After D-Day

After D-Day
Author: Robert Lynn Fuller
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2021-02-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807175153

After D-Day is one of a small but growing body of works that examine the Allied liberators of France. This study focuses on both the French experience of the U.S. Army and the American soldiers’ reaction to the French during the liberation and its immediate aftermath. Drawing on French and American archival materials, as well as dozens of memoirs, diaries, letters, and newspapers, Robert Lynn Fuller follows French and American interactions, starting in the skies over France in 1942 and ending with the liberation of Alsace in 1945. Fuller pays special attention to French life in the war zones, where living under constant shelling offered a miserable experience for those forced to endure it. The French stoically withstood those travails—sometimes inflicted by the Americans—when they saw their sacrifices as the price of liberation and victory over Germany. As Fuller shows, when the French did not believe afflictions brought by the Americans advanced the cause of success, their tolerance waned, sometimes dramatically. Fuller maintains that the Allied bombing of France was an important yet often overlooked chapter of World War II, one that inflicted more death and destruction than the ground war still to come. Yet the ground campaign, which began with the Allied invasion of Normandy, unleashed enormous violence that killed, injured, or rendered homeless tens of thousands of French civilians. Fuller examines French and American records of the fate of civilians in the principal battle zones, Normandy and Lorraine, as well as in overlooked liberated regions, such as Orléanais and Champagne, that largely escaped widespread damage and casualties. Despite French gratitude toward the Americans for the liberation of their country, relations began to cool in the fall and winter of 1944 as progress on the battlefield slowed and then appeared to reverse with the German offensive in the Ardennes. Revealing in stark detail the experiences of French civilians with the American military, After D-Day presents a compelling coda to our understanding of the Allied conquest of German-occupied France.

D-Day Through French Eyes

D-Day Through French Eyes
Author: Mary Louise Roberts
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2014-05-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 022613704X

“A moving examination of how French civilians experienced the fighting” at Normandy during WWII from the acclaimed author of What Soldiers Do (Telegraph, UK). “Like big black umbrellas, they rain down on the fields across the way, and then disappear behind the black line of the hedges.” Silent parachutes dotting the night sky—that’s how one Normandy woman learned that the D-Day invasion was under way in June of 1944. Though they yearned for liberation, the French had to steel themselves for war, knowing that their homes, lands, and fellow citizens would have to bear the brunt of the attack. With D-Day through French Eyes, Mary Louise Roberts turns the conventional narrative of D-Day on its head, taking readers across the Channel to view the invasion anew. Roberts builds her history from an impressive range of gripping first-person accounts by French citizens throughout the region. A farm family notices that cabbage is missing from their garden—then discovers that the guilty culprits are American paratroopers hiding in the cowshed. Fishermen rescue pilots from the wreck of their B-17, then search for clothes big enough to disguise them as civilians. A young man learns to determine whether a bomb is whistling overhead or silently plummeting toward them. When the allied infantry arrived, French citizens guided them to hidden paths and little-known bridges, giving them crucial advantages over the German occupiers. As she did in her acclaimed account of GIs in postwar France, What Soldiers Do, Roberts here sheds vital new light on a story we thought we knew. "In the great tradition of Studs Terkel and Is Paris Burning?, Mary Louise Roberts uses the diaries and memoirs of French civilians to narrate a history of the French at D-Day that has for too long been occluded by the mythology of the allied landing.”—Alice Kaplan, author of Dreaming in French

La bataille de Normandie, 6 juin-25 août 1944

La bataille de Normandie, 6 juin-25 août 1944
Author: Jean Quellien
Publisher: Tallandier
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2014-05-09
Genre: History
ISBN:

Mardi 6 juin 1944, à l’aube, les Alliés débarquent sur les côtes normandes. Le 25 août, Paris est libéré. Dans l’intervalle, les Alliés piétinent, s’enlisent et subissent d’effroyables pertes. Trois mois, au lieu des trois semaines prévues, de longs et sanglants affrontements : la bataille de Normandie va décider du sort de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Douze semaines de combats acharnés : d’abord sur les plages, dans les haies du bocage et dans la plaine de Caen, avant la percée tardive des Américains en direction d’Avranches, la « poche » de Falaise et la « course vers la Seine ». Au cours de la bataille de Normandie, deux millions de combattants s’affrontent sans merci. Pris au milieu des combats, 20 000 Normands périssent. Près de 100 000 hommes, femmes et enfants se réfugient dans les granges et les étables autour des villes anéanties par les bombes ; 150 000 sont chassés sur les routes dangereuses de l’exode. D’une écriture fluide et claire, cet ouvrage donne la part belle aux témoignages des différents protagonistes, alliés et allemands, et bien sûr normands. Au-delà de la simple description des opérations, il rend également compte des tensions entre Américains et Britanniques. Spécialiste incontesté de la bataille de Normandie, Jean Quellien nous offre une synthèse magistrale à l’appui des derniers travaux, d’archives inédites et des récits des témoins. Il suit ainsi au plus près la libération chèrement payée de la Normandie et de la France.

