Booktalk: The Longest Day

From off the ACS Library shelves, I have just finished reading The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan. In it, he recounts D-Day, June 6th, 1944. He does it by assembling the the recollections of hundreds of survivors, each of whom he names: officers and enlisted men, Americans and Germans (In fact the appendix lists them all with their current [1957] occupations).

The book triumphs as a history, I believe, for that march of personal histories he portrays as the "main event" of the day. Indeed, for those soldiers amid the great mechanism of the day, it was a world of wholesale serendipitous death and destruction. The inertia of duty and purpose survived, again and again, from individual to individual; the engines of history.

Heroism and patriotism are not the themes of this book, although they are present thoughout it. Nor does it take an anti-war slant, though the waste and agony of war are on every page. Rather, it manages to portray the reality of that day as just that: reality.

The value of the sacrifices, the value of the war, the value of the retelling reside in what we know of the following days, years, and decades.

I wish I had read it earlier in my life. Perhaps I can rally others to do just that.