The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (3 page)

By late July, the allies fielded 1.4 million soldiers in Normandy, about twice the number of German soldiers engaged in the battle, yet were still stuck in positions they had planned to occupy just five days after D-Day. The battle had been far slower and bloodier than ex- pected, with the terrain of Normandy inhibiting Allied maneuvers. But on July 25, with the bulk of the German forces engaged in the Caen area, the American First Army, deployed along a line running west from Saint- Lô to the coast, staged the great breakout that would change the dynamic of the campaign, and the war. Following a colossal (and sloppy) carpet bombing of the German defensive positions just west of Saint-Lô, the Americans ripped open a gap in the German line and plunged forward, rushing south and west toward Avranches, thus opening the way into Brittany and, more importantly, threatening to envelop the German army in Normandy. Fending off a ferocious German counteroffensive at Mortain between August 7 and 12, the U.S. First and Third armies punched eastward and caught the Germans in a massive pincer, between the

Anglo- Canadian forces in the north, at Falaise, and their own troops in the south at Argentan. Under sus- tained air and ground attack, the German army was caught in a rapidly constricting pocket and brutally pummeled. The Germans lost 10,000 men killed in the furnace of Falaise, and another 50,000 were captured. But brilliant German defensive fighting kept the Falaise pocket open just long enough to allow perhaps 100,000 Germans to slip away and escape across the Seine riv- er. They joined a massive exodus of all German forces in France, some 240,000 troops, who rushed headlong through France and Belgium on into Germany itself, where they would regroup behind the Siegfried Line and fight another day. Though victory in Normandy had not brought about the total destruction of the German army in France, it dealt it a severe blow and clearly sig- naled that the liberation of Europe was at hand.

By August 25, when the Allied forces reached the river Seine and marched into Paris, the American and Brit- ish commanders could look with satisfaction on the victory they had achieved since the landings in early June. The Germans had lost 1,500 tanks, 3,500 guns, and 20,000 vehicles. There were 240,000 German sol- diers dead or wounded, and another 200,000 had been taken prisoner. More than forty German divisions had been destroyed, and Hitler could not make good this

scale of loss. By the first of September, virtually all of France had been cleared of the German forces and on September 4, the Belgian capital Brussels and vital port city of Antwerp were liberated. The Allies paid for their victory in Normandy with the lives of 36,976 of their own soldiers.

1: “ Too Wonderfully Beautiful”: Liberation in Normandy

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BOUT TEN DAYS after the Allied landings on the beaches of Normandy, Ernie Pyle, the legendary American war correspondent, took a jeep ride through the Norman countryside. “It was too won- derfully beautiful to be the scene of a war,” he wrote. “Someday I would like to cover a war in a country that is as ugly as war itself.” Of course, Pyle saw more than the gently rolling pastures, the wheat fields, and the fruit trees: the region had been shattered by heavy bombardments before and during the D-Day inva- sion, and he wrote about the ruined hamlets and towns eloquently. But he also told stories that neatly framed the basic American understanding of what the war was really about. Arriving at an old school that was being used as a prison for German POWs, he got out to have

a look around.

At this time the French in that vicinity had been “lib- erated” less than twelve hours, and they could hardly encompass it in their minds. They were relieved, but they scarcely knew what to do. As we left the prison enclosure and got into the jeep we noticed four or five French country people—young farmers in their twen- ties, I took them to be—leaning against a nearby house.

We were sitting in the jeep getting our gear adjusted when one of the farmers walked toward us, rather hes- itantly and timidly. Finally he came up and smilingly handed me a rose. I couldn’t go around carrying a rose in my hand all afternoon, so I threw it away around the next bend. But little things like that do sort of make you feel good about the human race.
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ErniePyle’snewspapercolumnsfortheScripps-Howard syndicate, written from North Africa, Italy, and France, sketched out for avid readers in the United States de- tailed portraits of average American soldiers—their concerns and their personalities, their uncomplicated nature and basic kindness. Pyle was honest enough a reporter to write about screw-ups, about wrecked French towns, about how frightened soldiers under fire normally were, and about the moment he found himself caught under the massive American bombing run near Saint-Lô on July 25 that inadvertently killed over a hundred GIs. But Pyle became treasured for his ability to paint moving portraits of these “good boys” and the cause for which they fought. He traveled with these young soldiers, slept out in the cold with them, cooked eggs for them, shared anxieties with them, and in April 1945, while in the Pacific, Pyle died with them, the victim of a Japanese sniper’s bullet. He was mourned by the nation precisely because his writing

