Book review: The Battle for Normandy

Shortly before midnight on 5 June 1944, "in towns and villages across southern England, the air filled with the roar of hundreds of aircraft engines", said Dominic Sandbrook in the Observer. Thousands of people went outside to watch the vast armada flying over; some dropped to their knees to pray, others simply said "this is it" and went back to bed.

Off Southampton, 7,000 boats escorting 130,000 Allied troops were already heading south. "We are all familiar by now with the story  of D-Day: the soldiers vomiting in their landing crafts, the slaughter on Omaha Beach." But Antony Beevor is "not just any military historian: as a master of narrative, expertly blending the grand sweep with the telling anecdote, he has few peers".

His new account of Operation Overlord is "splendid". It reminds us, above all, of "the appalling human suffering" involved: the daily casualty rates that were higher than in Russia; the tank crews that drowned in their tanks before even reaching the shore; the 3,000 French civilians who died on D-Day itself, mostly the victims of their liberators’ bombs.

"This is as powerful and authoritative an account of the battle for Normandy as we are likely to get in this generation," said Max Hastings in the Sunday Times. One of Beevor's many "bleak revelations" is that the killing of enemy prisoners was common during the three-month long campaign in the densely hedged Norman countryside. The SS killed a "substantial" number of Canadians in June. Their opponents then "responded in kind".

The Allies advanced agonisingly slowly against Hitler's more disciplined and better-equipped troops: one German Tiger tank was reckoned to be able to knock out three US Shermans. "Beevor has assembled a mass of unfamiliar sources, fresh voices and untold anecdotes to create a saga as impressive as his earlier narratives of Stalingrad and the battle of Berlin."

"Beevor tells it straight," said Sam Leith in the Daily Mail. There are no stylistic flourishes – just "a patient, brisk orchestration" of facts and observations. It is devastatingly effective. "On almost every page there's some detail that sticks in the mind."

There's the British officer telling his men on the eve of D-Day: "Don't worry if you do not survive the assault, as we have plenty of back-up troops who will just go in over you"; or the paratrooper who heard his comrades, dropped too low for their parachutes to open, hitting the ground like "watermelons falling off the back of a truck". This is "a terrific, inspiring, heart-breaking book".

D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, by Antony Beevor, 608pp (Viking, £25) The Week Bookshop £22.50 (incl p&p) ·