Legends of World War II

Such historians as Stephen Ambrose have recently reminded us of what Paul Fussell emphasizes in The Boys' Crusade—that the 1944–45 war in northwestern Europe was fought largely by American boys who were seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen years old. Why this fact should have been overlooked or forgotten is difficult to understand. During the war no one heard such phrases as "our fighting men" drop from anyone's lips; the American people seemed to be living closer to reality, so on the street and in the stores, it was always "our boys" this and "our boys" that until, at the war's end, the boys returned home men, and we learned to view them in that capacity.

Time and perhaps a generation of patriotic war movies (e.g. Battleground, The Story of G.I. Joe, The Young Lions, and The Victors) in which mature actors play roles as heroic infantrymen may have skewed public perception considerably. Whatever the cause, a shift in perception or in recollection seems to have taken hold in the nation's imagination. Fussell's overriding concern in this book of essays is to restore a sense of reality about the war by planting readers' feet—not to mention their memories—firmly on solid ground. "Now, almost sixty years after the horror, there has been a return, especially in popular culture, to military romanticism, which, if not implying that war is really good for you, does suggest that it contains desirable elements—pride, companionship, and the consciousness of virtue enforced by deadly weapons. . . . There is nothing in infantry warfare to raise the spirits at all, and anyone who imagines a military 'victory' gratifying is mistaken."

The Boys' Crusade, which was originally published by Random House in 2003 and which earned the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History in 2005, should not be read as a pacifist tract. As readers familiar with Fussell will know, he was severely wounded in France as a twenty-year-old second lieutenant leading a rifle platoon in the 103rd Infantry Division. Like the majority of America's boys—regardless of personal pain and suffering, regardless of being surrounded by body parts, killing, and death, and particularly after discovering what the Nazis had been doing in nearly five thousand prisons and slave-labor camps—Fussell reluctantly concludes that the nightmare journey forced on our boys by the war was worth the effort.

What Fussell nevertheless refuses to countenance and what he makes a sustained ironic effort to debunk are the countless illusions we as a people keep trying to sustain about the war to obscure its ghastly reality. He would retain, for example, the bloody opening minutes of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, retitle them "Omaha Beach: Aren't You Glad You Weren't There?" but consign the remainder of the movie to "the purgatory where boys' bad adventure films end up." Prewar supposition, its claims supported by postwar propaganda, suggested that strategic air power alone would bring and did bring Hitler to his knees. Many—some would say far too many—died in the air for the results achieved; the postwar Strategic Bombing Survey demonstrates that the air campaign was far less than decisive. Fussell contends that Eisenhower was dead right about strategic air power from the start: while it might contribute to the war effort in Europe, toppling Nazi Germany could only be achieved by boys on the ground who could root out the enemy and destroy him on his home turf, and the effort would be bloody. Faced with the necessity of invading Europe, we prepared the best-trained and best-equipped army the world has ever seen and sent it into battle. Such is the mythology.

The facts—as any student of military history knows and as Fussell painstakingly sets out—are different. The divisions that landed on D–Day were well trained to reduce strong points on the Norman beaches, but they had received little preparation, if any, for what to do once they...