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D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II | 
 enlarge | Author: Stephen E. Ambrose
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
List Price: $17.00
Buy Used: $5.69
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Avg. Customer Rating:  305 reviews
Sales Rank: 34775
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 656
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.5
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.542142
ASIN: B0013L2EG8
Publication Date: June 1, 1995
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Condition: Used - Good
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| Also Available In:
| • | Turtleback - D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climatic Batte of World War II (Touchstone Books (Turtleback)) | | • | Paperback - D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II | | • | Hardcover - Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West: The Climactic Battle of World War II | | • | Paperback - D-Day June 6, 1944 | | • | Audio CD - D-Day: June 6, 1944 -- The Climactic Battle of WWII | | • | Hardcover - D-Day, June 6, 1944 : The Climactic Battle of World War II (Large Print Edition) | | • | Library Binding - D-day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II | | • | Paperback - D Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II | | • | Library Binding - D-Day, June Sixth, Nineteen Forty-Four | | • | Hardcover - D-Day: June 6, 1944 -- The Climactic Battle of WWII | | • | Audio Cassette - D-Day June 6, 1944 : The Climactic Battle of World War II/Cassettes Abridged |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
Published to mark the 50th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy, Stephen E. Ambrose's D-Day: June 6, 1944 relies on over 1,400 interviews with veterans, as well as prodigious research in military archives on both sides of the Atlantic. He provides a comprehensive history of the invasion which also eloquently testifies as to how common soldiers performed extraordinary feats. A major theme of the book, upon which Ambrose would later expand in Citizen Soldiers, is how the soldiers from the democratic Allied nations rose to the occasion and outperformed German troops thought to be invincible. The many small stories that Ambrose collected from paratroopers, sailors, infantrymen, and civilians make the excitement, confusion, and sheer terror of D-day come alive on the page. --Robert McNamara
Product Description
They wanted to be throwing baseballs, not hand grenades, shooting .22s at rabbits, not M-1s at other men. But when the test came, when freedom had to be fought for or abandoned, they fought. They were soldiers of democracy. They were the men of D-Day.When Hitler declared war on the United States, he bet that the young men brought up in the Hitler Youth would outfight the youngsters brought up in the Boy Scouts. In this magnificent retelling of the war's most climatic battle, acclaimed World War II historian Stephen E. Ambrose tells how wrong Hitler was. Drawing on hundreds of oral histories as well as never-before-available information from around the world, Ambrose tells the true story of how the Allies broke through Hitler's Atlantic Wall, revealing that the intricate plan for the invasion had to be abandoned before the first shot was fired. Focusing on the 24 hours of June 6, 1944, D-Day brings to life the stories of the men and women who made history -- from top Allied and Axis strategic commanders to the citizen soldiers whose heroic initiative saved the day. From high-level politics to hand-to-hand combat, from winner-take-all strategy to survival under fire, here is history more gripping than any thriller -- the epic story of democracy's victory over totalitarianism.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 300 more reviews...
 Excellent Read! May 10, 2008
I packed this book for a long project assignment overseas. It did not disappoint. If you are looking for an excellent historical narrative, you've found it. It is too bad Stephen Ambrose is dead. All of his stuff earns a five-star review.
This is history by the people who made it. It is also a good training document for anyone teaching young officers and soldiers.
If this review was helpful, please add your vote.
excellent service and product November 19, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
this is the best book on D-Day ever written and also the most detailed, I loved it.
Excellent reading although highly US-centric September 28, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I read WWII books as a hobby and have read many books on the subject of D-Day. I had read Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day and was unsure how Ambrose's book would stand up to that. However, I found Ambrose's book highly readable and quite good. He has a very magic way of telling stories and interjecting the veteran's oral history in with his own story telling. For that reason, I found the book to be quite good, entertaining and informative.
However, there were two items which detracted from the overall objectivity of this book. The first was Ambrose's constant belittement of the Axis (German) forces. In many pages, he states how great we were; how bad they were; how prepared we were; how unprepared the Germans were; and on and on. If that's the case, why are there 9300+ cemetary markers in the American Cemetary in France?
Secondly, Ambrose devotes only 5 chapters to the British and Canadian forces. And, these chapters were not nearly as long as the space devoted to the Americans. If the title of the book is subtitled as The Climatic Battle of WWII, then he should have devoted MORE space to the British and Canadian efforts than what he did. Or he should have subtitled the book as The Climatic US Battle of WWII.
I think these issues take away from the overall quality and objectivity of the book.
In saying that, the book would be an excellent primer for those not well versed in this battle as he does write well. For others, be aware of Ambrose's US-centric point of view.
The Unvarnished Truth! August 25, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
`D-Day' by Stephen Ambrose was an excellent book about the greatest battle of the 20th century. It was frank, candid, brutal, engaging, scary, exhilarating, massive, loud, and, I'm sure many other things. It was based on unvarnished first-hand accounts from the wounded at Normandy (compiled for the Eisenhower Center).You get the story about what really went on from the guys that were there, as well as candid insights and quotes from the high military leadership, from both the Allied and Axis perspectives. It was nothing short of a phenomenal effort of scholarship, a bird's eye view along with numerous front-line views.
