The Boys' Crusade: American G.I.s in Europe: Chaos and Fear in World War Two

The Boys' Crusade: American G.I.s in Europe: Chaos and Fear in World War Two

by PaulFussell (Author)

Synopsis

This book is a brilliant antidote to the military romanticism of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN or BAND OF BROTHERS. Part memoir, part history, it presents a series of episodes from the arrival of American troops in Britain through to the discovery of the concentration camps in early 1945. The experience of these young (often very young) soldiers was not always unpleasant - he explains why the boys' were so popular with British women (better paid, better dressed, better washed) - but especially after D-Day it usually was. The American Army was involved in 1944-45 in some of the most ferocious fighting of the war, for which it was totally unprepared militarily or psychologically. But after the discovery of the concentration camps, the American soldier no longer had any difficulty in hating the Germans and came to see the war as the Crusade that Eisenhower had believed in from the start.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 200
Edition: New edition
Publisher: Phoenix
Published: 07 Apr 2005

ISBN 10: 0753819767
ISBN 13: 9780753819760
Book Overview: A series of revelations about the US Army: the cover-up of fiascos -devastating examples of friendly fire - the full extent of desertion and self-inflicted wounds - the American Army got worse as the war went on - the hostility between the Americans and the French Author of The Great War And Modern Memory, one of the best books about the First World War Author fought in this war himself, and was severely wounded and decorated 'It's not comfortable reading; in fact, it's terrifying. In its short compass, it gives an unforgettably bleak picture of the Second World War, with all the stench, confusion and horror that was all most infantrymen - or boys, because many of them were so young - knew of it. The moral power of Fussell's narrative is all the greater for being so unemphatically delivered' Philip Pullman, Observer.

Author Bio
Paul Fussell was born in California in 1924. As a second lieutenant in France leading a rifle platoon of the 103rd Infantry Division, he was severely wounded in March 1945. Afterwards he attended Harvard and went on to become Professor of English Literature at Rutgers University and then at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is now Professor of English. He is married and lives in Pennsylvania.