A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(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) 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...