Abstract
On 20 June 1944, the British Information Service in New York reported on the first ten days of D-Day newsreel coverage in American cinemas. ‘Normandy was invaded solely by American troops’, the report observed, ‘with a couple of Britishers and Commonwealth troops for effect only’. This, BIS concluded laconically, ‘would seem to be the sum total of our participation in the affair’. Not much has changed in the popular American perception of the June 1944 landings in France, but modern scholars expect a higher standard from Oxford University Press. Regrettably, in the case of Craig Symonds Neptune, they will be disappointed.
Neptune is essentially two books: the first eight chapters focus on strategic planning for the second front, and the last seven recount anecdotes of the American experience in Operation Overlord from early 1944 until just after D-Day. Symonds’ march to D-Day begins with the attack on Pearl Harbor, which sets the American focus of the book solidly from the outset (British authors typically start with Dunkerque). He follows the subsequent wrangling between Americans and Britons over how best to attack Germany and how soon the burgeoning American army could be launched onto the continent. This is all pretty familiar stuff. Symonds’s treatment of the British in this process is nonetheless sympathetic. When trying to deter American ambitions to land on the continent in 1942, he writes, ‘The British found themselves in a situation akin to a parent trying to explain to his six-year old why he cannot drive the car . . .’ (p. 55). The second part of the book focuses primarily on the American experience prior to and during D-Day, with particular attention on Omaha Beach. This is mostly anecdotal, built around themes like training, life in England, the experience off the beaches on D-Day and then problems getting inshore from those beaches, and there is a chapter about the great storm of 19–22 June, which destroyed the American artificial harbour at Omaha. For this reviewer, the best part of the book is his account of those in the LCVPs off Omaha beach on D-Day. Indeed, there is much excellent writing. To be sure, Neptune is well written, and the popular American readership will eat it up.
But the smooth writing stitches together a conceptually flawed, idiosyncratic, American-centric account of (apparently) Neptune, which Symonds describes as everything from Pearl Harbor to the wrack-line on the beach on 6 June 1944, and a little beyond. In the end it is hard to tell if the publishers just got the title of the book wrong, or if Symonds had another book in mind (other than something for the 70th Anniversary of D-Day). Because Neptune is not about Operation Neptune at all. It takes 121 pages to get to Operation Neptune, and then the next 240 pages drift through a series of anecdote-filled chapters highlighting aspects of the American role in the amphibious side of the D-Day landings.
There is much to be said, and the field could use a modern account of Operation Neptune. The concerted planning took nearly nine months and involved roughly 6,000 vessels. The operational orders for Neptune, issued by Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, RN, ran to 700 pages, controlling two massive task forces and much else besides. Neptune tackles none of this. At no point is the scope and scale of the naval problem and effort made clear, and at no point does Operation Neptune actually drive the narrative. There is no discussion of the situation in the English Channel in early 1944, no threat analysis based on German naval and air forces present. No discussion of the efforts by British, Canadian and Polish destroyers of the 10th DF to sweep the channel of larger German surface units, and nothing on the work of MTBs, motor launches and minesweepers to—in the modern term—‘shape the battlespace’. There is no discussion of the larger covering plans for D-Day itself, especially the huge anti-submarine operations that effectively closed the channel at either end to U-boats. There is, in fact, no analysis of the impact of weather on D-Day and the days after (although the Great Storm, which destroyed the American Mulberry, is covered in some detail). As a result, there is no framework against which to judge events on the day, or even a framework against which to measure America’s role.
This neglect may be because Americans played such a small role in Operation Neptune. Of the 1213 major Allied warships (i.e., not landing craft, etc.) assigned to the assault phase of Neptune, only some 184 were US Navy—barely 15%. Among major warships, from battleships to minesweepers, even the Royal Canadian Navy deployed more individual ships than the USN: 63 versus 54 (although the RCN had no battleships or cruisers). In fact, the final approaches to both Utah and Omaha beaches were swept primarily by Canadian minesweepers (in fairness of Symonds, the Western Task Force Op Order fails to distinguish them as HMC Ships).
Probably for that reason (the small American naval role in Neptune), the author casually and pervasively conflates ‘American’ with ‘Allied’, and tends to generalize from American experience. ‘More than sixty destroyers added thousands of rounds of 4-inch and 5-inch ammunition to the bombardment’, Symonds writes on page 266. But half of those destroyers were British, Canadian, or Allied, and many of them had neither 4-inch or 5-inch guns: the standard gun of British fleet class destroyers was 4.7-inch. The chart on page 151, showing ‘Relative Sizes of Allied Landing Craft [sic]’, is all American. Symonds has a whole chapter on American amphibious training, but nothing on the Anglo-Canadians. And yet on page 195 he generalizes about pre-assault training for all the assault troops, saying it consisted ‘primarily of lengthy route marches’. This is demonstrably not true of 3rd British and 3rd Canadian Divisions, which conducted intense amphibious training from July 1943 onwards. Historians of the Arctic convoys will be surprised to learn that RAdm Don Moon, USN, who commanded the Task Force ‘U’, previously ‘commanded the escort for convoy PQ 17’ (p. 204)—which would be news to Captain J.E. Broome, RN, who did. One is left to assume that Moon commanded one of the three USN heavy ships in the PQ 17 covering force. Anglo-Canadian historians will be surprised to learn that only on Omaha were the German emplacements sited to provide cross fire on the beaches (p. 281), and that old saw about the 352 Division being at Omaha is trotted out again (p. 272, there was actually one battalion plus the division’s artillery there at H-hour).
In the final analysis, it may be enough to observe that a book which claims to be about Operation Neptune—‘the largest seaborne assault in human history, involving over 6,000 vessels and more than a million men’ (p. xiv)—an operation which was predominantly British, commanded by a British admiral and launched from British port, uses no British primary sources and no British official histories. Stephen Roskill’s official history of the RN has a 73-page chapter on Neptune, while the new RCN official history has more than 100 pages on the subject: the literature is out there. Neptune would not have amazed the British Information Service in New York in 1944: it was what they had come expect from American mass media. It is not what one expects from Oxford University Press.