True tales of conflict

THERE is nothing which brings the great turning points of history to life quite like first-hand accounts. Saving Private Ryan is one thing - talking to a man who was there on the Normandy beaches in 1944 is something totally different.

Two new books just out to mark the 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings recognise that - and have gone back to archive material for authentic accounts of what it was really like to be on the beaches.

"This is a book about men of action, men who were there," writes Philip Warner in his book The D Day Landings (The Daily Telegraph/ Pen & Swords Books, £16.99). And that is exactly what it is. The accounts range from soldiers who took part in the landings, to RAF pilots, Royal Navy sailors, tank crews, doctors and chaplains. "We hit the beach and were met with withering machine-gun fire; the sand was spurting up in front of us," recalls Mr K Hollis, who in 1944 was a lance corporal with the 62 (9) Field Squadron Royal Engineers on Sword Beach.

Mr S R Sharman recalls reaching the town of Benouville and meeting fierce resistance. "We saw a machine gun being fired from the tower (of the village church) by a German soldier," he recalls. "You could see his arm bent to an upright position, holding the gun and firing into the air."

Another book published by Pen & Sword, D-Day By Those Who Were There by Peter Liddle (£19.99) draws upon similar archive. It includes recollections by Cpl Jim Brown of York, a jeep driver with the Green Howards.

"There were some terrible sights - men with their guts hanging out. ...It was a rough day altogether," he recalls, with that characteristic understatement of those who have been to hell and back.

To help you put pictures to the words, Pen & Sword have also brought out a remarkable book of rare archive photographs. Images Of War: D-Day by Francis Crosby (Pen & Sword, £12.99) contains photographs that are shocking, humbling and moving by turn: scared German soldiers coming over the crest of a hill with their hands raised in surrender; a German battle tank, abandoned among the crumbling ruins of a once-pretty Normandy town; infantry troops, weighed down with heavy packs, waist-deep in water as they struggle ashore on Utah beach; the bodies of those who did not survive the early hours of battle lying covered by blankets, awaiting burial in a mass grave.

Finally, Sutton Publishers is bringing out an entire new series to commemorate the anniversary. Each book in the 14-volume Battle Zone: Normandy series (Sutton, £14.99 each) covers a different battlefield and features an authoritative historical narrative and battlefield tour guides. Lavishly illustrated with full-colour photographs and maps, they are ideal volumes for those wishing to travel to Normandy to remember D-Day in their own way.

Stephen Lewis

Joachim Fest has become Germany's most eminent Nazi historian but he has surpassed even himself with Inside Hitler's Bunker, The Last Days Of The Third Reich, (Macmillan, £16.99).

It recreates in stunning detail the last month of Hitler's life as he descends from arrogant dictator to dishevelled suicide. Given that the last days of the Fhrer and his cronies in the Berlin bunker have still not been entirely fathomed out by historians Fest produces a remarkably vivid account.

Hitler, spitting venom at all and sundry one moment, crying like a baby the next, is portrayed in astonishing detail.

The once conqueror of Europe is shown as a pitiful figure, awaiting his doom but still gripped by an appetite for destruction.

A fawning Goebbels is depicted as a coward, Goering and Himmler as fools - men who believed Nazism would survive the war. Compelling.

The same cannot be said, however, of Above The Battle, D-Day: The Lost Evidence, (Crecy, £14.95), which is a horrible attempt to cash in on the 60th anniversary of the Allied invasion of France.

Produced in conjunction with the History Channel, which makes its poor quality even harder to bear, readers will have little respect for a publication that can't spell Hitler's name correctly (see Adolph (sic) in the introduction).

That aside there are some interesting aerial reconnaissance pictures of the first steps of the invasion, but there's only so many times you can look at an overhead picture. That's all there is for this book.

Showing us the gruesome realities of war from an earlier age is a reprint of Ernst Junger's classic Storm Of Steel, (Penguin, £7.99).

Junger was a German soldier in the trenches during the First World War and served on some of the conflict's most notorious battlefields.

That he is able to talk about his experiences at all is a miracle, but Storm Of Steel is an elegant and vivid work portraying friendship and hope as well as the grotesque consequences of 20th century warfare in startling detail. Storm Of Steel should be an anti-war manifesto.

Steve Carroll

"Two kinds of people are staying on this beach - the dead and those who are going to die. Now let's get the hell out of here!"

"It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore. Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn't know they were in the water, for they were dead..."

TWO different quotes from the desperate hours of 60 years ago, when Allied forces clawed their way onto the fringes of Hitler's "Fortress Europe".

The first is from Norman "Dutch" Cota, the second-in-command of a US infantry division caught in the slaughter of Omaha Beach. He rallied the survivors and got them off the beach - a crucial moment of D-Day.

The second is from American war correspondent Ernie Pyle, who met his own death about a year later, on an island off Okinawa.

Both can be found in The Greenhill Dictionary Of Military Quotations edited by Peter G Tsouras (Greenhill, £19.99), a volume which ranges across the centuries and the continents, embracing quotations from the pithy to the portentous.

Along with the humour and horror of war we have the great theorists, including Sun Tzu, who wrote 500 years before Christ. In the midst of quotes about the complexities of mountain warfare, he says simply: "Do not climb heights in order to fight. So much for mountain warfare."

So much, indeed.

From the American Civil War comes one of my favourite "last words", from the unfortunate general who told his men not to worry, adding: "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist...."

One of the great weaknesses of many military volumes is their lack of meaningful maps. The Collins Atlas Of Military History (Collins, £10.99) fills this gap admirably, but also illustrates how some conflicts are more easily explained through maps than others.

A map of the D-Day beaches is useful, but explains little about why the following campaign was so bitterly slow. In contrast there is a truly enlightening one of the Crusades, showing how they spread well beyond the Middle East, to northern Europe and even central France, as crusaders took their faith to the lands of pagans and heretics, as well as Moslems.

Andrew Hitchon

Updated: 09:14 Wednesday, June 02, 2004