Antony Beevor's D-Day is useful as an ambitious survey, but it is too focused on the land campaign for a naval reader. The scale of the beachhead helps explain that emphasis, and the maps support the attempt to cover many aspects of the operation. Even so, the book gives strikingly little visual attention to ships or landing craft. A broad D-Day narrative can describe the fighting ashore while understating the maritime system that made the invasion possible.
Notable Point · 9:07
What a D-Day survey can miss at sea
A critique of a broad D-Day history explains why the naval effort and landing craft deserve more than a land-war footnote.