Juno Beach, by Zuehlke

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Carl Schwamberger
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Juno Beach, by Zuehlke

#1

Post by Carl Schwamberger » 03 Jul 2014, 02:17

Just acquired 'Juno Beach' by Mark Zuehlke. Anyone familiar with it? If it a accurate account & the comments & fact within regarded as useful? I'm nearly finished a complete skim though and am curious if it is worth a closer look for facts and data?

Thanks for any educated opinions here.

RichTO90
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Re: Juno Beach, by Zuehlke

#2

Post by RichTO90 » 03 Jul 2014, 03:23

You might do well to read the various Canadian DHH reports on the subject written by Colonel Stacey et al from the original records and interviews (Stacey wrote much of his initial drafts at the time the events were occurring). They are all available from the DHH website along with the official Canadian history.


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Attrition
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Re: Juno Beach, by Zuehlke

#3

Post by Attrition » 30 Jul 2014, 19:13


Michael Dorosh
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Re: Juno Beach, by Zuehlke

#4

Post by Michael Dorosh » 01 Aug 2014, 16:20

Carl Schwamberger wrote:Just acquired 'Juno Beach' by Mark Zuehlke. Anyone familiar with it? If it a accurate account & the comments & fact within regarded as useful? I'm nearly finished a complete skim though and am curious if it is worth a closer look for facts and data?

Thanks for any educated opinions here.
Zuehlke is a pop historian. Check the bibliography and see how many German sources he consulted, for example. I'd be surprised to see there is a single one. He sells a lot of books and I would not call him a bad writer, but I don't think he is really a "military historian" in the classic sense. You may enjoy the book for the atmosphere he creates, but if you are looking for facts and figures and data, as you suggest, you will not find Zuehlke useful. The maps are ok, but there are better.

Get Tim Saunders' book on Juno Beach which contains much more low-level detail of the type you may be craving. He talks about the engineer support, has a bunch of contemporary maps, and goes into the kind of detail that Zuehlke does not cover. To be fair, Zuehlke and Saunders set out to write vastly different kinds of books.

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