Having revitalised military history with his peerless account of the battle of Stalingrad in, er, Stalingrad, Anthony Beevor has since gone on to deliver equally successful books about the fall of Berlin and the Spanish Civil War. Now it is the turn of the Normandy campaign to receive the full Beevor treatment and boys of a certain age will be falling over themselves to make a new addition to their Amazon Wish List.

Although we are not exactly short of WW2 histories, least of all accounts of the Western front, Beevor’s place at the top of the shop is well-deserved. D-Day: The Battle For Normandy is military history as it should be, encompassing both the epic sweep of grand strategy and the experieces of the lowliest private. Furthermore Beevor is unlike most other war junkie historians in that he steps away from the maps and stories of infantry assaults to find out what it was like for those civilians unlucky enough to be living in the midst of the mayhem. Beevor seems genuinely interested in and does not seem to be impatiently marking time until he can get back to the tanks, but his real gift is to use a novelist’s eye for detail to turn his source material into the stuff of vivid high drama

This is a world familiar to many from fact, fiction, movies, games and holidays. Normandy is not the alien world of the endless steppes and the British, American and German troops could be grandparents of people we know. Which means this was exactly the sort of campaign today’s grown up boys can have fantasise having taken part in. However Beevor is not playing that game and he does a good job dispelling the myth that Normandy was a clean campaign compared to the no holds barred hell of the Eastern front.  Indeed beyond the intensity of a war fought between citizen soldiers and those brought up in a totalitarian regime, casualties during July and August 1944 exceeding those in the East. Even so it cannot be denied there is an element of the vicarious thrill about this book and those overgrown schoolboys who secretly wish to have been there can do so even while acknowledging the true horror experienced by those who actually were.

D-Day: The Battle For Normandy begins with Eisenhower taking the go/no go decision on the basis of advice from his weather forecasters and from there it is straight into the (it has to be said, familiar) action. Comprehensive as D-Day: The Battle For Normandy is, I would have liked a section about the planning of Overlord – who did it, where, over what period, what alternatives were rejected, etc. Also, hilarious passages about de Gaulle aside, I could have done with more about the political context as the major leaders are largely conspicuoulsy absent. This is a bit unfair as D-Day: The Battle For Normandy is specifically military history. Which leaves my only real quibble – the title. D-Day: The Battle For Normandy is about the whole Normandy campaign not about the invasion that started it, epic as that was. Beevor is surely big enough not to require a dumbed down title to sell extra copies.

That aside D-Day: The Battle For Normandy is up to the usual Beevor gold standard and will deservedly feature heavily on wish lists this year and beyond.

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