The Boys' Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945

by Paul Fussell Narrated by Joel Leffert

Overview

National Book Award Winner Paul Fussell tells the breathtaking story of WWII from the young soldiers' points of view. WWII was not the glorified picture it is often depicted to be. For the American soldier it was a tiring, emotional, and gruesome experience. Fussell's extensive details and insight help to make this story come alive.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times

As this short, riveting book turns to the war itself, it allows for heroism, but dwells more on what went wrong.—Alan Riding

The Washington Post

Instead of the camaraderie, courage and respect emphasized by Stephen Ambrose and Tom Brokaw, Fussell focuses on the dark side of combat -- the absurdity, tragedy and horror. With considerable insight, he stresses the many costly foul-ups ("snafus"), the failures of training, communication and supply, the casualties from "friendly" as well as enemy fire, the desertion and self-inflicted wounds, and the meaning of the "deterioration" of units eroded by continuous service on the front lines. — John Whiteclay Chambers II

Publishers Weekly

This short study of the U. S. Army's most burdened branch in the final campaign against Germany does not represent its National Book Award-winning author at his highest level. It focuses on the 17-, 18-, and 19-year-olds who were the backbone of the infantry. They were also frequently thrust into combat after no more than four months' training, led by officers as green as themselves; Fussell himself was one of them. If wounded, they were returned to some other unit through the infamous Replacement Depot system, and altogether not treated much better than the trench fodder of WWI. Thorough research has not prevented some questionable pieces of historiography, such as leaving out the resistance the American army eventually generated in the Battle of the Bulge. Fussell also tends toward space-consuming jabs at rival schools of interpretations and even journalists as distinguished as Ernie Pyle. The focus bounces around, with mini-essays covering such non-infantry affairs as the Allied deception operation for D-Day, at the expense of material on the infantry as other than victim. For a minihistory or minibiography of the same subject, readers should stick with Stephen Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers. (On sale Sept. 9) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Readers should be forewarned that this book is not your normal, garden-variety memoir of World War II. In a series of essays dealing with strategy, tactics, and leadership from the landings at Normandy to the fall of Berlin, Fussell (The Great War and Human Memory), a decorated infantry officer of the European campaigns of 1944-45, comes as close to the unvarnished truth as is ever likely to see print. Beginning with a chapter titled "Boy Crusaders," Fussell describes the typical GI as 18 to 20 years old, from all types of social and educational backgrounds, taken from minimal training and thrown into ground combat of the fiercest kind. Other essays discuss the relationship and attitudes toward the French (which were not always rosy), the lost opportunity at the Falaise Gap, the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest (perhaps the western front's worst), replacements and infantry morale, the treatment of the dead and wounded, and the discovery of the concentration camps and how that changed attitudes toward the Germans. As with his longer Wartime, this work is aimed at correcting the sanitized works of "sentimental" history the war has inspired. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/03]-David Lee Poremba, Detroit P.L. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Brief, wholly memorable essays-sometimes little more than vignettes-on a season in hell. Not for literary historian and combat veteran Fussell (Veterans, 2002, etc.) all this talk of "the greatest generation" and the mawkish military romanticism that has settled on WWII: the young men, many scarcely more than boys, who fought against the formidable German enemy in places like Normandy and the Hürtgen Forest were a "reluctant draftee army," their deeds usually less heroic than desperate. Building on his fine memoir Doing Battle (1996), Fussell explores the lives and actions of those boys, "who bitched freely, but seldom cried, even when wounded." Among the themes he explores, at the length of a few pages or paragraphs, are the widespread dislike for the young Americans among British civilians, who famously complained that they were "overpaid, oversexed, and over here," and even among the liberated French, "who didn't at all appreciate the immense black market in Paris run by over two thousand American deserters"; the extraordinary, and underreported, rate of desertion among those boys, traumatized by battle settings straight out of the Grimm Brothers and the constant presence of ignoble death; the carnage of battle in places like the Falaise Pocket, where, Dwight Eisenhower recalled, "It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh" (to which Fussell, ever the curmudgeon, adds, "And Eisenhower is gentleman enough not to offend . . . by dwelling on the smell"); and the general insanity of war and its fighters, torn between the "quite contradictory operations" of trying to kill some people with the greatest efficiency while trying tosave others to the same high standards. Throughout, Fussell writes vividly and sardonically, sounding like the spiritual twin of Kurt Vonnegut at some points and an aggrieved Julius Caesar at others, and painting extraordinary scenes at every turn. A bracing corrective for a literature recently dominated by Ambrose, Brokaw, and other cheerleaders, and just right for a new season of war.

