The Longest Day, Cornelius Ryan

[beckyh2112]

In St.-Lo, at the headquarters of the 84th Corps, Major Friedrich Hayn, the intelligence officer, was making arrangements for another kind of party. He had ordered several bottles of excellent Chablis, for at midnight the staff planned to surprise the corps commander, General Erich Marcks. His birthday was June 6.

They were holding the surprise birthday party at midnight because Marcks had to leave for the city of Rennes in Brittany at daybreak. He and all the other senior commanders in Normandy were to take part in a big map exercise that was to begin on Tuesday morning. Marcks was slightly amused at the role he was supposed to play: he would rpresent the "Allies." The war games had been arranged by General Eugen Meindl, and perhaps because he was a paratrooper the big feature of the exercise was to be an "invasion" beginning with a paratroop "assault" followed by "landings" from the sea. Everyone thought the Kriegsspiel would be interesting - the theoretical invasion was supposed to take place in Normandy.

The Longest Day is Cornelius Ryan's history of D-Day, published about fifteen years afterwards. It's not just a history of the event, but a story of the people involved - occupied French, Allies, and Germans.

He wrote it based off of official reports and countless interviews with people who had been there on all sides. There's so much in here that gets you down on the ground with people, so much showing how personal it all could be, how the fog of war affected things, and all the strange quirks of that day. It's amazing, tense, horrible and uplifting by turns. Several times, it moved me to tears.

Comments

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

The Longest Day is a very good book. I also recommend his book The Last Battle which is a very interesting book from an emotional standpoint - it covers the German defense and the Allied attack on Berlin in 1945. It's a very confusing book for me, as it's one of the few books that can make me feel a sympathy with a wide variety of German characters- who he manages to portray very successfully as real human beings, flaws and all. Suffice it to say, the ending to that book is a great deal more depressing.

Ryan is one of the breed of military history authors who concentrates on people on both sides of the lines - not just the one related to his own country. That adds a depth to his work that a lot of other works lack, and makes him supremely readable.

(I liked A Bridge Too Far as well, although not quite as much as the other two).

[beckyh2112.livejournal.com]

I think we've got A Bridge Too Far lurking around the house somewhere. Not sure about The Last Battle, though it is one I want to track down.

I was very impressed with how well he handled the people involved on so many sides. He did a good job evoking sympathy for people I'd not normally consider sympathetic, or even stop to think about it at all.

I've been handed Is Paris Burning? to read next for WWII nonfiction.

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

Never read it, so I can't tell you how it is.

To be honest, I've begun to stray away from WWII nonfiction for several years because most of it is far too parochially American. There seems to be a recognition that there is a tremendous market for oral history of American soldiers in WWII, and a great many books based on the memoirs and oral accounts of soldiers has sprung up (probably thanks to Stephen Ambrose and others), but a lot of them lack any particular insight. They neither draw conclusions from the course of events or the experience of the people, nor do they give a full comprehensive view of the history, omitting the view from the other side (and even the view from the people who lived in the country in which the war was being fought). As such I've limited a lot of my reading to books I've already read before, and more technical studies.

There still are good books, or so I've been told, but there's a lot of crud too.