Success despite failure

The D-Day invasion 80 years ago was a success despite being a failure, as David Howarth describes in Dawn of D-Day: These Men Were There, June 6, 1944 (2008).

The invasion was planned with minute-by-minute precision. This was supposed to happen, then five minutes later this was supposed, and 10 minutes after that something else. Yet almost nothing happened on schedule or as planned. The bombing and shelling before the invasion was mostly ineffective. Paratroopers were dropped in the wrong places. Winds caused boats to go off course, so that troops didn't land where they were supposed to or when they were supposed to. Troops assigned to break through defensive barriers didn't arrive until after the troops who were supposed to charge through those openings. And so forth.

And yet, somehow, it worked. And this success had less to do with the generals who planned the invasion down to the minute than with the men who overcame all those obstacles on their own. And of course, it helped that the German army was surprised, not believing the Allies would invade in poor weather. And fewer lives were lost than the generals had expected if everything went as planned.

Howarth breaks the invasion into parts — the air drops, Utah Beach, Omaha Beach, etc. — and then examines those parts through the stories of some of the men who survived to tell about their experiences. Thus you won't learn about everything that happened on the French coast that day, but you will experience a little of what it was like through the stories of individual soldiers, including some from the German side. The result is an exciting, you-are-there feeling as you read this relatively short book.

Along the way, the author tells us things even experts on the invasion may have never considered. For example, until the invasion most of the British soldiers involved had less experience with war than residents of the city of London, who had experienced almost nightly bombing for a long period. Meanwhile the soldiers were training elsewhere in relative safety, and some of them, Howarth tells us, felt guilty about it and were glad to finally be able to demonstrate as much courage as ordinary British citizens had already shown.