“D-Day, June 6, 1944: the climactic battle of World War II” as the full title reads is in fact simply a book about D-Day, it’s written by author Stephen Ambrose of Band of Brothers fame. The first third of the book is about the background to the attack, a short biography of the commanders Eisenhower and Rommel, and finally the training and preparation for the invasion. After that initial background information the book moves on the invasion itself.

This book is rather the opposite to what I expected, which might be one reason I did not find it to be a good book. D-Day was the third book by Stephen Ambrose that I read, after reading Band of Brothers and Pegasus Bridge I knew that Ambrose was a great storyteller. Band of Brothers tells a story that spans several years, Pegasus Bridge is basically just about one day (D-Day), so therefore I thought this book would be somewhat the same style. But instead this book is nothing like the ones I’ve read before, you don’t get to know anyone personally — except for maybe Eisenhower in the first part of the book. I do understand that the number of soldiers fighting during D-Day were far greater then just Easy Company or John Howard’s men at Pegasus, but I still think it would have been possible to tell some of the soldiers stories in greater detail. Most of the time a soldier only gets between one and three sentences, at the maximum half a page. So there you are, every third sentence you’re introduced to a new soldier and are able to read a few lines of his story then it’s on to the next one.

Another thing that I found really annoying to be honest is the centralization around the American forces. This book is not about D-Day as an historically account from all sides of the battle. There are very few stories told from the German side, and the same goes for resistance, the Free French forces who assaulted Ouistreham aren’t much accounted for et cetera. The British and Canadian forces who landed on and captured Gold, Juno and Sword beaches don’t get nearly as much room combined as Omaha gets by itself. The same goes for the British Airborne, which gets less then one third of the number of pages as the American Airborne gets. Not only is it that Ambrose writes far less about the non-American soldiers but also the overall tone of the whole book is more Americanized if you don’t mind me saying so. I’m not saying that American didn’t contribute enormous forces and sacrifice on D-Day and during WWII, all I’m saying is that this book is not the best book to read if you want to read about all sides of the battle. I made a chart just to better be able to show how much is written about the different nationalities who fought.

As you can see, the blue fields outnumber the green and red ones with quite a large margin. The red fields, the German side of the battle, are barely visible. The fields “Home News: USA” and “Home News: World” might need an explanation: These are about how the people back in the states and all around the world took the news about the invasion. The USA section is mostly about the people in New York but also small towns all around the nation. The World section mentions how the news were received in London, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Moscow and Berlin — and as you can see the American section is once again considerably larger. What was even weirder, to me the strangest thing in this book, is the fact that after the chapters on Utah and Omaha the following chapter is that on the home fronts. Even before Ambrose mentioned the British beaches we already learn what the Americans, Londoners and people all around the world said about it. (I chose not to have that order in the chart since I thought it would confuse some people if I split the beaches.)

There are nine maps in the book. Two maps about the overall invasion plans, one about the German strength in Western Europe, two about Utah beach and four about Omaha. Not a single map about any of the British beaches. Am I the only one to find that strongly irritating and rather stupid? Overall I find this book lacking in detail, some parts are very detailed but most of the time the focus is more on the small “meaningless” details then the more important ones. I know this has been a quite negative look on this book, but this is what I felt after reading it.