Antony's Beevor's new book, D-Day, debunks certain accepted ideas about the Allied campaign.
Far from being universally welcomed as liberators, many troops had a distinctly surly reception from the people of Normandy. In some communities the devastation was never forgotten.
There are villages in Normandy where until recently the 6 June celebrations were deliberately shunned, because the associations were too painful. The reason for this was simple. Many Normandy towns and villages had been literally obliterated by Allied bombing.
The bombardment of Caen, Mr Beevor said, could almost be considered a war-crime . (The destruction of Caen has long been admitted that it was militarily useless. The Germans were stationed to the north of the city and were more or less untouched. In his book Overlord, Max Hastings described it as "one of the most futile air attacks of the war." )
20,000 French civilians were killed in the two-and-a-half months from D-Day, 3,000 of them during the actual landings.
"Think of the hundreds of tons of bombs destroying entire cities and wiping out families. But the suffering of civilians was for many years masked by the over-riding image - that of the French welcoming the liberators with open arms" Christophe Prime , Historian
Cpl LF Roker of the Highland Light Infantry is quoted in another new book about the civilian impact of the campaign, Liberation, The Bitter Road to Freedom, by William Hitchcock.
"It was rather a shock to find we were not welcomed ecstatically as liberators by the local people, as we were told we should be... They saw us as bringers of destruction and pain," Mr Roker wrote in his diary.
Another soldier, Ivor Astley of the 43rd Wessex Infantry, described the locals as "sullen and silent... If we expected a welcome, we certainly failed to find it."
Mr Hitchcock raises another issue that rarely features in euphoric folk-memories of liberation: Allied looting, and worse.
"The theft and looting of Normandy households and farmsteads by liberating soldiers began on June 6 and never stopped during the entire summer," he writes.
One woman - from the town of Colombieres - is quoted as saying that "the enthusiasm for the liberators is diminishing. They are looting... everything, and going into houses everywhere on the pretext of looking for Germans."
The evidence shows that sexual violence against women in liberated France was common . According to American historian J Robert Lilly, there were around 3,500 rapes by American servicemen in France between June 1944 and the end of the war.
Apologists of capitalism would claim the Second World War was a just war . Regardless of the stated intentions, of the apparent excuse for beginning a war, the only reason ever is the pursuit of the interest of the capitalist class, which they will enforce without reserve upon the working class. Hoping that war can be carried out in a gentlemanly way, that it can be carried out without inflicting suffering on the working class is pie in the sky.
Far from being universally welcomed as liberators, many troops had a distinctly surly reception from the people of Normandy. In some communities the devastation was never forgotten.
There are villages in Normandy where until recently the 6 June celebrations were deliberately shunned, because the associations were too painful. The reason for this was simple. Many Normandy towns and villages had been literally obliterated by Allied bombing.
The bombardment of Caen, Mr Beevor said, could almost be considered a war-crime . (The destruction of Caen has long been admitted that it was militarily useless. The Germans were stationed to the north of the city and were more or less untouched. In his book Overlord, Max Hastings described it as "one of the most futile air attacks of the war." )
20,000 French civilians were killed in the two-and-a-half months from D-Day, 3,000 of them during the actual landings.
"Think of the hundreds of tons of bombs destroying entire cities and wiping out families. But the suffering of civilians was for many years masked by the over-riding image - that of the French welcoming the liberators with open arms" Christophe Prime , Historian
Cpl LF Roker of the Highland Light Infantry is quoted in another new book about the civilian impact of the campaign, Liberation, The Bitter Road to Freedom, by William Hitchcock.
"It was rather a shock to find we were not welcomed ecstatically as liberators by the local people, as we were told we should be... They saw us as bringers of destruction and pain," Mr Roker wrote in his diary.
Another soldier, Ivor Astley of the 43rd Wessex Infantry, described the locals as "sullen and silent... If we expected a welcome, we certainly failed to find it."
Mr Hitchcock raises another issue that rarely features in euphoric folk-memories of liberation: Allied looting, and worse.
"The theft and looting of Normandy households and farmsteads by liberating soldiers began on June 6 and never stopped during the entire summer," he writes.
One woman - from the town of Colombieres - is quoted as saying that "the enthusiasm for the liberators is diminishing. They are looting... everything, and going into houses everywhere on the pretext of looking for Germans."
The evidence shows that sexual violence against women in liberated France was common . According to American historian J Robert Lilly, there were around 3,500 rapes by American servicemen in France between June 1944 and the end of the war.
Apologists of capitalism would claim the Second World War was a just war . Regardless of the stated intentions, of the apparent excuse for beginning a war, the only reason ever is the pursuit of the interest of the capitalist class, which they will enforce without reserve upon the working class. Hoping that war can be carried out in a gentlemanly way, that it can be carried out without inflicting suffering on the working class is pie in the sky.
Great post, guys. One could add to this all the other villainies of the victorious allies, from the "mundane" -- the killing of POWs, the rape of civilians, etc -- to the catastrophic: the terror bombings of German and Japanese cities, the deaths caused by blockades, the systematic rape of Berlin, the expulsion and genocide of Germans living in Eastern Europe, and the imposition of Stalinism on one half of Europe.
ReplyDeleteHave any of you had the chance to read the book Human Smoke? In many ways it's bourgeois junk, since it sees the war as caused by a lack of pacifistic idealism, and it focuses on a few leaders like Churchill, Roosevelt, and Hitler, thus turning the war into the creation of a few bad people, but it does do a good job of showing that none of these people gave a damn about "justice" or human beings.
Yeah, I figured it out. We are losing it fast. It's time we march…
ReplyDeletehttp://animal-farm.us/change/we-are-all-socialists-now-446
There's not a lot of point in cutting and pasting Foxwood's link.
ReplyDeleteS/he's just a troll who doesn't know the first thing about socialism. It's just the usual right wing schtick about Obama and the Democrats apparently being socialists. ;-)
Have they gone mad in Lancashire,giving the B.N.P.seats.
ReplyDeleteI have to say that I've been quite impressed by what I've read of Anthony Beevor's.
ReplyDeleteIn his history of the Spanish Civil War I thought he dealt with the various political groupings fairly well.