Quick Read: 'Disaster at D-Day: The Germans Defeat the Allies, June 1944'

Art for the audiobook edition. (C) 1994 Greenhill Books (UK) and Stackpole Books (USA)

Golden anniversaries of historical events are often a gold mine for publishers and writers alike, and 1994 - the 50th Anniversary of various famous World War II battles - was no exception. A small library's worth of new books about such engagements as the Battle for Normandy, Operation Market-Garden, and the Ardennes Counteroffensive (aka "The Battle of the Bulge") hit bookstores that year, along with re-issue editions of classics such as John Toland's The Last 100 Days, Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day, and Charles B. MacDonald's A Time for Trumpets: The Untold Story of the Battle of the Bulge. 

Among the many D-Day books that were published in 1994 was the first edition of Peter G. Tsouras' Disaster at D-Day: The Germans Defeat the Allies, June 1944. Published in Great Britain by Greenhill Books and in the U.S. by Stackpole books, Disaster at D-Day is an alternative history of the Allied invasion of Normandy in the late spring of 1944 in which events take a disastrous turn on the morning of June 6, 1944, and, due to a few small but vital divergences from real history, cause Operation OVERLORD to falter and eventually fail, handing Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich an unexpected triumph in the West.

Written not as a novel but in the style of a history book, Disaster at D-Day covers a three-week period that starts on the eve of the Normandy landings and ends on June 28, 1944. At first, Tsouras describes the pre-invasion sequence of events as they happened in "the real timeline." Subtly, though, the author rearranges some of the "chess pieces" on the D-Day chessboard, such as the placement of a German Panzer division or delaying Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's scheduled trip to visit his wife by bad weather and a random but crucial health issue that affects Frau Rommel at the last minute.

 It is June 1944. The Allied armies are poised for the full-scale invasion of Fortress Europe. Across the Channel, the vaunted Wehrmacht lies waiting for the first signs of the invasion, ready for the final battle.

What happens next is well known to any student of modern history - but the outcome could have been very different, as Peter Tsouras shows in this devastating account of a D-Day in which plans, missions and landings go horribly wrong.

 Peter Tsouras introduces minor adjustments at the opening of the campaign - the repositioning of a unit, bad weather and misjudged orders - and examines their effect as they gather momentum and impact upon all subsequent events. Without deviating from the genuine possibilities of the situation, he presents a scenario that keeps the reader guessing and changes the course of history. - Publisher's blurb, Disaster at D-Day  

Tsouras, a senior analyst at the U.S. Army National Ground Intelligence, writes the book in the same style as a "true history" of the Normandy campaign, using the same authorial tone as, say, Max Hastings' Overlord: D-Day & the Battle for Normandy. Along with the narrative of a chain of events gone horribly wrong, he includes quotes from fictitious works on the revised version of World War II, maps, and even an insert of black-and-white illustrations showing real events but with new captions based on the fiction-that-seems-real in Disaster at D-Day.

Because the book is not written with a pro-Nazi Germany slant (as it surely would have if Hitler had won the war), the reader will wonder how Disaster at D-Day's altered history melds with our own reality. A perceptive reader will pick up on the eventual fate of Hitler and his regime early on in the book; there's a hint as to how the disillusioned Rommel and other German generals intend to deal with their Fuehrer. It's a subtle bit of foreshadowing that will, if Tsouras does his job right, be temporarily overshadowed by the specter of an Allied defeat at Normandy. But this subtle bit of authorial trickery pays off nicely at the final pages of the book.