D-Day: Tales From The Front Line

D-Day: Tales from the Front Line is the gripping account of the build-up to and aftermath of the single most decisive battle of the Second World War, as told by participants ranging from generals to frontline soldiers, statesmen and civilians. Compelling first-hand accounts in the form of interviews, letters and diaries, make this a superlative “living history” of a seminal day, and a homage to the bravery and skill of the extraordinary participants – most of them no more than high school age boys – who through their actions shaped modern history, many at the forfeit of their lives. D-day took place almost exactly four years after the date of Churchill’s famous “We shall fight them on the beaches” speech, and has, as Bastable points out, to this day maintained its
‘mythic resonance’ in the catalogue of military victories: “For the peoples of the many nations who took part – not just Britons and Americans and Canadians, but Frenchmen, Belgians, Poles, Norwegians, Dutchmen, Danes and some free Germans – D-Day says something meaningful about who they are as a nation, and about what they are capable of at their best.”It is this singular status in modern history that this book pays testament to. A victory which took place in the teeth of the worst storm in thirty years raging across the south of England and which saw nearly 3000 men killed on the three-mile strip of Omaha Beach alone. Bastable’s narrative is chock full of poignant human interest as well as fascinating historical details, such as the M15 visit to a bemused physics
teacher who compiled the Daily Telegraph crossword in his spare time, only to be told that he had been inadvertently drawing public attention to highly sensitive military code words, or the fact that Churchill and King George VI initially planned to watch the invasion from a cruiser squadron (much to Eisenhower’s disapproval), before the King had second thoughts and managed to persuade Churchill only after a couple of personal, pleading letters: “I am a younger man than you, I am a sailor, and as King I am the head of all these Services. There is nothing I would like better than to go to sea, but I have agreed to stay at home; is it fair that you should then do exactly what I should have liked to do myself? You said yesterday afternoon that it would be a fine thing for the King
to lead his troops into battle, as in the old days; if the King cannot do this, it does not seem to me right that his Prime Minister should take his place.”The book vividly brings to life its cast of modern historical heroes, men as flawed and as great as their classical forebears and certainly as, if not more, eccentric. One such was Lord Lovat who would ‘walk calmly with his head held high while all the rest of us would be ducking and diving to avoid shells’, commanding his personal piper to play Highland Laddie as they stepped off the ramp (“Whenever I hear that song I remember walking through the surf”, Bill Mullin the piper remarked in later years). Yet another was General Hobart, who Churchill had brought out of obscure demotion to design what became known as
“Hobart’s funnies” – decidedly odd-looking but astonishingly innovative and effective new tanks, such as a the Duplex Drive, which looked “like a strange dinghy” but could function on both land and water, and the Crab, which crawled slowly along flogging the ground with chains on either side, thus setting off any mines in its path. (The Americans, perturbed by the appearance of these innovations, widely disdained their use, and suffered higher casualties as a result.) And lest the British claim all the eccentricity for themselves, what about Theodore Roosevelt, son of the former President and distant cousin of the serving one, who insisted on being present despite having suffered a heart attack and walking with a stick, and refused to wear a helmet because he
thought they were uncomfortable? But Bastable’s book gives equal weight, equal value, to the experiences of the ordinary, non-decorated soldiers for, as General Bradley is"ed as saying, anyone who was on the beach on D-Day was a hero. From the heartrending words of a young boy’s letter to his mother written on the 5th of June, surely written not knowing if they would be the last she would ever receive from him, to the responses of civilians as they heard the news of the invasion broken to them – in the middle of school lessons, church sermons or on the radio at work in the factories, Tales From the Front Line does honour to the full spectrum of actions and reactions on that stormy day in the summer of 1944. Thanks to what must surely be the most annoying darkroom
assistant’s error anywhere, ever, only eight of Robert Capa’s 106 pictures of the invasion (he was in the first wave of American arrivals) survived, and while these remain an extraordinary visual record of the conditions endured by the allied forces on D-Day, in the absence of any other form of documentary footage of the battle, Jonathan Bastable’s book must surely be the closest thing we can have to a collection of first-hand and eye-witness accounts, and thereby command the awed attention of anybody at all with any interest in the events of that day. As Joan Carr-Jones, a Wren in Southampton, whose fiancé returned that evening from his naval duty of transporting troops across the Channel, remarked, “A sense of living with destiny, and a fierce and joyful pride. There
never was a day like it.”