Anthony Beavor: D-Day

He provides a more balanced account of the main features of the battle for Normandy in June-August 1944. This has become easier to do, now that practically everyone involved had died. The main strengths of the account are the accounts of (1) the effect on the civilian population, (2) the experience of war, based on individual memoirs, and (3) the well-documented violations of humane and decent behaviour by all sides.

Some of my prejudices (i.e. prior judgements) were supported by reading this: (1) My low opinion of Montgomery's character. (2) Ditto of Churchill. (3) That most of the killing is done in cold blood, and consists in the killing of unarmed people. (4) That the Germans were scarily good.

Nuggets:
1. German soldiers occupying Paris were forbidden to smoke in public.
2. Allied soldiers who wounded themselves were imprisoned. Germans were shot.
3. 70,000 French people were killed by Allied bombing, more than the number in Britain killed by German bombs.
4. Airey Neave was in MI9.
5. Hemingway was a prominent and flamboyant member of the press corps in Normandy.
6. 20,000 women had their heads shorn.
7. Most captured SS members were murdered.

I used to assume, when I was young, that we would have a war, and would have to fight. I have been extraordinarily fortunate, to be born early in this prolonged period of peacetime, in my part of the world. I have been spared exposure to the utter breakdown of decency that has always gone along with the passage of hostile armies through the land. (For this, we have to thank the Europen Union, above all else.) Even worse than the things that would have been done to me and my loved ones, are the things I may well have done myself. How do I know that I would have adhered meticulously to the provisions of the Geneva Convention?