The Guns of Normandy: A Soldier's Eye View, France 1944

With all due respect to Stephen Ambrose's D-Day: June 6, 1944, Band of Brothers, and Citizen Soldiers as well as to Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day and Steven Spielberg's preparations for his film Saving Private Ryan, what we have here is not a third-party's analysis of research resources based on information provided by participants in the Normandy Invasion. Rather, and infinitely more valuable, Blackburn offers an eyewitness account. He was there. True, no individual could possibly know everything that was happening on June 6th and thereafter, be everywhere along the beaches and later during the advances inland, etc. Blackburn never makes that claim. His purpose, rather, is to allow his reader to accompany him as he and his associates made their way through an understandably messy, confusing, terrifying, and ultimately humbling ordeal.As indicated in this volume, he possesses all of the skills of a military historian in combination with the talents of a world-class novelist except that what he has produced is eloquent and compelling non-fiction. His writing skills remind me of Yann Martel's in his brilliant Life of Pi, technically a work of fiction but one in which human experience is elevated to levels of clarity and intensity I am unable to describe.Blackburn celebrates the human spirit when confronted with seemingly insurmountable obstacles and impossible barriers. He makes especially effective use of second-person narrative and present tense by which to invest his eyewitness account with both immediacy and authenticity. To the extent possible, he allows his reader to be right there with him as he prepares for and then becomes centrally involved in the largest, most extensive, and most complicated military operation ever undertaken, before or since. Chilling, heart-rending, inspiring, but always credible. Time and again I found myself saying "So THAT is what it was really like." Otherwise, how would I know? I was eight years old when the Normandy Invasion began.This volume is one of three in a trilogy which Blackburn wrote inorder to share his personal experiences throughout World War II. (I have not as yet read Where the Hell Are the Guns?: A Soldier's view of the Anxious Years, 1939-44 and The Guns of Victory: A Soldier's Eye View, Belgium, Holland, and Germany, 1944-45, but plan to.) One personal note. Several years ago, it was my great privilege to assist with efforts to raise funds for indigent recipients -- NOT "winners" -- of the Congressional Medal of Honor. I worked with and became close friends with several recipients who were determined to assist comrades who had fallen upon hard times. For various reasons, each was reluctant to discuss his wartime experiences and especially his individual heroism. Although sincerely interested, I never pressed the issue. Now having read The Guns of Normandy, I think I understand their reticence.

The familiar French expletive is uttered by the narrator after an exploding shell has spilled ink on the song he's just written for his wife, negating his night's labors but not his determination to rewrite it. It's this sort of touch that separates Blackburn's uncommon account about the common soldier's experience from other books about the Normandy campaign or any other war. "The Guns of Normandy" describes the two-month mission of the author's regiment in the ferocious and decisive battle for Verrieres Ridge, but it is clear from the outset that the author is on another mission. Like Toni Morrison's narrator in "Beloved," who insists that hers is "not a story to be retold," Blackburn insists that his account, however gripping it may be, is "never, never an adventure story." It is time to salvage this critical moment in history from the dispassionate reconstructions of the academics, from the fanciful fabrications of the "war games" crowd, and even from the fading memories of the participants themselves. The resulting account is at once a powerful tribute to the Canadian 2nd Division's contribution (the victory at Falaise seals the doom of Hitler's forces in the west) and a stirring memorial to the author's comrades. But above all it is an honest portrayal of men engaged in a protracted "real" war, not an in-and-out invasion where the primary focus is on high-tech weaponry and smart bombs.Blackburn's use of the second-person narrator, in effect, de-emphasizes his own persona and directly engages the reader in the experience-from the undeniable fascination of war to the horrifying spectacle to the depressingly prosaic daily business. The narrator's question before landing in France quickly became my own: Would I be able to stand up in a similar situation? Doubts entered my mind even when, shortly after landing, the narrator describes a herd of distended, dead cows, each with two legs pointing toward the sky. That unsettling scene much later becomes a powerful, unshakable metaphor representing the horror, the absurdity, the futility of war. A Canadian gun officer, preoccupied with guiding his weapon, jumps down from his quad-and finds himself buried in the rotten intestines of one of those swollen carcasses, the bowels of hell literally engulfing him in an instant.Other images become indelible with little help, and certainly no hype, from the narrator. We register disappointment at the overmatched Allied tanks vs. their heavily-armored German counterparts; we're attracted to the German Nebelwerfers that unexpectedly discharge terrifying "Moaning Minnies" at the Canadians' expense; we share the narrator's helplessness and dismay while his comrades fall victim to the misdirected bombs of the RAF; we can't shake off the image of a barely recognizable human form after it has been run over the previous night by a column of tanks. Throughout, we share the narrator's amazement at the tenacity and sheer will of men who continue to fight in the face of r