reflected a tone that American readers found comfort- ing: unpretentious, gently ironic, and filled with quiet assurance that the cause was just and that democracy would win through in the end. Pyle, in writing the rose story, told Americans that the liberators had been wel- comed to France warmly and that through the horrors of war, one could glimpse some basic human decency still alive in Europe.

And yet, Pyle doesn’t tell us much about that young man who offered him the rose. What had become of his fam- ily? Had his home been damaged in the invasion? What became of him after the Americans had passed through? Was he, indeed, a Norman? Pyle might not have known if this young farmer was a refugee from any one of the cities nearby that had been evacuated during the fight- ing, or even if he had been a Pole, or a Russian, trans- ported into France to labor on behalf of the German occupiers as they built up their now-breached Atlantic Wall. In fact, Pyle didn’t write much about French civil- ians in Normandy. In his articles, civilians remain, like that farmer, mute, decent, but alien. Pyle offered no in- sight into how civilians in the region viewed these gun- toting American boys who arrived in such huge num- bers, or how they dealt with the soldiers’ petty thefts, periodic looting, and frequent drunkenness; nor did he write much about the shocking violence of the battles

that left thousands of French civilians dead. Pyle didn’t mention a feature of the battlefield that almost every war diary written by soldiers in Normandy stresses repeatedly: the overwhelming stench of rotting flesh, both from unburied livestock killed in the heavy and constant bombing as well as from decomposing hu- man remains that carpeted great swaths of Normandy for months after the D-Day landings. And Pyle, like the bulk of the Allied soldiers, moved out of Normandy in August and pushed eastward toward Paris, so he never was able to see what life was like in Caen and Saint-Lô and Falaise and dozens of other “liberated” towns that had been ground to powder by Allied bombing. If he had gone there and talked to the inhabitants, he prob- ably would have found very few who, in the summer of 1944, felt “good about the human race.”

Of course, Ernie Pyle can be excused: like all war cor- respondents in World War II, he wrote under the con- straints of censorship, and could not truly depict the awful face of war. But even long after these restrictions had been lifted, American writers and scholars who wrote about the D-Day battles continued to give pride of place to soldiers and to events on the battlefield, and neglected the complex experience of the liberated peo- ples. In the richly detailed official histories produced by the Army, or the many moving journalistic accounts,

or the anecdotal histories that have always been popu- lar to American tastes, little if any attention has been given to the local peoples of Normandy.
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Instead, popu- lar writers of military history return like salmon to the rich breeding grounds of Ernie Pyle’s language and imagery. By far the most popular kind of writing about Normandy has long been those that give a picture of combat “As Told By Those Who Were There,” to use the inaccurate subtitle of one such work—for these ac- counts rarely include French voices.
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It is possible to write military history without attending to the experiences of noncombatants. But we cannot write the history of liberation without paying attention to the voices, experiences, and travails of the liberated people themselves. For liberation is more than victory on the battlefield: it is a forcible, often brutal destruc- tion of one kind of political order, and its replacement with another. Historical accounts of liberation that start and stop with the soldiers’ experience all too eas- ily ignore the social and political aspects of the war, the complex interactions between soldiers and civilians, and especially the after-battle conditions that liberat- ing armies leave behind. They also overlook the patient daily work of recovery that transforms victory at arms into something that looks like peace.