From the Publisher

This is a former warrior’s haunting meditation on the terrible, yet often necessary, destructiveness of total warfare. Written with passion and fidelity, The Boys’ Crusade is a book that will not leave you after you have put it down. If there is a more powerful personal account of the ground war in Western Europe I have yet to encounter it.” —Donald L. Miller, author of The Story of World War II

“No one writes about war with greater authenticity and eloquence than Paul Fussell. The Boys’ Crusade is an extraordinarily powerful account that is at once poignant and searing. It is a truth-telling of a very high order from one of our finest men of letters.” —Rick Atkinson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of An Army at Dawn

“Fussell writes vividly and sardonically . . . painting extraordinary scenes at every turn. . . . A bracing corrective . . . and just right for a new season of war.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

DEC 04/JAN 05 - AudioFile

This work chronicles the U.S. infantryman from Normandy to V-E Day. The author emphasizes the youth of these G.I.s, a great many of whom were 19, 18, even 17 years of age, merely boys in fact. The author writes from experience, for he himself was one of these boys. We are told of the slaughter of the Huertgen Forest, desertion, the liberation of the concentration camps, and other events. There is nothing romantic in these "joyless" accounts as Fussell describes the dirty, grimy business of war. This no-nonsense work is performed skillfully by Joel Leffert. His delivery is relaxed and his speech clear, splendidly nuanced, and expressive. M.T.F. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171114435
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	01/16/2008
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The Boy Crusaders

When Ike Eisenhower was a boy, European history was more avidly pursued in schools than now, and it's also possible that he knew a bit about the Crusades from his own reading, if he hadn't heard about them in church—his family was pious—or at elementary or high school or even at West Point. In any event, the imagery of the Crusades was lodged strongly in his mind. In an Order of the Day given or read to "Soldiers, Sailors, and Air- men of the Allied Expeditionary Force," just before the invasion of Normandy, he informed them: "You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months." And, once successfully over, he would title his memoir of the war Crusade in Europe.

Eisenhower was not the only one conscious during the war of the Crusades. One of the enemy, Panzer leader Hans von Luck, had occasion three times to recall a poem about a military moment in the Crusades whose horrors resembled those he witnessed in the Falaise Pocket in 1944. He writes, " ‘Man, horse, and truck, by the Lord were struck.' This saying, from a poem on the battles of the Crusaders in Palestine about 1213, had come to my mind twice before: in December, 1941, by Moscow, and in 1943 in North Africa."

The date 1213 suggests the so-called Children's Crusade, about whose actuality some historians have doubts. In the year 1212, it is said, an odd army set out from France and Germany. Its purpose was to liberate the Holy Land from the profane grip of Islam. This Crusade is reputed to have numbered fifty thousand young people, of whom only three thousand survived the attentions of pirates, slave dealers, and brothelkeepers. Whether actual or mythical, the Children's Crusade can't help suggesting many dimensions of American youth's curious, violent journey eastward over France and Germany in the Second World War. Kurt Vonnegut invokes The Children's Crusade as a sardonic alternative title for his novel Slaughterhouse Five, which measures many significant features of that war and those "children."

I intend no disrespect to the memory of Dwight D. Eisenhower by examining his term crusade. It made some sense at the moment, even if many of the still unblooded troops were likely to ridicule it. If they read or heard the Supreme Commander's words at all, they were doubtless embarrassed to have so highfalutin a term applied to their forthcoming performances and their feelings about them. It is likely that many never saw the sheet of paper on which the word appeared, and if the message was read to them (in the wind and the rain), their military experience so far had inclined them to greet all official utterances with scorn and skepticism. Indeed, when such pronouncements were read aloud they often ridiculed them noisily, until silenced by a sergeant's "At ease!"

At this distance, it may not be easy to remember that the European ground war in the west was largely fought by American boys seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen years old. At seventeen you could enlist if you had your parents' written permission, but most boys waited until they were drafted at age eighteen. (Actually, the army contained numerous illicit seventeen-year-olds, their presence as soldiers more or less regularized by false papers not rigorously inquired into.) Some of these men-children shaved but many did not need to. Robert Kotlowitz remembers bayonet drill. "We aimed, thrust, slashed or whichever—screaming ‘Kill! Kill!' in our teen-age voices." Not a few soldiers hopeful of food packages from home specified Animal Crackers, which, one soldier said, "can do wonders for low morale." (Perhaps what troops were recalling when seeking this specialty was eight-year-old Shirley Temple singing "Animal Crackers in My Soup.") At the same time, the infantrymen, not yet versed in the adult conventions of the high-class uses of wine, did not wait until after dinner to sip a little cognac. In quantity, it often replaced water in their canteens.

