
The Daily Telegraph, he lives in London, England.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Overlord

1
“MUCH THE GREATEST THING WE HAVE EVER ATTEMPTED”
Not the least remarkable aspect of the Second World War was the manner in which the United States, which might have been expected to regard the campaign in Europe as a diversion from the struggle against her principal aggressor, japan, was persuaded to commit her chief strength in the west. Not only that, but from December 1941 until June 1944 it was the Americans who were passionately impatient to confront the German army on the continent while the British, right up to the eve of D-Day, were haunted by the deepest misgivings about doing so. “Why are we trying to do this?” cried Winston Churchill in a bitter moment of depression about Operation OVERLORD in February 1944, which caused in him a spasm of enthusiasm for an alternative Allied landing in Portugal. “I am very uneasy about the whole operation,” wrote the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, as late as 5 June 1944. “At the best, it will come very far short of the expectations of the bulk of the people, namely all those who know nothing about its difficulties. At its worst, it may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war.” Had the United States army been less resolute in its commitment to a landing in Normandy, it is most unlikely that this would have taken place before 1945. Until the very last weeks before OVERLORD was launched, its future was the subject of bitter dissension and debate between the warlords of Britain and America.

For a year following the fall of France in 1940, Britain fought on without any rational prospect of final victory. Only when Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941, the most demented of his strategic decisions, did the first gleam of hope at last present itself to enemies of the Axis. For the remainder of that year, Britain was preoccupied with the struggle to keep open her Atlantic lifeline, to build her bomber offensive into a meaningful menace to Germany, and to keep hopes alive in the only theatre of war where the British army could fight — Africa and the Middle East. Then, in the dying days of the year, came the miracle of Pearl Harbor. Britain’s salvation, the turning point of the war, was confirmed four days later by another remarkable act of German recklessness: Hitler’s declaration of war upon the United States.

The outcome of the Second World War was never thereafter in serious doubt. But g