I have been interested in D-Day since I first saw the movie `The Longest Day' with John Wayne and Robert Mitchum. I still really like the movie and catch a little of it almost every year around the anniversary date. I also liked `Saving Private Ryan', which was a much more realistic (though harder-to-watch) version of the battle, with unforgettable beach scenes of the action. And recently, a full 20 years after his death, I even found out that my father had participated in D-Day. It was strange: he never said a word about it. My sister ordered his discharge papers on a genealogical search and that's how we found out! He was a `radio mechanic' in the Air Corps, by the way.
I would have liked to have been anywhere but there on that day, but I would have wanted to do my duty as most of the men there did. The battle plans went right out the window due to weather, inaccurate troop and materiel landings, inaccurate paratrooper drops, and a failure to take into account the omnipresent hedgerows (of all things). The incoming troops were sitting ducks that were not battle tested (some high school age) and were going against (supposedly) the best military on the planet. The courage and the carnage were at times unbelievable. The accounts of the beach action were every bit as brutal, and maybe more so, than the Private Ryan movie. Even the Allied medics treating the wounded were fair game as target practice for the Axis.. Also, in one account, an Allied landing craft leader ordered land craft off in water that was clearly too deep so he could get out of there. (I'm glad to report that his orders were disobeyed and he was eventually mustered out with a dishonorable discharge.)
The battle was won by the Allies by their innovative, creative leadership, and lost by the Axis by the rigid, moribund, top-down leadership. The Allies on the front lines simply had to regroup and improvise in real time to get to get it done while the Axis solders had to wait for decisions often from those not even on the scene, which is some cases meant Hitler himself. The scene in `The Longest Day' was correct: Hitler's need for sleep trumped the Axis need for a tank counter attack. Rommel was ham-strung because he didn't have control of the tanks, but it also must be said, he wasn't very good at defensive warfare either.
I learned some new things about the battle. For example, the attack was a major gamble for the Allies, leaving England exposed. There was no fall-back plan and the Allies were very susceptible to a counter-attack. The battle itself was extraordinarily massive and loud; over and over again that point is made in the first hand accounts. Also, there were years of planning and training right down to the level of each soldier or sailor. In the movies, it seemed that they just showed up and went at it.
I would highly recommend it for anyone with any interest in American history. It's very detailed but well-worth the read, even for a semi-buff of American military history such as myself.
Tide Of Fire And Blood June 9, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Stephen Ambrose was an opinionated, myopic self-aggrandizer who could spin a great tale and give unique perspective to the most batted-around topic. Both the bad and good sides of Ambrose are on display in his 1994 book "D-Day", published to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Normandy landings.
Reading the reviews here is like reading Ambrose himself. The bullets fly thick and fast, and sober-sided analysis gives way to nationalistic ranting. It's not that people are wrong when they say "D-Day" shortchanges the non-American story behind the Normandy landings. Actually, it is a significant failing. But the drama of D-Day itself centered on one beachhead, the Omaha beachhead attacked by the Americans, and in the airborne landings carried out by two American and one British paratroop division (a Canadian airborne brigade also pitched in). "D-Day" is not definitive, no, but by focusing on the drama it is a hell of a read.
He writes: "It was a cool night and the spray hitting the men in the face was cold, but the soldiers and sailors gathered off the Normandy coast were sweating."
So are you, especially as Ambrose makes use of numerous oral histories and interviews to give an immersive view of how D-Day went down. This is especially poignant and valuable when it comes to the attack on Omaha Beach, which Ambrose describes at great length and heartbreaking detail. For the 116th and 16th regiments, first in, the battle was akin to the Charge of the Light Brigade under the enfilading fire of German MG-42s and artillery. Companies were wiped out before firing back. The greatest contribution many would make that day would be to carry in weapons others stripped from their corpses.
Ambrose tells the story well, but can't resist making his points in neon for the sleepy reader. Telling you "someone" had to be doing something right at Omaha through all the carnage, he goes on to say: "That someone was spelled i-n-f-a-n-t-r-y."
That is not scholarship but shilling, and there is too much of it in this book. Add to that the lack of focus on America's allies that day (less than 20 pages for Juno, the Canadian beach which Ambrose notes saw the highest proportion of Allied casualties on June 6, and the farthest Allied advance). Ambrose knew his market was predominately American, and catered to it unabashedly.
Yet despite these faults, the facts are undeniable, about a generation of young Americans who had the right stuff, and how much of that stuff was left wafting in the tide off the coast of France. If it's not a rounded or definitive account of D-Day (I recommend "The Longest Day" by Cornelius Ryan), "D-Day" offers thrilling testimony to one of the great American achievements, albeit one that was part of a larger endeavor. It's like seeing those famous Robert Capa photos for the first time, without blurriness and distortion.
"Who can fail to see the beauty and sacrifice our brave lads are making?" wrote a woman to her newspaper in Bedford, Virginia just after the battle. "Because they cannot keep themselves for a day, we'll keep them forever in memory and give them immortality." Ambrose is working along similar lines, and it's hard to begrudge him his success.
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