Unhappy Landings

Going once more onto the beach with private perspectives on D-Day.

- Greg Dixon

The New Zealand poet Denis Glover took his gramophone to war. Indeed, on the wild, grey morning of June 6, 1944 – D-Day – as the then Royal Navy lieutenant commanded a landing craft through a choppy English Channel, the mad bugger used that gramophone to play “the robust music of an English hunting song” to the seasick British commandos he was about to drop on a beach in Normandy.

Music hath charms to provoke the savage breast, perhaps? In any case, this extraordinary scene – unexpected, funny, and arriving on page 276 – is just the sort of detail occupying nearly every paragraph of Giles Milton’s unexpectedly cracking, sometimes funny, often tragic and entirely redolent new book, D-Day: The Soldiers’ Story.

Of course, you’ll be wondering: why in the world do we need yet another history of what’s always billed as “the greatest invasion in history”? I’m entirely inclined to agree.