The Boys' Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945
Paul Fussell
Language: English
Pages: 85
ISBN: B00MB460GQ
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Boys' Crusade is the great historian Paul Fussell's unflinching and unforgettable account of the American infantryman's experiences in Europe during World War II. Based in part on the author's own experiences, it provides a stirring narrative of what the war was actually like, from the point of view of the children--for children they were--who fought it. While dealing definitively with issues of strategy, leadership, context, and tactics, Fussell has an additional purpose: to tear away the veil of feel-good mythology that so often obscures and sanitizes war's brutal essence.
"A chronicle should deal with nothing but the truth," Fussell writes in his Preface. Accordingly, he eschews every kind of sentimentalism, focusing instead on the raw action and human emotion triggered by the intimacy, horror, and intense sorrows of war, and honestly addressing the errors, waste, fear, misery, and resentments that plagued both sides. In the vast literature on World War II, The Boys' Crusade stands wholly apart. Fussell's profoundly honest portrayal of these boy soldiers underscores their bravery even as it deepens our awareness of their experiences. This book is both a tribute to their noble service and a valuable lesson for future generations.
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Division’s psychiatrist, and imagines his report on this interesting patient: “Sole unwounded survivor of engagement at or near Bézange-la-petite . . . normal guilt feelings at survival, combined with powerful frustrated aggression resulting from twelve-hour siege, during which time soldier did not fire a single round of ammunition at the enemy.” Adjudged finally a victim of combat fatigue, or something like it, he was sent, whether for therapy or punishment wasn’t clear, to help guard a beat-up.
Wounded German was no one to fear. I could see as we got close that he was an unlikely soldier, old and fragile, among the dregs the Germans were beginning to shove into combat. He must have been trying to surrender when we spotted him. He didn’t have a weapon. He lay twisted around his right leg. He wore a gray wool uniform and cap, his eyes huge, his face pinched and unshaven, his mouth stretched as if shrieks were coming out, but it was a smothered sound, Ohhhhh, Ohhhhh. He saw the red crosses.
Horror for American troops. In January, 1945, the U.S. Army suffered more battle casualties—over 39,000—than in any other month in the fight for northwest Europe.” Because it was cleaning up an unforgivable mess instead of taking new territory and destroying new opposition, the details were not so well publicized. But the ruinous old horrors were still going on. Of the fighting in this month, an infantryman says, “People didn’t crumble and fall like they did in the Hollywood movies. They were.
Phrases like these—a boy gets hurt; the injured boy; leaves space for another boy; the wounded boy; as each boy comes in; a brief history of the boy and his diagnosis—the last of which refers to the official tag fastened to the soldier’s jacket or, as our aidman puts it, to “the boy’s coat.” Wounded officers passing through the aid station were never called boys, although many were almost as young. Taken as a whole, the boys had a powerful propulsion of optimism, a sense that the war couldn’t.
Now no longer the Wehrmacht but the Bundeswehr, be rearmed, retrained, and prepared to oppose the new bugbear, the Russians. It is not easy to recall that when the war ended, the Germans, large and small, civilian and military, were despised as loathsome sadists who by their behavior, their laws, and their extermination camps had earned widespread contempt and deserved serious punishment. It is hardly surprising that many Europeans, their countries ruined, take the war more seriously than.