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Previous Events

Members' Military History Lecture D-DAY: THE BATTLE FOR NORMANDY

12:45, 10 Jun 2009
RUSI, Whitehall, London, SW1A 2ET
Link to map: multimap

About the event:

D:DayAntony Beevor will draw on themes from his forthcoming book, D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, which makes use of overlooked and new material from over thirty archives in half a dozen countries. The Normandy Landings that took place on D-Day involved by far the largest invasion fleet ever known. In particular he will discuss flaws in the planning for the immediate follow-up phase after landing; the failure to capture Caen; how the pattern for attritional warfare developed; and how Montgomery's refusal to be straight with SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) led to a major diplomatic disaster for Britain. He will shed light on the Nazi and neo-Nazi 'stab-in-the-back' conspiracy theories, still promoted to this day to explain the German defeat in Normandy. The suffering of French civilians, mainly under the bombs and shells of the Allies will be highlighted as well as the uneasy relationship between the Allied armies and French civilians. He will consider the differences between the armies on both sides, the shooting of prisoners, the effectiveness of German defensive tactics and their determination to resist as well as the high levels of combat fatigue casualties on the Allied side.

Antony Beevor is the author of The Battle for Spain, a completely new edition of his 1982 book on the Spanish Civil War; Crete - The Battle and the Resistance, which won a Runciman Prize; Paris After the Liberation, 1944-1949 (written with his wife Artemis Cooper); Stalingrad, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature; Berlin - The Downfall, which received the first Longman-History Today Trustees' Award; and The Mystery of Olga Chekhova. He also edited A Writer at War - Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945, a compilation of the great novelist's wartime notebooks. His latest book is D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, which was published in May 2009. His books have appeared in twenty-nine foreign editions and sold nearly four million copies. A former chairman of the Society of Authors, he has received an honorary doctorate from Kent University, and is a Visiting Professor at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London.

This event is open to all RUSI members.

To become a member please click here

An optional £10 lunch shall be available from 1215.

To register for this event please contact Aimee Braginton, Event Manager

www.rusi.org/events

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