http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/books/990767,normandy060608.article
Olivier Wieviorka’s Normandy is, I suppose, a revisionist history at bottom, but its impact on the reader seems somewhat less revolutionary than that: a “let’s-reexamine-insufficiently-observed-factors history,” perhaps. Whatever you want to call it, it is possibly the best summary of the Normandy campaign I have yet read.
Wieviorka, a prominent French historian, says of the monumental three-month campaign, “soldiers and historians alike have often preferred its heroic charms to the harsh realities of the day, in relegating to the margins of silence everything that contradicts the legend.” He brings the contradictory, harsh realities out from the margins into the center of the page.
*
Soldiers, too, fought not mainly for glory or principle, but to get it over with and go home. As Paul Fussell, man of letters, historian and an American veteran, has said, the war has been “sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty.”
Wieviorka does have this startling revelation: When it was decided that a French unit would march in to liberate Paris, American and British commanders insisted that it be made up entirely of white troops.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WIENOR.html
D-day, Wieviorka notes, was a striking accomplishment, but it was war, violent and cruel. Errors, desertions, rivalries, psychological trauma, self-serving motives, thefts, and rapes were all part of the story. Rather than diminishing the Allied achievement, this candid book underscores the price of victory and acknowledges the British, American, and Canadian soldiers who dashed onto the Normandy beaches not as demigods, but as young men.
This photo is used for the book's cover -
D Day Rescue, Omaha Beach, Rosenblum, Walter, 1919- photographer. Photograph shows American soldiers on Omaha Beach recovering the dead after the D Day invasion of France. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
http://www.loc.gov/vets/stories/thewar/episode4.html
Olivier Wieviorka’s Normandy is, I suppose, a revisionist history at bottom, but its impact on the reader seems somewhat less revolutionary than that: a “let’s-reexamine-insufficiently-observed-factors history,” perhaps. Whatever you want to call it, it is possibly the best summary of the Normandy campaign I have yet read.
Wieviorka, a prominent French historian, says of the monumental three-month campaign, “soldiers and historians alike have often preferred its heroic charms to the harsh realities of the day, in relegating to the margins of silence everything that contradicts the legend.” He brings the contradictory, harsh realities out from the margins into the center of the page.
*
Soldiers, too, fought not mainly for glory or principle, but to get it over with and go home. As Paul Fussell, man of letters, historian and an American veteran, has said, the war has been “sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty.”
Wieviorka does have this startling revelation: When it was decided that a French unit would march in to liberate Paris, American and British commanders insisted that it be made up entirely of white troops.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WIENOR.html
D-day, Wieviorka notes, was a striking accomplishment, but it was war, violent and cruel. Errors, desertions, rivalries, psychological trauma, self-serving motives, thefts, and rapes were all part of the story. Rather than diminishing the Allied achievement, this candid book underscores the price of victory and acknowledges the British, American, and Canadian soldiers who dashed onto the Normandy beaches not as demigods, but as young men.
This photo is used for the book's cover -
D Day Rescue, Omaha Beach, Rosenblum, Walter, 1919- photographer. Photograph shows American soldiers on Omaha Beach recovering the dead after the D Day invasion of France. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
http://www.loc.gov/vets/stories/thewar/episode4.html
