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Summary: Brilliant, gripping. Some of the bloodiest fighting in WWII
Review: This is the story of barely two months of the eleven months of brutal combat seen by Canada's 4th Field artillery regiment, and of the infantry units 4th Field supported with astonishing firepower. After several years in England, 4th Field's combat role begins with the regiment's landing in Normandy twenty days after D-Day.Canadian field artillery during WWII was the best in the world. The guns of every artillery unit in a given battlefield sector were laid out on a grid plan that allowed Forward Observation Officers to call in pinpoint fire from every other regiment as well as their own. The Germans, who considered their's the best, were astounded by the Canadians' ability to rain huge barrages down precisely on target. Post-war German accounts of the fighting here repeatedly mention the dreaded Canadian field artillery. When Canadian infantry companies were being overrun, they often took what cover they could find and called in artillery barrages on their own positions, catching the Germans out in the open and astounded that they would do it. In some of the fiercest action of WWII the Canadian Army advanced only 30-some miles, but they slugged it out against some of Germany's toughest, most fanatical panzer divisions and battle-hardened infantry. Hitler had ordered them not to give up an inch of ground, and they tried desperately to obey. Nevertheless, the Canadian units drove them into the famous Falaise Pocket from which only remnants of crack German divisions escaped. One reason why writings by men on these front lines is rare is that few lived to tell about it. Some of the Canadian outfits in this action suffered over 100% casualties. Some replacements who arrived at Blackburn's regiment one evening were wiped out the same night. It takes a man who was there to REALLY know what it's like to live in the same sopping-wet clothes, in mud-and-water-filled dugouts for weeks and weeks, rarely getting a warm meal, fighting today for ground they may have to give up tomorrow. So much detail seeps from one's memory, and for those who try to keep notes, doing so is daunting in conditions where imagination is needed to even keep written target coordinates preserved long enough for them to be used by the gun crews. George Blackburn was a reporter before enlisting in the Canadian Army in 1939. He took notes during combat and somehow preserved them. And, he survived the war to use them. After the war he interviewed some of the men he writes about. He visited the battlefield almost thirty years later gathering more material. His life after the war included writing in several professional regimes. His skill at painting vivid recollections of minute-to-minute life on the battlefield is evident throughout this splendid work. I like the author's way of arranging the book into short chapters, each of which is an episode in the whole campaign. I like his way of presenting his first-person narrative, using "you" for "I". It works very well: "For a moment your attention is drawn to an opening in the stone wall, where a giant German tank, which you believe is a Panther, points its long-barrelled gun right at you." This book, and its companion "The Guns of Victory," (even better, if that's possible) are the best accounts of battlefield action I've read. Even that exemplary novelist and war historian Len Deighton, with his outstanding "Fighter" historical novel and "Bomber" true account (or was it the other way around?) doesn't measure up to this. Blackburn stands above Remarque ("All's Quiet on the Western Front") and Siegfried Knappe ("Soldat: Reflections of a German Soldier") Detail -- vivid, essential detail - provides a crucial underpinning of the gripping narrative. 4th Field's training in England allowed us to appreciate its excellence on the battlefield. I was honored to meet some of the men, like that gallant and resourceful Capt. Bill Waddell, for just one. From the descriptions of the bombings of Canadian forces by American and RAF bombers I have gained a new understanding of how devastating saturation bombing really is. Geez! For men who are already at the ragged edge of human endurance to suffer bombing by friendly air forces ... We think of war as being conducted by infantry and tanks and planes - and of course generals in their comfy commands back there. There are many more. I was pleased to learn about the vast support network behind the troops in the thick of it. The Canadians fired more rounds per gun per day in this campaign than has ever been fired before - more rounds overall than during the Normandy beachhead. How does the ammo - MOUNTAINS of ammo -- the fuel, the food, the medical help get to the front? How do they even know where the front is from one day to the next? (Some didn't, like that intrepid motorcycle messenger.) And, of course, who carries the casualties from the front, and the replacements for them? (The dead usually had to be left where they fell: the overpowering stench of thousands of dead Canadians and Germans is always there.) Footnotes, not so many as to inundate us, appear on the page, not as endnotes which keep readers flipping back and forth. The book has a fine index.
