It is set amid well-known historical events and peopled in part by actual historical figures. Despite its author’s professional background, the novel’s relationship to history is notably loose and irreverent. In that sense, “Essex Dogs” starts very much as it means to go on. By implicitly connecting these two very different events, nearly 600 years apart, and, in effect, turning the earlier invasion into a medieval version of D-Day, Jones adds extra drama and interest to the novel’s beginning but at the expense of historical accuracy, since chronicles of the time make clear that in 1346, unlike in 1944, the English troops took the beach unopposed. But “Essex Dogs” is set not in June 1944, close to the end of World War II, but in July 1346, toward the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War, and the enemy in the novel, French not German, is armed with crossbows and catapults rather than machine guns or mortars. To anyone with a basic knowledge of 20th-century European history, or has seen “Saving Private Ryan, ” at least, this may sound like a familiar opening. They disembark on the beach, where they meet a barrage of enemy missiles and must scramble to safety as soldiers from other boats drop dead all around them. “Essex Dogs,” a first novel by the best-selling historian Dan Jones, opens with a group of soldiers pressed together inside a landing craft approaching the coast of Normandy at dawn.
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