D-Day Through French Eyes

There is hardly an American alive today who has not seen “The Longest Day,” Darrell Zanuck’s 1962 epic film of the invasion of France in June 1944. This star-studded, dramatic film and other movies about World War II center on the actions and activities, usually heroic, of Allied forces on the long march to Berlin to end the Nazi reign in Europe. Recall the moment in Patton when the General, standing in his jeep as it sped down the road, replied to a common soldier’s “Where are you going General? “I’m going to Berlin. I'm going to personally shoot that paper-hanging son of a bitch.” 

Lost in all of these tales of derring-do and allied competence is an intimate picture of what D-Day was like for the ordinary French men and women living, some for decades, on the Normandy peninsula. 

Those who lived in the Normandy countryside where the landings and fighting took place were average every day people. They were farmers and villagers. They had cows to milk, bread to bake, crops to harvest, children to educate, babies to be born, old and sick people to be nursed and buried.

 

Ms. Roberts

Mary Louise Roberts', professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, second book,  D-Day through French Eyes - Memoirs of Normandy 1944, brings to life the personal stories of some of the French men and women who were the first Europeans to be touched for good or bad by the greatest sea and air armada in history on the night of June 5- 6, 1944. The Allied plan was to conquer the Normandy peninsula in three weeks. It took three months.

The tales of joy, merriment, love, respect, admiration, sorrow, loss and anger are from diaries kept at the time and recollection put down on paper years later. To make an omelet you have to crack eggs, was certainly on the mind of the Normans. From the moments the paras (Allied paratroopers) began dropping from the sky to the early morning shelling from the ships off-shore that destroyed homes, churches, schools, businesses, and killed people and animals, death and destruction were all around.

Roberts says in her introduction to this easily read book, “I have chosen temoignages (testimony)  that revolve around the rich sensory details of D-Day --- the sound of artillery, the first glimpse of an American, the stench of death, and the taste of chocolate. The result is a vision of both hell at the hands of the occupiers and joy at being liberated.” In most instances testimony is prefaced with an explanation and perspective by Roberts to help the reader become enmeshed as if living in the day.

Perhaps for the first time, D-Day through French Eyes offers readers the opportunity to balance the stirring events of those dramatic, impacting days as portrayed by Hollywood, and what it was like to live in the path of D-Day.

Complete blog here

Comment to: arch@archibald99.com