Reviews for The boys' crusade : the American infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Brief, wholly memorable essays—sometimes little more than vignettes—on a season in hell. Not for literary historian and combat veteran Fussell (Veterans, 2002, etc.) all this talk of "the greatest generation" and the mawkish military romanticism that has settled on WWII: the young men, many scarcely more than boys, who fought against the formidable German enemy in places like Normandy and the HÜrtgen Forest were a "reluctant draftee army," their deeds usually less heroic than desperate. Building on his fine memoir Doing Battle (1996), Fussell explores the lives and actions of those boys, "who bitched freely, but seldom cried, even when wounded." Among the themes he explores, at the length of a few pages or paragraphs, are the widespread dislike for the young Americans among British civilians, who famously complained that they were "overpaid, oversexed, and over here," and even among the liberated French, "who didn't at all appreciate the immense black market in Paris run by over two thousand American deserters"; the extraordinary, and underreported, rate of desertion among those boys, traumatized by battle settings straight out of the Grimm Brothers and the constant presence of ignoble death; the carnage of battle in places like the Falaise Pocket, where, Dwight Eisenhower recalled, "It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh" (to which Fussell, ever the curmudgeon, adds, "And Eisenhower is gentleman enough not to offend . . . by dwelling on the smell"); and the general insanity of war and its fighters, torn between the "quite contradictory operations" of trying to kill some people with the greatest efficiency while trying to save others to the same high standards. Throughout, Fussell writes vividly and sardonically, sounding like the spiritual twin of Kurt Vonnegut at some points and an aggrieved Julius Caesar at others, and painting extraordinary scenes at every turn. A bracing corrective for a literature recently dominated by Ambrose, Brokaw, and other cheerleaders, and just right for a new season of war. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Readers should be forewarned that this book is not your normal, garden-variety memoir of World War II. In a series of essays dealing with strategy, tactics, and leadership from the landings at Normandy to the fall of Berlin, Fussell (The Great War and Human Memory), a decorated infantry officer of the European campaigns of 1944-45, comes as close to the unvarnished truth as is ever likely to see print. Beginning with a chapter titled "Boy Crusaders," Fussell describes the typical GI as 18 to 20 years old, from all types of social and educational backgrounds, taken from minimal training and thrown into ground combat of the fiercest kind. Other essays discuss the relationship and attitudes toward the French (which were not always rosy), the lost opportunity at the Falaise Gap, the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest (perhaps the western front's worst), replacements and infantry morale, the treatment of the dead and wounded, and the discovery of the concentration camps and how that changed attitudes toward the Germans. As with his longer Wartime, this work is aimed at correcting the sanitized works of "sentimental" history the war has inspired. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/03]-David Lee Poremba, Detroit P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
This is an unsentimental crystallization of the American infantryman's experience in World War II from D-Day forward, of which Fussell knows something, as his memoir Doing Battle (1996) attests. Fussell finds his experience echoed in that of another memoirist, Robert Kotlowitz, and quotes copiously from Before Their Time (1997) to illustrate the training of a soldier; frictions with the British and the French; and being ordered into combat by mulish or inept officers. He then describes the chain taking the dead and wounded back and the replacements up, castigating the ironic chasm between its horrors and the popular penchant to remember the American soldier's experience as a righteous crusade. Ultimately, with the overrunning of the concentration camps, he was rightly exalted as a sacrificial liberator, but few footsloggers at the time felt that way--as Fussell reminds us with trenchancy and intolerance for cant. --Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2003 Booklist
Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
This short study of the U. S. Army's most burdened branch in the final campaign against Germany does not represent its National Book Award-winning author at his highest level. It focuses on the 17-, 18-, and 19-year-olds who were the backbone of the infantry. They were also frequently thrust into combat after no more than four months' training, led by officers as green as themselves; Fussell himself was one of them. If wounded, they were returned to some other unit through the infamous Replacement Depot system, and altogether not treated much better than the trench fodder of WWI. Thorough research has not prevented some questionable pieces of historiography, such as leaving out the resistance the American army eventually generated in the Battle of the Bulge. Fussell also tends toward space-consuming jabs at rival schools of interpretations and even journalists as distinguished as Ernie Pyle. The focus bounces around, with mini-essays covering such non-infantry affairs as the Allied deception operation for D-Day, at the expense of material on the infantry as other than victim. For a minihistory or minibiography of the same subject, readers should stick with Stephen Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers. (On sale Sept. 9) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
World War II from the perspective of U.S. infantrymen-with Fussell stressing how young they were. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
