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    Landing on the Edge of Eternity: Twenty-Four Hours at Omaha Beach
    Landing on the Edge of Eternity: Twenty-Four Hours at Omaha Beach
    Landing on the Edge of Eternity: Twenty-Four Hours at Omaha Beach
    Audiobook14 hours

    Landing on the Edge of Eternity: Twenty-Four Hours at Omaha Beach

    Written by Robert Kershaw

    Narrated by Roger Clark

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    When Company A of the U.S. 116th Regiment landed on Omaha Beach in D-Day's first wave on 6th June 1944, it lost 96% of its effective strength. Sixteen teams of U.S. engineers arriving in the second wave were unable to blow the beach obstacles, as first wave survivors were still sheltering behind them. This was the beginning of the historic day that Landing on the Edge of Eternity narrates hour by hour.

    Mustered on their troop transport decks at 2 a.m., the American infantry departed in landing craft at 5 a.m. Skimming across high waves, deafened by immense broadsides from supporting battleships and weak from seasickness, they caught sight of land at 6:15. Eleven minutes later, the assault was floundering under intense German fire. Two and a half hours in, General Bradley, commanding the landings aboard USS Augusta, had to decide if to proceed or evacuate. On June 6th there were well over 2,400 casualties on Omaha Beach-easily D-Day's highest death toll.

    The Wehrmacht thought they had bludgeoned the Americans into bloody submission, yet by mid-afternoon, the American troops were ashore. Why were the casualties so grim, and how could the Germans have failed? Juxtaposing the American experience, Robert Kershaw draws on eyewitness accounts, memories, letters, and post-combat reports to expose the true horrors of Omaha Beach.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateApr 16, 2019
    ISBN9781977349545
    Landing on the Edge of Eternity: Twenty-Four Hours at Omaha Beach
    Author

    Robert Kershaw

    A graduate of Reading University, Robert Kershaw joined the Parachute Regiment in 1973. He served numerous regimental appointments until selected to command the 10th Battalion the Parachute Regiment (10 PARA). He attended the German Staff College spending a further two years with the Bundeswehr as an infantry, airborne and arctic warfare instructor. He speaks fluent German and has extensive experience with NATO, multinational operations and all aspects of operations and training. His active service includes several tours in Northern Ireland, the First Gulf War and Bosnia. He has exercised in many parts of the world and served in the Middle East and Africa. His final army appointment was with the Intelligence Division at HQ NATO in Brussels Belgium. On leaving the British Army in 2006 he became a full-time author of military history as well as a consultant military analyst. He has recorded for BBC radio and interviewed on numerous TV documentaries including Dutch TV and National Geographic, and published frequent magazine and newspaper articles including The Times, The Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph and Daily Telegraph. Two of his books have been serialized in the Daily Mail and Daily Express. He lives in Salisbury, England.

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    Reviews for Landing on the Edge of Eternity

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    • 5/5
      Superb! Narrator does a very good job and the story is woven brilliantly together.
    • 2/5
      While I appreciate Robert Kershaw's attempt to present an intimate and focused narrative of the US D-Day landings at Omaha Beach, both the organization of the book's contents and the prose of the story itself conspired to hinder my enjoyment of it. Without delving too deeply into an expansive review, I will note the following points which stayed with me through the reading:1) The author's attempt to chronicle the timeline of the landing's first twenty-four hours by breaking down chapters and sections into blocks of time came off as feeling forced. Furthermore, it muddied the writing by restricting certain events to specific sections of the book, but did not at all help the continuity of the story. There are many other viable narrative structures that could have worked (theme, emotion, locale, perspective), but this one plainly did not. 2) Kershaw's writing is plagued by tautology and jargon. His constant repetition of actions, explanations, and definitions throughout the book is arrantly distracting, and is directly a product of the book's organization, as described above. The editing is also poor, with numerous spelling errors and an unforgivable lack of consistency with how commas are used. All of this made for some pretty frustrating reading.3) Similarly, there are no interstitials between the accounts of Axis, Allies, or civilians, which creates confusion as each paragraph jumps back-and-forth from perspective to perspective. There were several times when I had to go back and pore through previous sections to figure out whom the author was "inhabiting" in a given scene – especially when some of the American soldiers happened to have had Germanic surnames.4) The memorable details one might expect from a narrative with an itemized dramatis personae (Kershaw's "voices") are oddly devoid of character. Though it's obvious that the author spent vast amounts of time reading over first-person accounts of the landings from three sides, there is a distinct lack of individualism in the story – which informs his inability to empathetically and compellingly portray the human condition during this most incredible of days.5) Kershaw's use of these first-person accounts is, disappointingly, ineffective. There are countless descriptive paragraphs that are first interrupted and then deflated by the insertion of unnecessary quotations from veterans of the event. Whether or not this is meant to add an air of authenticity to the story, it only serves to hinder the author's narrative voice and dull down the flow of the tale. Kershaw actively uses quotations to impede his own process; there are far too many of these when his own words would have done more effectively.6) There is no measure of analysis whatsoever. Kershaw is so glaringly not a military historian that Landing on the Edge of Eternity leaves one quite sure there are far better accounts of the D-Day experience to consult. His only analytical question is a rhetorical one in the epilogue: "can this be judged as defeat or failure?" Spoiler: he claims that the answer is both, but we are not given much evidence in either direction.I greatly respect the fact that the author is a long-time military veteran. Despite this and his rather extensive body of work in the field of military history, however, I am uninterested in exploring more of his work.