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

Dean F. Oliver is the assistant director of the Centre for International
and Security Studies at York University in Toronto.

This account of the Normandy campaign is one of the best Canadian war
memoirs to appear in years. Erudite, passionate, and detailed, it
follows the author’s 4th Field Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery,
from the south of England in July 1944, through the battles for Caлn,
Verriиres Ridge, and Falaise, to the emotional return to Dieppe of the
2nd Canadian Infantry Division in early September 1944. While
Blackburn’s main focus is on the men and machines of his gun troop,
commentaries throughout the text (some of chapter length) also provide a
lively, opinionated sketch of the overall campaign, an essential
perspective often lacking in similar recollections.

Blackburn’s odyssey is grueling, the writing powerful. His use of the
second person to place “you” in the slit trenches and gun pits of
the regiment is unusual for this genre, but it is most effective in
conjuring up the smells and sounds of the battlefield. This, in fact, is
his primary purpose. Denying with vigor any desire to have compiled an
“adventure” story, he strives instead to redress the emphasis in
scholarly and official accounts on operations and troop movements by
paying close attention to the human aspects of combat. Fear, discomfort,
and disease, he reminds us, were the common companions of men on both
sides in the Normandy campaign—a battle described most accurately, he
argues, by the word “attrition.” The Allied forces were numb from
fatigue, weakened by dysentery and hunger, and brutalized by a
brilliant, determined enemy; the wonder, Blackburn suggests in reference
to the existing literature, is not they did not win more quickly, but
that they won at all.

Some scholars will bristle at the double-barreled denunciation of
professional historians in Blackburn’s introduction, or at his
selective use of sources, but they will not detract from his
achievement. The Guns of Normandy is a massive, spirited portrait of men
at war. You will hear in its pages the shrieks of German mortar bombs
and the cries of the wounded. You will know fear, exhaustion, and rage,
and you will weep with George Blackburn on the cliffs overlooking

Dieppe.