Jump directly to the Content
Jump directly to the content
Article
D-Day Illustrated Edition: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II
D-Day Illustrated Edition: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II
Stephen E. Ambrose
Simon & Schuster, 2014
768 pp., 50.0

Buy Now
Neptune: Allied Invasion of Europe and the The D-Day Landings
Neptune: Allied Invasion of Europe and the The D-Day Landings
Craig L. Symonds
Oxford University Press, 2014
440 pp., 31.99

Buy Now

Albert Louis Zambone


D-Day and the Dichotomies of Military History

Just what are military historians up to these days?

Books about war used to be about "battles and leaders" (the actual title of a series of retrospective essays on the Civil War published in 1887 and 1888). This was not only fashion but also pedagogy, supported by the War Department's belief that military history was a necessary part of the curriculum for U.S. Army officers. Indeed one of the first governmental measures to preserve historic places was the War Department's purchase of Civil War battlefields—at first to preserve the cemeteries and the dead that had been left behind by the departing combatants. Eventually, in 1896, Congress declared four battlefields to be "monuments," in part for the historical memories that they conveyed, but also to preserve them as training grounds for military maneuver and for the education of officers.

The staff ride, a battlefield study tour taken by officers learning their trade, focused on the tactics of the battle under examination, as well as on how the two armies had gotten to that battlefield. It became a prominent feature of upper-level military study, from 1906 to World War II, and then again from the late '60s to the present. The pedagogical requirements of military history led to an ever deepening concentration on just why Grant had ordered that attack at Cold Harbor, why Jackson had been so sluggish at Seven Days', and—the $64,000 question that Civil War buffs will never stop asking, ever—why Lee ordered Pickett's charge, and whether Longstreet made a real effort to follow that order. By asking these questions, Army officers put themselves in the shoes of previous leaders and prepared for their own future decisions. Campaigns and battles were at the heart of this history, and leaders of battles, generals, were the all-important subjects. Perhaps the greatest practitioner of this genre in American history was Douglas Southall Freeman in his seemingly unending stream of books on Robert E. Lee and the Confederate general officers (at least the ones in the East). Freeman's relentless Teutonic approach to research, combined with an almost Johnsonian capacity to pass epigrammatic judgment and fueled with the passion of an unreconstructed son of a Confederate soldier, made his studies the summit of that approach. Photographs from the era show Eisenhower, Churchill, Marshall, and other luminaries intently listening to Freeman, as if to an oracle—for to them, he was, and that was what they expected a military historian to be.

To the chagrin of many military historians, readers—and non-military historians—still see "battles and leaders" as the dominant mode of military history. If you doubt that, you have not lately browsed the history section in one of the surviving superstores. In the academic discipline of military history, though, this has not been the case for more than forty years. Since the 1960s, military historians have engaged in their own warfare, skirmishing, maneuvering, and sometimes in digging rather formidable systems of entrenchments.

The late John Keegan, with his 19XX book, The Face of Battle, ignited the conflict. Keegan displaced the general from the battlefield by explicating the experience of the regular soldier in combat. He was not interested in what Henry V did at Agincourt, but in the experience of the Welsh archer preparing to shoot; he did not repeat the same set of anecdotes about the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, but gave the view of a private in the ranks waiting for the advance of Napoleon's Guard. Keegan's aimed to understand battle as soldiers had experienced it, not as generals believed that they had, should have, or could have directed it.

Keegan's approach appealed both to academics and to buffs, to the professional and the armchair tactician. It arrived just as oral history had demonstrated its respectability to a wider academic audience and just as the movement to do history from the "bottom up" rather than the "top down" was gaining traction. Oral history allowed a historian study social history without having to understand statistics. But unlike "cliometrical" social history, the oral-history approach had wide popular appeal; both genealogy and historical reenacting became popular hobbies in the 1970s, ways of exploring and expressing historical connection. The confluence of professional and lay audiences, coupled with bottom-up trends in the academic discipline, made books describing the experience of privates, corporals, and sergeants just as popular as those grading a general's thinking. Social histories were books about Dad's army. They told the stories that he refused to tell.

Perhaps the preeminent popular expression of that trend was Stephen Ambrose's D-Day, his 1995 account of the Normandy invasion published to critical acclaim and massive sales. As early as the 1970s, Ambrose had felt the shift in the wind and adjusted accordingly. The book that made him was a biography of the eminent Civil War fussbudget General Henry Wager Halleck; not a sexy biographical subject even for the chroniclers of generals, but it opened the door for Ambrose to write a biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Some of the stories that Ambrose later told about his writing of Eisenhower's biography, such as the number and extent of interviews with Eisenhower that he did, turned out to be fabrications at worst, fantasies at best—Ambrose, as it emerged shortly before his death and since, had an uneasy relationship with facts. Still, as he drafted that biography and worked with the Eisenhower Papers project, Ambrose became convinced of the importance of the interview. Thus, when he founded the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, he began a massive oral history project: interviewing veterans who had participated in D-Day. Those interviews served as the foundation for not only Ambrose's D-Day, but for Craig L. Symonds' Neptune, and many other studies.

