The Longest Day Turns Fifty Raymond A. Callahan (bio) Stephen E. Ambrose. D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. 655 pp. Maps, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00. Robert J. Kershaw. D-Day: Piercing The Atlantic Wall. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1994. 245 pp. Maps, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. The fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, 1994 saw a flood of books on the subject. None of the works is likely to approach in impact Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day, which first appeared in 1959 and a few years later as a Hollywood movie that fixed the image of the Allied landings in Normandy firmly in the popular mind: the British gliderborne attack on what is still called Pegasus Bridge; the widely scattered American airborne descents (with one unfortunate paratrooper ending up suspended by his chute from the church steeple at St. Mere-Eglise); the American Rangers scaling the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc to capture, expensively, empty gun emplacements; the shambles on Omaha and the fortuitously easy assault on Utah. It seems that successive anniversaries of June 6, 1944, simply replay these stories — in print, in speech and, of course, on film. Stephen Ambrose brings to the task of retelling the story of D-Day impressive credentials. From working as one of the editors of Eisenhower’s wartime papers, he went on to write an excellent account of Ike’s three years (1942–45) as an Allied supreme commander and then a two-volume biographical study of the general and president. As the head of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, Ambrose and a team of assistants have collected nearly fifteen hundred oral history interviews with veterans, which are the heart of this book. Ambrose, of course, puts these personal accounts into a larger context — Anglo-American debates on strategy, training and preparation in England, the whole incredibly complex business of mounting the largest aerial and amphibious assault in history is laid out for the reader. The heart of Ambrose’s narrative, however, is June 6, and especially the American experience on that day, for the heroes of this story are [End Page 313] the rank and file who, at the “sharp end,” made the planners’ concepts and commanders’ intentions work. Ambrose has clearly conceived a great affection for the American soldier (and sailor) of 1944, and this book is perhaps best seen as a tribute to the generation of American veterans who fought the “last good war,” whose greying ranks are now beginning to thin. There is little new for specialists, but this is not a book written for specialists. Its audience is the broader public, and that Ambrose has gotten the tone and balance right for such a narrative seems amply attested by the book’s summer-long presence on the best-seller list. This is all to the good — if capable historians scorn the “popular” market, the market will not disappear but will merely be served by bad historians. Robert J. Kershaw’s book is cooler in tone but similar in many ways. An officer in the British army, Kershaw extends his story to June 18, by which time the bridgehead was secure and the emphasis shifted from consolidating a foothold to breaking out of a beachhead. Kershaw covers all the lodgement areas, and both sides of the firing line, with even-handed skill. As he did in his earlier study of the ill-fated operation “Market Garden,” It Never Snows in September (1990), he makes excellent use of German material. Anyone — specialist or general reader — interested in the story of June 6, 1944, on the beaches of Normandy, and the manner in which the thousands of individual decisions and actions taken (or not taken) on that day coalesced into the mosaic that we remember and commemorate will find these two books well worth the time spent reading them. The intense concentration on D-Day itself, however, does seem to have kept certain very important issues from being developed in both of these books. One of the enduring controversies about D-Day (and the ensuing weeks) has to...