My late father-inlaw was a artillery battery commander and was severely wounded on 10th July 1944 during the events described brilliantly by George Blackburn. I also served as an officer in the artillery for some 15 years (well after the war) but I can vouch for the athenticity and realistic detail involved with the art of soldiering. Apart from anything else the book is a wonderfully stirring antidote to the rather cynical views that tend to prevail in today's society. A book that should not be missed.

This is the story of barely two months of the eleven months of brutal combat seen by Canada's 4th Field artillery regiment, and of the infantry units 4th Field supported with astonishing firepower. After several years in England, 4th Field's combat role begins with the regiment's landing in Normandy twenty days after D-Day.Canadian field artillery during WWII was the best in the world. The guns of every artillery unit in a given battlefield sector were laid out on a grid plan that allowed Forward Observation Officers to call in pinpoint fire from every other regiment as well as their own. The Germans, who considered their's the best, were astounded by the Canadians' ability to rain huge barrages down precisely on target. Post-war German accounts of the fighting here repeatedly mention the dreaded Canadian field artillery. When Canadian infantry companies were being overrun, they often took what cover they could find and called in artillery barrages on their own positions, catching the Germans out in the open and astounded that they would do it.In some of the fiercest action of WWII the Canadian Army advanced only 30-some miles, but they slugged it out against some of Germany's toughest, most fanatical panzer divisions and battle-hardened infantry. Hitler had ordered them not to give up an inch of ground, and they tried desperately to obey. Nevertheless, the Canadian units drove them into the famous Falaise Pocket from which only remnants of crack German divisions escaped.One reason why writings by men on these front lines is rare is that few lived to tell about it. Some of the Canadian outfits in this action suffered over 100% casualties. Some replacements who arrived at Blackburn's regiment one evening were wiped out the same night. It takes a man who was there to REALLY know what it's like to live in the same sopping-wet clothes, in mud-and-water-filled dugouts for weeks and weeks, rarely getting a warm meal, fighting today for ground they may have to give up tomorrow.So much detail seeps from one's memory, and for those who try to keep notes, doing so is daunting in conditions where imagination is needed to even keep written target coordinates preserved long enough for them to be used by the gun crews. George Blackburn was a reporter before enlisting in the Canadian Army in 1939. He took notes during combat and somehow preserved them. And, he survived the war to use them. After the war he interviewed some of the men he writes about. He visited the battlefield almost thirty years later gathering more material. His life after the war included writing in several professional regimes. His skill at painting vivid recollections of minute-to-minute life on the battlefield is evident throughout this splendid work.I like the author's way of arranging the book into short chapters, each of which is an episode in the whole campaign. I like his way of presenting his first-person narrative, using "you" for "I". It works very well: "For a moment your atte

George Blackburn tells a riveting, fast-paced and convincing story about life with the Cdn. 2nd Division after the invasion of Normandy. He contributes his own experiences as an artillery forward observation officer, and adds to it the stories of dozens of the soldiers who fought around him (most of whom he interviewed himself). It's gripping, scary, funny and sad. I've not read many first person accounts like this, but I doubt that many can be much more evocative then this. Unfortunately you realize after the first couple of pages that Blackburn is planning to tell the whole story in the second person, present tense. You realise why he's doing this, but still you're annoyed by it. But after a chapter or two you stop noticing this stylistic quirk and just go on to enjoy a great story.