The other strand of the "new military history"—now far from new—is the "war and society" strand, far more important to academic and professional historians at present than any other approach. It focuses on the society from which an army or a war develops, not merely what happened in that war or how that army was organized. Consequently one can now attend a military history conference and hear a very interesting paper on gender relations in the Red Army during the Battle of Kursk, or a vigorous argument over the metaphors of warfare in ancient Athens. (Try doing that forty years ago.) And more likely than not, an eminent speaker introducing this or that panel will dismiss "drums and trumpets" —as if this same dismissal hadn't been issued for the last thirty years. Not only is the new military history no longer new, it is also complacent.

As a matter of fact, in 1975 Dennis Showalter published a sparkling essay in Military Affairs, "A Modest Plea for Drums and Trumpets." Showalter correctly pointed out that one could not understand an army completely apart from its goal of destroying people and property, or apart from the means by which it was trained, disciplined, and controlled. To do good "war and society" history, he prophesied, one would still have to understand the history of military operations.

As with the "new military history" it criticized, Showalter's plea is now an old argument, yet one that does not seem to fade. I can't help but look at Symonds' Neptune, published to mark the 70th anniversary of D-Day, and hope that it is evidence that, at last, we might be getting beyond this historiographical dispute and spend our time debating more interesting things, to the benefit of both the academic clerisy and the interested laity. Even if we aren't, it would be hard to find a brisker, more compelling account of the entire scope of the Normandy invasion of 1944.

Symonds is, looking over his list of titles, a "drums and trumpets" kind of scholar—or, given his focus on naval history, a "pipes and chanteys" historian. Neptune, at its heart, is an operational history of the Normandy invasions: their conception, the arguments over them, their planning, their execution, and their aftermath. Yet throughout the book there are numerous respectful nods to the "war and society" point of view. Symonds explains the British-American cultural clash, between both privates and admirals, as they prepared and planned for the unprecedented invasion. It's not given too much space, and he is drawing together many other studies of the "American occupation of England"—but it's there because he obviously thought it important. He also includes an afterword with paragraph-long sketches answering the question "What happened to them after that?" (In case you wondered, "them" refers to generals and politicians—does the reader of Neptune really need to be reminded of what happened to Roosevelt, Churchill, and Eisenhower?) But Symonds also draws on numerous interviews with ordinary men and women from every stage of the operation, and he concludes with an anecdote from a seaman retelling his recurring nightmares after the war's end.

These tidbits can't of course compare to Ambrose's monumental compilation of oral histories in D-Day. But there is a limit to what oral history can do. Oral histories of men trapped beneath the bluffs of Omaha Beach are one thing; an oral history of a typewriter clerk in the logistical preparation for D-Day is … well, suffice it to say that it will not be written. The strength of Symonds' book is his insistence on focusing on things that certain professional and lay historians find tedious: planning, supply chains, logistical preparation, and scheduling. Amazingly, he makes all of this seem not only interesting, but as important as it actually was—even as the reader knows, with the dreadful certainty of hindsight, that so much of that planning will prove mistaken at best.

For Symonds, as it was for Ambrose, the entire Normandy invasion was ultimately a question of decisions. But Ambrose focused on the actual invasion itself, and then imposed a kind of democratic populism on the evidence: in his telling, only the Allied soldiers were flexible decision-making agents, and thus able to defeat the robotic Hun. Symonds' does not make that sort of Manichaean judgment; he's far too careful a historian to use cheap historiographical lenses that merely flatter the reader. Nor is he interested simply in what happened on D-Day itself. Instead he details a vast web of decisions, a sprawling Venn diagram draped across days, weeks, months, and years, preceding and succeeding the actual day of the invasion.

If history is contingent, then it is in part the work of historians to illuminate the decisions that humans make as contingent beings operating within structures and forces that are at times flexible, at times inflexible. Symonds does this. He chronicles the decisions of captains and lieutenants in the lower levels of the planning process. He recounts the decisions of men like Rear-Admiral Moon, who decided to work fifteen hours a day, seven days a week until, frayed by exhaustion, he decided to kill himself, and did, after meticulously wrapping a towel around his service pistol. Included are the decisions of coxswains to take their landing craft in to the designated landing zone where they were blown apart, and the decision of another coxswain to make an approach to some other part of the beach, where his cargo of soldiers lived. Destroyer captains, seeing men slaughtered on Omaha Beach by machine gun positions, decide to take their beloved ships so close to the beach that there could only have been was only a foot of water beneath their keels, and from there blasted apart the German defenses at virtually point blank range. Soldiers decide that they would rather die fighting than crouched in the surf, or at the base of the bluffs on Omaha Beach. And Eisenhower, lighting cigarette from cigarette, decides to postpone the invasion by a day; decides not to cancel the Utah Beach landing; decides to give the go-ahead to the Airborne landings; and finally decides to give the order for the invasion.

Ultimately Symonds strives to rise above the historiographical strife of the past forty years. In doing so, he has not produced battles-and-leaders history; or operational history; or war-and-society history. Symonds has written—to quote for our purposes a great review by the late Edmund Morgan—"social history, institutional history, political history, [military] history, and not any single one of them, which is to say good history." I hope everyone at both the Barnes & Noble coffee shop with the stack of Gettysburg battle studies and the alt-funk java joint down the street takes notice.

Albert Louis Zambone's previous piece for B&C was a review of The End of Sparta by Victor Davis Hanson.

Most ReadMost Shared