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Summary: Terrific First Person History Of Invasion Into France, 1944
Review: What a wonderful bit of eye-witness history Canadian author George Blackburn has rendered in his recent book, "The Guns Of Normandy: A Soldier's View, France 1944". This is an absorbing, entertaining, and fascinating account of a Canadian participant in the Allied invasion onto the beaches of Normandy in June of 1944, a wonderful second volume in his three-volume trilogy. His eye-witness testimony concerning his own anecdotal experience during the historic campaign marshals a marvelously captivating and insightful perspective on the nature of combat as he experienced it while on the line as the action transpired all along the front. Indeed, it is Blackburn's unique ability to speak in the first person that makes his contribution so compelling and valuable. The author's stated purpose is to take the reader on an accompanied tour of the battle as it progresses and evolves, helping us to better empathize with and understand the horrific and riveting circumstances under which the situation progresses, as they struggle from the killing ground of the beaches up the escarpment to the fields and deadly hedges, and on into the lush green of the waiting countryside of France. What we are privileged to experience, as a result, is a full metal jacket approach to the chaos of war, amid the acrid smells, blinding flashes of light, and ear-pounding crashes of both incoming and outgoing shells exploding day and night. In doing so, Blackburn clears somewhat a path through the all too commonplace `fog of battle'. Blackburn does so with a wonderfully literate and engagingly approachable writing style, and he sues his obvious facility with words to great advantage here, adding immeasurably to our understanding of what the experience on the ground was in those first fatal hours and days as the Allies bludgeoned their ways through the brutal resistance of a frenzied Nazi war machine. He writes with surprising intensity and emotion, and his sense of recall of particular events and existential circumstances for himself and his fellows is both impressive and quite moving at points in his narrative. This is first person history at its best, one that employs both a more objective coda to the book, which also serves to lend a more authoritative aura to the proceedings than would otherwise have been possible.
Blackburn's other volumes are interesting as well, and are similarly eyewitness accounts of this remarkable Canadian war hero turned historian and author's personal experience as a participant in the Mediterranean and European campaigns of the Second World War. Here he has shared with us his amazing, profound recollections of the men who fought so valiantly in France in 1944 in service to their countries. This is a story that should be told again and again, so we never forget what it took to take back the beaches, the surrounding countryside, all in preparation for moving on into the interior of France to push the Germans all the way back to Berlin. This was not only the longest day, but also one of the greatest days in history, when hundreds of thousands of Canadians, Brits, Australians, Frenchmen, and Americans strove out of their landing boats to set foot back on Europe, to take back by force of arms the liberty and freedom that had been wrested away from the mainland so cruelly nearly five years before. This, then, is the story of how that crusade to liberate Europe began, of its first shaky steps off the LSTs and boats onto the rocky bloodied shores of France. Enjoy!
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Summary: One Warrior's Perspectives at Ground Zero in 1944
Review: With all due respect to Stephen Ambrose's D-Day: June 6, 1944, Band of Brothers, and Citizen Soldiers as well as to Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day and Steven Spielberg's preparations for his film Saving Private Ryan, what we have here is not a third-party's analysis of research resources based on information provided by participants in the Normandy Invasion. Rather, and infinitely more valuable, Blackburn offers an eyewitness account. He was there. True, no individual could possibly know everything that was happening on June 6th and thereafter, be everywhere along the beaches and later during the advances inland, etc. Blackburn never makes that claim. His purpose, rather, is to allow his reader to accompany him as he and his associates made their way through an understandably messy, confusing, terrifying, and ultimately humbling ordeal. As indicated in this volume, he possesses all of the skills of a military historian in combination with the talents of a world-class novelist except that what he has produced is eloquent and compelling non-fiction. His writing skills remind me of Yann Martel's in his brilliant Life of Pi, technically a work of fiction but one in which human experience is elevated to levels of clarity and intensity I am unable to describe. Blackburn celebrates the human spirit when confronted with seemingly insurmountable obstacles and impossible barriers. He makes especially effective use of second-person narrative and present tense by which to invest his eyewitness account with both immediacy and authenticity. To the extent possible, he allows his reader to be right there with him as he prepares for and then becomes centrally involved in the largest, most extensive, and most complicated military operation ever undertaken, before or since. Chilling, heart-rending, inspiring, but always credible. Time and again I found myself saying "So THAT is what it was really like." Otherwise, how would I know? I was eight years old when the Normandy Invasion began. This volume is one of three in a trilogy which Blackburn wrote inorder to share his personal experiences throughout World War II. (I have not as yet read Where the Hell Are the Guns?: A Soldier's view of the Anxious Years, 1939-44 and The Guns of Victory: A Soldier's Eye View, Belgium, Holland, and Germany, 1944-45, but plan to.) One personal note. Several years ago, it was my great privilege to assist with efforts to raise funds for indigent recipients -- NOT "winners" -- of the Congressional Medal of Honor. I worked with and became close friends with several recipients who were determined to assist comrades who had fallen upon hard times. For various reasons, each was reluctant to discuss his wartime experiences and especially his individual heroism. Although sincerely interested, I never pressed the issue. Now having read The Guns of Normandy, I think I understand their reticence.
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