Max Hastings, Sword: D-Day Trial by Battle (London: William Collins, 2025)

D-DAY ‒ Operation Neptune followed by the start of Operation Overlord and final nail in the coffin of Nazi Germany ‒ was a triumph of planning, ingenuity and fortitude. It remains the largest amphibious operation in history and the last time Britain played a dominant role in a global military event. So, it has inevitably been mythologised and misused; during the Brexit campaign, for instance.

Max Hastings brings a balanced and realistic perspective to bear by focusing on the easternmost of the British invasion beaches, Sword, on 6 June 1944. He provides a highly readable analysis of military strategy and technical detail and places particular emphasis on the recorded experiences of participants.

Britain’s armed forces had been training for a return to the continent since the withdrawal at Dunkirk in 1940 and had only the failure at Dieppe to show for it. They had been in action in a number of theatres, successfully in North Africa and Italy; but the bulk of the force that would invade Europe had never before been in action. Years of training had involved a great deal of boredom and misapprehension; yet as Hastings poignantly puts it, the first shot many would hear fired in anger on D-Day would be their last. And another caveat: by 1944 it was clear the Allies were going to win the war eventually, so the urge to take risks had dissipated.

Just before D-Day there were 42 divisions – American, British, Canadian, French and Polish – waiting to invade Europe; five million personnel in all. On all five invasion beaches the main preoccupation and preparation concerned getting ashore, staying there, and quickly establishing a bridgehead. On Sword this involved night-time assault by the 6th Airborne Division by glider and parachute; and dawn landings by the 3rd Infantry Division from the sea.

Enormous imagination had been exercised designing armoured ‘funnies’, specialised vehicles that would make the landings easier. The DD (duplex drive) swimming tank could propel itself ashore from a distance; the flail clear a path through beach defences, for instance. Similar effort was put into detailed reconnoitring of the beaches by frogmen and from aerial photos. Midget submarines were stationed off Sword to erect directional beacons. And in the background was a deception plan encouraging the Germans to believe that the Normandy assault was a feint; the main thrust would come in Pas de Calais. The amount of intelligence gathered was phenomenal, not least the weather forecasting that in the final analysis was crucial.

The airborne division’s arrival the previous night was indicative of high morale. All six gliders landed, five on target and one of them within 50 metres of its objective. Their task was to secure crossings over the River Orne and Caen canal. The paratroopers were less lucky and there was criticism of the performance of transport command. The attack on the Merville battery was undertaken with great bravery but debatable effect by depleted forces. Officers resorted to the bugler to muster their scattered men.

There were doubts before D-Day about the quality of the infantry but most of them made it off the beach, a notable achievement in itself, and casualties were lower than anticipated. What happened subsequently was criticised, although the aim of Churchill and Montgomery to reach Caen on D-Day was over-ambitious. Wireless communication was poor and too much reliance was placed on cautious senior officers with leadership shortcomings rather than initiative from junior officers in the vanguard.

The invasion stalled during the day, perhaps not surprising after the rigours of the crossing and landing. Yet forward troops of the Shropshires were only 5 kilometres short of Caen by nightfall while the Staffordshires had repulsed 21 Panzer Regiment. As a finale there was an impressively successful evening landing of 250 gliders carrying troops, supplies and tanks.

I have a particular interest in this book: my father was there at Sword at dawn on D-Day. Like a high proportion of that day’s participants, he was barely in his twenties but as a coastal forces navigator had the enormous responsibility to guide twelve landing craft to their designated spot on the beach. Hastings has little to say about the naval and air force contribution to events on D-Day; a strange omission because without them there would have been no landings.