Not surprisingly, the French have their own ways of talking about the events in Normandy: they tend to emphasize the civilian experience because the role of organized French military force was minimal in Nor- mandy in 1944. Drawing on detailed local analyses of casualties, French scholars have determined that about 20,000 French people were killed in Normandy during its liberation, most as a result of Allied bomb- ing. This represents 29 percent of the 70,000 French people killed in Allied bombing attacks in France during the entire Second World War.
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Along with the deaths, civilians endured a profound social upheaval. In Normandy, hundreds of thousands of townspeople and farmers were displaced by the fighting; they fled the scene of their liberation bearing tattered bundles in rickety wheelbarrows, trying to avoid shells and bullets, while all around them the armies churned up fields, leveled homes and barns, killed off cattle, ruined crops, destroyed roads and bridges, and cut off elec- tricity and water and sewage and basic services, mak- ing life a misery not just in June and July but for years to come. French writers of memoirs and contemporary accounts likened the dolorous scene to Calvary—the setting of the Crucifixion—and frequently invoked the “martyrdom” of their villages and towns. The emphasis here has been on loss, death, destruction, and the bit- tersweet recovery of freedom after the horrible ordeal

of German occupation. Even today, in the Norman dé- partements, local residents cannot tell the story of the liberation of France without bowing their heads, and grimacing.
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IT WAS RATHER a shock,” wrote Corporal L. F. Ro- ker of the Highland Light Infantry in his wartime diary, “to find that we were not welcomed ecstati- cally as ‘Liberators’ by the local people, as we were told we should be…They saw us as bringers of destruction and pain.” Fellow soldiers concurred: Ivor Astley of the 43rd Wessex Infantry Division noted in his memoirs that, far from waving flags and handing out bottles of bubbly, “the French peasants to whom the shell-torn villages and ruined farmlands belonged” were “sullen and silent; if we had expected a welcome, we certainly failed to find it. Some of the people looked utterly be- wildered.” Major Edward Elliot of the Glasgow High- landers, whose diary is studded with acute observa- tions, noted that “the French are having a pretty thin time at present. First the Germans dig holes all over the place and pull down houses, then we shell and bomb their homes and drive their vehicles all over the fields. Naturally their attitude to us is inclined to be a bit stiff; however, I think they are mostly for us, though

they are desperately tired of the war and the misery it has caused them.” In Creully on June 16, Major M. H. Cooke of the Royal Scots noted that “the people came out in force, but for the most part they stood gravely and seriously watching us. Many nodded, and once or twice there was a little clapping, and once a French- woman rushed forward crying, ‘ Welcome, Messieurs, welcome to France.’ It was still a little disappointing.”
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Why such a chilly reception? Some observers tried to explain this French reticence as typical of the Norman character. A. J. Liebling, the war correspondent for The New Yorker, noted the “foolish talk in the British news- papers…about the Normans’ lack of enthusiasm,” and chalked up such stories to “correspondents who ac- quired their ideas of Frenchmen from music-hall turns and comic drawings. One might as well expect pub- lic demonstrations of emotions in Contoocook, New Hampshire or in Burrillville, Rhode Island, as in Nor- mandy, where the people are more like New England- ers than they are like, for instance, Charles Boyer.”
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A British Civil Affairs officer also relied on such typolo- gies to explain the surly civilians: “ Taking into account the naturally reserved disposition of the Norman, we have received an enthusiastic welcome.”
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But there may have been something else behind the

diffidence that Allied soldiers encountered among the liberated peoples of Normandy. Though Normandy looked to Ernie Pyle like a peaceful rural idyll, this was an area that had endured four years of a bitter occu- pation.
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Consider the département of Calvados, home to four of the landing beaches (Sword, Juno, Gold, and Omaha). A productive region of cider, apples, brandy, butter, and milk, Calvados had some 400,000 inhabit- ants at the start of the war. It was one of the most po- litically conservative parts of France, and Calvadosiens were known for their independence, their dislike of state intervention, their pro-business attitudes, and strong Catholic traditions. In the national elections of 1936, when France voted for a left-center Popular Front government, Calvados bucked the trend and went fur- ther rightward. The department actually became a re- cruiting ground for the far-right Croix de Feu, which strongly opposed the rise of the Popular Front. What- ever the prewar inclinations of the region, however, opinion in Calvados during the war was firmly anti- German and grew distinctly more so as the war went on. The reason for this was geographic: Calvados, like all the northern coastal departments, was heavily in- vested with German soldiers whose role was to prepare for an expected cross-channel Allied attack. By the fall of 1941, the Germans had stationed 15,000–20,000 troops in Calvados alone, and this number had trebled