A Traveller's Guide to D-Day and the Battle for Normandy

A Traveller's Guide to D-Day and the Battle for Normandy
Author: Carl Shilleto
Publisher: Interlink Publishing
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2014-07-30
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 162371057X

A Traveller’s Guide to D-Day and the Battle for Normandy covers the period from June to August 1944 when the Allies stormed ashore, fought their way through the bocage country of Normandy, and eventually broke out through the Avranches gap. This title gives comprehensive information about: • Major battles and battlefields • Memorials, sites, cemeteries, and statues • How to get there; what to see • Contemporary eyewitness accounts • Then-and-now photographs and maps The guide helps us understand what it was like to have endured the ordeal of combat. Through their own words, we learn the feelings of those young men and women of many nationalities who fought and died. What were their private thoughts and fears? Their personal memories? Contemporary eyewitness accounts are woven into the fabric of this book, which has immediacy and vividness that marks a new departure in guidebooks.

Bloody Verrieres, Volume 1

Bloody Verrieres, Volume 1
Author: Arthur W. Gullachsen
Publisher: Casemate
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2021-12-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1636240038

“An excellent work that adds to the history of the Normandy Campaign. It also gives the armchair historian points to ponder.” —A Wargamers Needful Things South of the Norman city of Caen, the twin features of the Verrières and Bourguebus ridges were key stepping stones for the British Second Army in late July 1944—taking them was crucial if it was to be successful in its attempt to break out of the Normandy bridgehead. To capture this vital ground, Allied forces would have to defeat arguably the strongest German armored formation in Normandy: the I. SS-Panzerkorps “Leibstandarte.” The resulting battles of late July and early August 1944 saw powerful German defensive counterattacks south of Caen inflict tremendous casualties, regain lost ground, and at times defeat Anglo-Canadian operations in detail. Viewed by the German leadership as militarily critical, the majority of its armored assets were deployed to dominate this excellent tank country east of the Orne river. These defeats and the experience of meeting an enemy with near-equal resources exposed a flawed Anglo-Canadian offensive tactical doctrine that was overly dependent on the supremacy of its artillery forces. Furthermore, weaknesses in Allied tank technology inhibited their armored forces from fighting a decisive armored battle, forcing Anglo-Canadian infantry and artillery forces to further rely on First World War “Bite and Hold” tactics, massively supported by artillery. Confronted with the full force of the Panzerwaffe, Anglo-Canadian doctrine at times floundered. In response, the Royal Artillery and Royal Canadian Artillery units pummeled the German tankers and grenadiers, but despite their best efforts, ground could not be captured by concentrated artillery fire alone. This is a detailed account of the success of I. SS-Panzerkorps’ defensive operations, aimed at holding the Vèrrieres-Bourgebus ridges in late July 1944.

War Tourism

War Tourism
Author: Bertram M. Gordon
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2018-11-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501715887

As German troops entered Paris following their victory in June 1940, the American journalist William L. Shirer observed that they carried cameras and behaved as "naïve tourists." One of the first things Hitler did after his victory was to tour occupied Paris, where he was famously photographed in front of the Eiffel Tower. Focusing on tourism by German personnel, military and civil, and French civilians during the war, as well as war-related memory tourism since, War Tourism addresses the fundamental linkages between the two. As Bertram M. Gordon shows, Germans toured occupied France by the thousands in groups organized by their army and guided by suggestions in magazines such as Der Deutsche Wegleiter fr Paris [The German Guide for Paris]. Despite the hardships imposed by war and occupation, many French civilians continued to take holidays. Facilitated by the Popular Front legislation of 1936, this solidified the practice of workers' vacations, leading to a postwar surge in tourism. After the end of the war, the phenomenon of memory tourism transformed sites such as the Maginot Line fortresses. The influx of tourists with links either directly or indirectly to the war took hold and continues to play a significant economic role in Normandy and elsewhere. As France moved from wartime to a postwar era of reconciliation and European Union, memory tourism has held strong and exerts significant influence across the country.

What Soldiers Do

What Soldiers Do
Author: Mary Louise Roberts
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2014-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226923118

"What do soldiers do presents a devastating new perspective on the Greatest Generation and the liberation of France, one in which the US military used the lure of easy, sexually available French women to sell soldiers on the invasion, thus unleashing a 'tsunami of male lust' among the war-weary GIs. The resulting chaos-ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal disease-horrified the battered and demoralized French population and caused serious friction between the two nations at a crucial point as the war drew to a close."--Page 4 of cover.