The book on D-Day by Antony Beevor, on newsstands on Thursday 6 June with the «Corriere», begins from the Regency halls of Southwick House, a residence 8 kilometers north of Portsmouth, the large British port on the English Channel. In that building, in the late spring of 1944, the supreme command post of the Allied Expeditionary Force, American General Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower, responsible for the entire operation, made the decision to give the green light to disembark for the morning of June 6th, after the originally scheduled date, June 5th, had been canceled due to bad weather.
The breakthrough, when it arrived at the end of July, it was a disaster for the Germans. From the western flank of the Allied landing point, now so deep as to almost reach the Breton peninsula, the American armored and motorized forces began to rush towards the east and north-east, threatening not only Paris and the fords on the Seine, but also the rear of what remained of the Wehrmacht’s elite divisions, still stuck facing the British and Canadians. That’s how it was formed the so-called Falaise pocket, in which all German forces in northern France found themselves trapped. The final toll was disastrous for Germany: in the three months of the summer campaign in France the German divisions had left 2,200 tanks on the ground, 240,000 men, dead and wounded, and around 200,000 prisoners. The British and Canadian XXI Army Groups had suffered 83,045 casualties. In the 12th US Army Group, 125,847 men had been killed or wounded. To these numbers must be added the 16,714 dead and missing of the Allied air forces.
The bombs of the two contenders, especially the Anglo-American ones, they had killed 19,890 French citizens, and another 15,000 civilian deaths and 19,000 injured civilians had been caused by bombing preparatory to the invasion. The destruction was enormous, even if limited to Normandy alone: in Caen, the departmental capital of Calvados, only 8,000 habitable houses remained for 60,000 inhabitants and the reconstruction of the city, begun in 1948, would only be completed in 1962.
The book ends with the liberation of Paris by the Deuxième division blindée, an armored division made up of French but armed and equipped by Americans, led by General Leclerc, an “austere and great patriot” man, writes Beevor, who was actually called Count Philippe de Hauteclocque, but had changed name to avoid reprisals on the family who remained in their homeland. The unit, committed to liquidating the last German resistance, was eager to liberate Paris, which had risen up on 18 August to drive out the Germans. Eisenhower and his commanders actually wanted to bypass the French capital to continue the pursuit of the fleeing Germans. But they gave in to pressure from Charles de Gaulle. The general, who fled France before the defeat in 1940, was self-proclaimed leader of the Free French and since then he had committed himself at all costs and on every occasion, with great haughtiness, to reaffirm the greatness and independence of his country.
De Gaulle was worried that the Germans might massacre the Parisian insurgents: after all, Hitler had ordered General Dietrich von Choltitz, military commander of the city, to raze it to the ground. Orders which fortunately were ignored, the German preferred surrender. The French leader was also fearful that the revolt, in which the communist partisans had taken a leading role, would affect the post-war political structure. Thus Paris was liberated and on August 26, against American orders, de Gaulle made a triumphal march along the Champs-Élysées up to Notre-Dame Cathedral. With the conquest of Paris the French campaign was over.
The volume at 12.90 euros
The book by the English historian Antony Beevor will be released on newsstands on Thursday 6 June with the «Corriere della Sera» D-day. The battle that saved Europe, at the price of €12.90 plus the cost of the newspaper. The volume, which remains on sale for a month, is published in collaboration with Rizzoli and opens with the preface by Paolo Rastelli anticipated above. It also contains three photographic inserts with suggestive images. This is an accurate reconstruction of the so-called Operation Overlord, which marks its eightieth anniversary: the landing of Anglo-American troops in Normandy on 6 June 1944 and the great military campaign that followed. The forces under the command of the future president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower, landed on five beaches on the Norman coast, taking the Third Reich troops barricaded in the so-called Atlantic Wall by surprise. Then there was the German attempt to block the Allied advance. After a series of very violent battles, at the end of July the left flank of the Nazis gave way: the Americans broke through the enemy lines and carried out a deadly encirclement maneuver, closing a large number of German forces in the Falaise pocket. Antony Beevor, born in London in 1946, is one of the best-known military historians: his works, written with a fluent and lively style, have been translated into 35 languages and have sold over eight million copies. A student of John Keegan, a former British army officer, Beevor also wrote novels and won prestigious prizes. Among his books published in Italy: Stalingrad (translation by Sergio Mancini, Rizzoli, 1998); Berlin 1945 (translation by Enzo Peru, Bur Rizzoli, 2002).
