A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

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 alte

(C) 2009 Viking/Penguin Books On October 13, 2009, Viking Penguin (the U.S. imprint of Britain's Penguin Books) published D-Day and the Battle for Normandy by historian Antony Beevor. Billed as "the first major account in more than 20 years to cover the invasion from June 6, 1944, up to the liberation of Paris on August 25," Beevor's 608-page tome joins the ranks of other classic works about the Allied campaign to liberate northern France, including Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day (1959), Max Hastings' Overlord: D-Day & the Battle for Normandy (1984) , and Stephen E. Ambrose's D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II.  Beevor, formerly a lieutenant in the British Army who studied under Professor John Keegan ( Six Armies in Normandy ) at Sandhurst as a young cadet, had written several books about World War II and one about the Spanish Civil War before he tackled Operation Overlord; most of his previous work either focused on the

(C) 2017 Da Capo Press I was a precocious child when I started reading books about the Second World War in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first published work I remember reading was the condensed version of Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day in the Colombian edition of Reader's Digest. This was around the same time that I saw The Great Escape in a Bogota theater; these two early exposures to the topic via mass media awoke in me an interest in World War II that has never abated. In many of the books I read in the 1970s, the Battle of Midway was usually heralded as the engagement that turned the tide of the Pacific War against the Japanese Empire and in favor of the United States and her allies in the region. After all, Japan's loss of four of her big fleet carriers, 248 planes, a cruiser (plus a second cruiser badly damaged) in exchange for the carrier USS Yorktown,  the destroyer Hammann, and 150 aircraft stopped the Japanese advance to the east. But as decisive as

Operation Market, the airborne element of Market-Garden. Official British Army photo.  On May 17, 2018, Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books, published the UK edition of Antony Beevor’s Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944. In this eighth work about the Second World War, the award-winning writer and historian turns his sights on one of the War’s most controversial battles – Operation Market-Garden. Outside of the professional military world – especially in the airborne community – Operation Market-Garden was better-known in Great Britain than in the U.S. until the summer of 1974. That’s when Cornelius Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far was published and gave U.S. readers their first real look at the Allies’ ill-fated attempt to drop 35,000 paratroopers behind the German front lines in Nazi-occupied Holland to capture a series of bridges “with thunderclap surprise” and allow elements of the British Second Army to drive up a single highway, grab a bridgehead over the Lower Rhin

Dust jacket illustration for the U.S. edition of Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge. Design by Matt Yee. (C) 2015 Viking (a Penguin Random House imprint) On November 3, 2015, Penguin Random House UK imprint Viking published Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble , a book by historian Antony Beevor about the biggest battle fought in Western Europe during World War II. Officially known as the Ardennes Counteroffensive, the engagement that began on December 16, 1944 and ended six weeks later is better known by its more popular nomenclature – the Battle of the Bulge. (The battle earned its nickname due to the bulge-shaped salient in Allied lines on situation maps – official and those published in U.S. and British newspapers during that cold, miserable, and violent winter battle.) Published in the U.S. as Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge, the book is Beevor’s first World War II book that focuses on a campaign that was overwhelmingly a struggle between Adolf Hitler’s We

Cover design for Bantam Books: Belina Huey. (C) 2005 Bantam Books, a division of Penguin Random House World War II is now three quarters of a century away in our collective memory. All of the great or infamous military and civilian leaders – Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, George Patton, Takeo Kurita, and William F. Halsey – are long dead. The elderly veterans that in the U.S. are dying at a rate of 2000 men and women a day are now the junior officers and enlisted men who were then the youngest. In a decade or so, the last people to have lived during history’s largest and bloodiest clash of arms will be gone, leaving only the historical record and a plethora of monuments as reminders of those turbulent, violent years. Since the 1980s, when authors like Max Hastings,   Stephen Ambrose, Rick Atkinson, Antony Beevor, and Carlo D’Este kicked off the renaissance of popular World War II history writing, many fine books have been publishe

(C) 1993 William Morrow & Co.  Martin Blumenson's The Battle of the Generals: The Untold Story of the Falaise Gap – The Campaign That Should Have Won World War II is an interesting, though never quite captivating study of the controversial Battle of the Falaise Gap, the climax of Operation Overlord in August of 1944. Blumenson, author of Breakout and Pursuit (1963) and an eminent military historian, focuses on the "big picture" as he focuses on what he frankly believes was the Allies' biggest blunder in the campaign in Northwest Europe: the failure of the Allied armies to close the Falaise Gap and trap the shattered remnants of two German armies west of the Seine River. Blumenson states point-blank that had Eisenhower, Bradley, and Montgomery paid more attention to the immediate goal of destroying the German army in Normandy instead of being diverted by visions of a triumphal march into Germany, many German troops and their equipment would have been se