Listening to the audiobook version of Cornelius Ryan’s account of the fall of Berlin, The Last Battle, read by the fabulous Simon Vance, inspired me to buy the audiobook of The Longest Day—which turned out to be much better than the Hollywood movie, despite the monotonous sing-song intonations of the reader, Clive Chafer.
In The Longest Day Ryan highlights the tremendous good luck that blessed the Allies, and the amazing foul-ups that doomed the Germans. First, the stormy weather that told the Germans the invasion could not possibly occur in early June, and the break in the weather that was just long enough to push Eisenhower to give the go-ahead. Then, the first group of Army Rangers attacking the cliffs at Pointe-du-Hoc missed their landing spot, causing a delay in their reaching the top of the cliffs; as a result, their reinforcements, hearing nothing from them by the agreed hour, diverted to Omaha Beach, which probably saved the Americans from being driven back into the sea there. On the German side, Hitler was convince that the Normandy landings were a feint, and that the real invasion would arrive in the Pas-de-Calais. Rommel left Normandy to go home to Germany for his wife’s birthday on the 6th, and to see Hitler to persuade him to release to him the reserve Panzer tank division. In his absence, the Germans badly miscommunicated the early reports of the landings, and Hitler delayed release of the Panzers until it was too late to drive the Allies off the beaches. By the time Rommel was finally alerted and got back to Normandy, the Allies had a firm foothold in Europe and Germany’s defeat, caught between Eisenhower in the west and the Russians in the east, was inevitable. In short: the success of the D-Day landings was almost a miracle.
The Last Battle, like The Longest Day, weaves its narrative around portraits of a diverse collection of Germans, Russians, Americans, Brits, and others of all sorts, both civilian and military. The accounts of atrocities committed by the advancing Russians, often in revenge for atrocities committed by German soldiers in Russia, are recounted in some detail. Among the German leaders, the cowardly Himmler and the vainglorious Göring vie in ignominy with the sycophantic yes-men surrounding Hitler, who by this time was a shrivelled, delusional basket case. But even the best of the Germans, like Heinrici, despite their intelligence and courage, were using their undeniable talents to support a regime of psychopathic bigotry and brutality.
As a child I would come home from school and watch WWII movies on television. They seemed like ancient history to me. Later I realized that the end of the war had been just 15 years before my afternoon television entertainments. Later still I realized that many of the fathers of my schoolmates had fought in the war. Today as I read news reports of the war in Ukraine, the atrocities in Gaza, and the neo-fascist ICE raids in the U.S., I realize that the Second World War did not end, really, but merely paused to catch its breath, like the American Civil War. These conflicts flare up into overt violence, then subside to uneasy truces, then flare up again, but seem never to end.