Sword Beach: The untold story of D-Day’s forgotten victory

REVIEW BY NICK HEWITT

Sometimes books teach us something new, but sometimes they inspire us to reconsider something that we thought we understood. Historian and archaeologist Stephen Fisher’s excellent debut work Sword Beach falls in the latter category. The number of people still alive who actually experienced Operation Neptune, codename for the assault phase of Operation Overlord, which began with D-Day on 6 June 1944, is diminishing by the day. But if you want to get as close as you can while remaining in the safety and comfort of your living room, then this is the book for you. At times when reading it, this reviewer could almost smell the stench of high explosive or hear the sinister chatter of machine-gun fire.

The sheer scale and complexity of the D-Day landings and the subsequent weeks-long Battle of Normandy, coupled with an understandable desire by many writers to focus on the widely recognised drama of the US landings in Omaha Assault Area, mean that the British and Commonwealth experience on 6 June 1944 can sometimes be lost.

Omaha was exceptionally bloody, so the experience in other landing areas (including, as an aside, the other US assault area, Utah) must, by definition, have been easy. In his venerable Overlord, Max Hastings covered all the British Commonwealth beaches in fewer than nine pages, with Sword getting fewer than three: ‘a remarkable success’, he wrote somewhat dismissively, ‘where the losses were slight in relation to the scale of the assault.’ An easy landing, followed by a sluggish advance, culminating in the failure to take the key objective city of Caen, is the clichéd tale. Fisher’s new work is an emphatic ‘not so’ counterpoint to these assumptions. A success Sword undoubtedly was, but it was never easy. In the prophetic words of the Allied Naval Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, writing about the entire operation on 30 July 1944, ‘it may seem to some people that it was all easy and plain sailing. Nothing could be more wrong. It was excellent planning and execution.’