Who were these boys, who bitched freely but seldom cried, even when wounded? What did they have in common? Most had sufficient emotional control not to express angry envy of those (like, say, nonflying air corps troops) who had a nicer, safer war.

These infantry soldiers, if they weren't children, weren't quite men either, even if officers commonly addressed groups of them as such. One medical aidman was typical in referring to his patients as boys. Explaining in a letter home the workings of the casualty-clearing system, he falls naturally into 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 last forever, and that if anyone was going to get wounded, it would not be them. They had a common ability to simulate courage despite actuality: that is, a certain amount of dramatic talent, plus a vivid appreciation of black humor, involving plenty of irony. They had sufficient physical stamina to survive zero-degree cold from time to time, and considerable elementary camping skills of the sort common among civilian fishermen and hunters, which lots of survivors became after the war. They had to have fine eyesight, good enough to detect planted antipersonnel mines by their little triggers of thin wire protruding aboveground. They had to have a pack rat's skill in collecting small objects, like looted knives and forks. And preeminently, they had to have extraordinary luck. One infantryman's mother exhorted him to be careful. He answered: "You can't be careful. You can only be lucky."

And these young troops got along with each other because they usually shared certain beliefs:

1. America is the best country in the world because it is the only really modern one.

2. It is the world leader in technology, producing the bulk of the good cars, and, in unbelievably large quantities, airplanes and tanks, which, being the best in the world, are going to win the war. They are certainly better than anything the Germans and the Japs can make. (Only the brightest and boldest of the troops perceived that American tanks were seriously outgunned by German ones and, when struck by a shell, were likely to burst into flames, almost as a matter of course. This tendency earned them the name Ronsons, after the popular cigarette lighter.) Among the troops, only the finely tuned noted the superiority of the German machine guns. Discovery of these facts was demoralizing, and a problem confronting the brighter U.S. infantrymen was rationalizing away these sorry truths when among dumber people.

3. The American army, despite its screwups, is the best ever in providing the troops with clothing, food, lodging, personal weapons, and security.

These credulous youths were the products of American high schools, and differences of race, religion, and social class did not significantly alter their adherence to this code of belief nor influence their common hatreds, which can be specified as follows:

1. Officers of any kind, especially those not to a degree redeemed by sharing troops' hardships, and those pursuing in wartime their peacetime professions in uniform, like medicine, optometry, or medical administration. These phonies were granted officer rank and beautiful dress uniforms without having to undergo the usual price of painful infantry training.

2. The French, and quite justly too: they spoke a language impossible to learn and embarrassing to pronounce, and worse, they required the help of strangers (especially Americans) to win their wars, both the First World War and this one. In his most famous harangue of the troops, General Patton had enunciated the American view of people who lose wars or battles: "Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a loser." And the French of all types were distinctly snotty toward their saviors.

3. Stay-at-homes exempt from the war by virtue of largely invisible ailments, like punctured eardrums, high blood pressure, flat feet, or a "nervous condition." Even self- proclaimed "homosexuality."

4. Anyone occupying in combat a position to the rear of the infantryman. Included are soldiers in the artillery, all engineers except combat engineers, and certainly the various staff, afraid to visit the line and to see what's actually happening there.

Military historian Roger Spiller, who has spent decades studying the embarrassing actualities of battle, quotes with approval Bernard Knox, who writes, "It is true of every war that much as he may fear and perhaps even hate the enemy opposing him, the combat infantryman broods with deep and bitter resentment over the enormous number of people in his rear who sleep safely at night." And it was an enormous number. Spiller explains: "Of the millions of Americans sent overseas by the Army during World War II, only 14 percent were infantrymen. Those 14 percent took more than 70 percent of all the battle casualties among overseas troops." As Captain Harold P. Leinbaugh, author of the memoir The Men of Company K, proclaims, "We were the Willie Lomans of the war." Or, as some coarser speakers have put it, "the niggers." Soldiers who fought in North Africa and Southern Italy, struck by the squalor and filth of the peasants, thought of them as "the Infantry of the World."

"Adolescent fervor" is Robert Kotlowitz's term for those characteristics of male youth that can be honed and intensified by military training. "The Army understood that fervor and used it," he writes. "All armies do; they depend upon it." Adolescent fervor in the form it assumed be- fore bullets and artillery and mines ruined it is pleasantly registered by Edward W. Wood Jr., an enthusiastic—no, ecstatic—soldier as he participated in the victorious pursuit of the enemy in late August 1944:

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