Fighting with a Purpose

...An armada such as the one that flew the 82nd and the 101st across the English Channel would be hopelessly vulnerable today to Exocet missiles and similar deadly weapons...

...The Germans, of course, were unable to check the incursions on the beaches as they had at Dieppe, and at length the Allies broke German lines with superior air and land power...

...John Keegan was living with his family in the west of England...

...and Hitler, instead of controlling Europe, was forced to protect the Fatherland...

...The German 21st Panzer Division, fatally ordered to pursue Hitler's goal of crushing the invasion on the beaches and subsequently inland, fought with a valor inherited from past Teutonic armies????which fought bravely regardless of the cause they were defending...

...Keegan also devotes an excellent section to the ill-fated Dieppe raid that destroyed the 2nd Canadian Division in 1942 and further delayed the decisive landing...

...One might paraphrase General Maxwell Taylor's sardonic remark about D-Day's large proportion of officers?Never in the history of human combat have so few been led by so many"????and observe that never has so much been written about a single military event...

...The very extent of its scatter, for all that it was unintended, had multiplied the effect of confusion in the German high command, preventing it from offering any kind of organized riposte...

...Delighted by his close proximity to real soldiers, he watched on the night of June 5, 1944 as the sky over his house "began to fill with the sound of aircraft, which swelled until it overflowed that darkness from edge to edge...

...250,000 Axis soldiers were killed...

...Six Armies in Normandy is not so glowing, though, that it ignores the difficulty of persuading Churchill to move forward with the cross-Channel invasion...

...An excellent overview rather than a definitive history, Keegan's book traces the performance of the forces of half a dozen nations from the invasion of Europe through August 25,1944, when the French liberated Paris...

...And in the Normandy campaign of 19441believed that I had stumbled upon it...

...In three months the German Army Group B was effectively wiped out: 1,800 tanks were reduced to 120 spread among the remnants of 12 divisions...

...in less than a year the Allies would surround Berlin...

...Thus Keegan is not a World War II veteran with an untold story...

...Slam" Marshall, the military historian and longtime NL contributor whose Men Against Fire Keegan much admires...

...This is why American paratroopers jumped into the sky over France, and English armored divisions pushed ahead under terrible shelling in Operation Goodwood...

...The book ends with a rhetorical question: "Dare we guess that D-Day was the last of Europe's great invasions...

...Seconding Marshall, Keegan notes that fear is a powerful motive????not so much fear of death as fear of shame, of what a soldier's companions will think if he runs...

...It seemed to me worth finding some episode through which the varying status of national armies might be exemplified...

...Indeed, it is to explore armies as representative institutions that Keegan treads the familiar ground of Normandy...

...What, therefore, can Keegan add almost four decades after the fact...

...It is a victory that Keegan likens to that of the Russians on the Eastern Front????no mean comparison...

...As a matter of fact, in his earlier The Face of Battle????a history of Agincourt, Waterloo and the first day on the Somme, July 1916, narrated from a soldier's perspective????he writes, "I have not been in a battle...

...In two and a half months Paris would fall...

...Moreover, given the present sophistication of electronic surveillance, such a large-scale operation could no longer be planned in secret...

...Keegan goes on to suggest that men also fight because they are part of an army drawn from a larger social group...

...He writes in the Introduction that an army is "a mirror of its own society and values: in some places and at some times an agent of national pride, or a bulwark against national fears, or perhaps even the last symbol of the nation itself...

...No general could risk two divisions to a fleet of lumbering DC-3s, any more than an admiral would start a naval engagement afloat in an old-fashioned dread-naught...

...Reviewed by Matthew Stevenson Contributor, "Harper's," the Washington "Post" Now a senior lecturer with Britain's Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, the author of the present volume was 10 years old when the Allies launched the invasion of Normandy, or, as the phrase had it, "opened the Second Front...

...Adding to one's initial skepticism about the present enterprise is the glut of histories, memoirs, television specials, and battlefield tours already covering nearly every angle of fire in the Normandy engagement...

...Keegan is fond of criticizing Hitler's tactics by citing the aphorism of Frederick the Great: "He who defends everything defends nothing...

...By stretching his troops across northern France and by failing to anticipate where the attack would come, Hitler undid himself...

...The six armies of his title are the American, Canadian, English, Scottish, Polish, German, and French, and within each he usually follows several divisions: the 3rd Canadian Division, for example, landing at Juno Beach...

...Keegan's chosen subjects fit his thesis well...

...Whatever the ultimate answer, Keegan has brought something new to the literature on Normandy by showing how the undertaking demonstrated that men fight well when they are members of armies that represent a society...

...Many of the "sticks," as U.S...

...Of the pioneering airborne bridgehead's boldness and logistical complexity Keegan says, "It was appropriate and characteristic that the effect should have been produced by Americans...

...The Americans, whom he had come to know and admire, were departing for the battle that was to be decisive on the Western Front...

...Despite Keegan's concentration on particular units and their heroics????or lack thereof????his portrait of the invasion makes clear the Allied accomplishment...

...But the fact that it was feasible in 1944 did not prevent the Americans from suffering a ghastly death toll...

...Keegan concludes with a discussion of how military staff colleges have taken to studying Normandy because it is one of the few battles waged with infantry and tanks that offers a hint of what might be expected were nato and the Warsaw Pact to engage each other across Central Europe...

...Both set out to discover exactly what makes men perform well in battle...

...it was composed of emigres and other wanderers who found themselves in England after Poland was crushed between the weight of Germany and Russia...

...Others broke legs and arms as they fell through roofs or into trees...

...The 82nd All Americans and the 101st Screaming Eagles dropped 13,000 troops from low-flying planes into the darkness over France to challenge a well-fortified Nazi war machine that had ruled the country since 1940...

...Nevertheless, Keegan maintains, "For all its wastefulness, the airborne descent on the margin of the Utah beach was a success...

...These troops embodied their nation's strongest traditions of courage, and it was on this strength that the battle was finally won...

...Unbelievable though it may seem, a common reaction of many soldiers upon hitting the ground was to curl up and go to sleep, no matter what circumstances they found themselves in????a side effect of airsickness pills and nervous tension...

...elsewhere and otherwise an instrument of national power deprecated, disregarded and of very last resort...

...Consider the 1st Polish Armored Division, which closed the Fal-aise Gap and thereby extinguished the German counteroffensive...

...paratroopers are called, landed in watery fields and drowned...

...None of these units was more illustrative of its society than the two American airborne divisions Keegan had heard overhead as a boy...

...nor heard one, nor heard one from afar, nor seen the aftermath...

...A radio operator at the time, Hugh Pritchard, reminiscing in 1967, said, "The terror of that first night remains so vivid even today that I some-times wake up i n a cold sweat and nearly jump out of bed...

...The beginning of the answer lies in the concerns he shares with the late S.L.A...