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Caen: Anvil of Victory McKee Amazon UK ref: 0333383133 | Amazon US ref: 028563559X Using extensive eye-witness accounts from both sides, Alexander McKee’s Caen is a classic and detailed history of the fierce struggle for the historical French city, the first major D-Day objective of the Anglo-Canadian armies. Although of strategic importance in itself as a centre of road communication, the attack was actually a feint to facilitate the American capture of Cherbourg and subsequent break out. The personal accounts vividly convey the experience of war, and these are combined with a firm grasp and projection of strategy in a style leavened with poetic and poignant reflections.
Despite the odds against them, the Germans remained very effective soldiers. Their small all-arms kampfgruppe (battle-groups) were more than a match for the suicidal mass tank charges undertaken by the British and Canadians. The Americans, meanwhile, relied on air and artillery preparation which made for slow progress. Numbers, however, proved decisive and the book culminates in Apocalyptic chaos as the surviving German units rush to escape the closing Allied jaws.
In accordance with the original plan, the Americans made a wide swing instead of taking the opportunity to make a close one, and there simply weren't enough Allied forces to close the Falaise gap. Half the German forces succeeded in breaking through the encirclement, and the war was thus prolonged into the following year.
McKee takes a very objective view of moral conduct, frankly exposing Allied as well as German atrocities. He implies, however, that the real criminals were not the soldiers or generals, but the politicians who prolonged the war through their demand for unconditional surrender, not to mention the civilian architects of civilian bombing.
The Allies were not particularly popular with the Normans, bringing, as they did, death, destruction and more draconian restrictions than had been suffered under the German occupation. Attitudes could scarcely have been improved by the futile destruction of Caen which killed thousands of French civilians but left the Germans unscathed.
© armed-combat.com 7/1999
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