The Boys' Crusade: the American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-45

Parameters, Autumn, 2004 by Henry G. Gole

The Boys' Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-45. By Paul Fussell. New York: A Modern Library Chronicles Book, The Modern Library, 2003. 184 pages. $19.95.

Paul Fussell gives fair warning: "The universal catastrophe that was the Second World War can be merely hinted at in this little book." Then he demolishes with acerbic brevity the military romanticism current in American popular literature and film. The veteran of close combat is profoundly offended by the feel-goodism found in works such as The Greatest Generation, The Good War, and the cheerleading of Stephen Ambrose. "There is nothing in infantry warfare to raise spirits at all, and anyone who imagines a military 'victory' gratifying is mistaken." Fussell's academic reputation is as a scholar of 18th-century English literature, and his scathing critique of American culture in our time is collected in three books of essays among the 15 books he has written and the several he has edited. He is a many-sided curmudgeon, and, above all, a de-romanticizer of war.

Fussell takes no prisoners. "Rumination" best describes The Boys 'Crusade, his return to events still vivid to him after 60 years. The author relentlessly illustrates the conditions that produce the fatal screw-ups that are so much a part of war, particularly infantry combat. Of the fratricide in July 1944, as strategic bombers killed friend and foe alike, he notes sardonically: "Tourists prowling around the COBRA area should not waste time looking for a memorial to the boys killed by the bombing error. There is none." The deception plan to conceal the time and place of D-Day, called "Fortitude," required the bombing of innocents. The missed chance at Falaise to destroy the enemy resulted in recriminations and accusing finger-pointing among allies. Fussell questions the need for the bloody fighting in the Heurtgen Forest, a place that denied the US Army its strong suit, mobility and speed. A lieutenant there wrote: "We were cut to pieces. This division as now constituted is not the old 28th. All new men. The old are mostly dead." Casualty rates in rifle companies of 100 percent, 200 percent, and more from June 1944 to May 1945 were too frequent. An infantryman notes: "Nobody gets out of a rifle company. It's a door that opens only one way, in. You leave when they carry you out, if you're unlucky, dead, or if you're lucky, wounded. But nobody just walks away. That was the unwritten law."

Amateurs led unskilled boys. The replacement system ensured that new guys died before the old guys knew their names. Prisoners of war and soldiers attempting to surrender were gunned down by both sides. Americans were shocked by the emaciated living and dead found in concentration camps. Infantry boys "hate" (Fussell's word): officers, especially phonies granted officer rank and beautiful dress uniforms without having to undergo the usual price of painful infantry training; the French of all types who were distinctly snotty toward their saviors; and anyone to the rear of the infantryman.

The author says "conscious sloppery" was "the Conscript's Revenge," a way of saying: "I'm not really a powerless part of an institution so unfair, stupid, and silly as the army. I'm still the careless boy from Winnetka that I used to be, and I'm determined to be my own boss. Screw you all."

This book is a savage attack on comforting illusions about war. The author is appalled by the readiness of the public to accept myths rather than "facts" presented by participants. The author says in Doing Battle, his autobiography, that innocent Boy Fussell, age 20, was ill-treated and damaged by the Wehrmacht in 1945. His ill treatment was a shrapnel wound, from which his body recovered. His platoon sergeant was killed, from which his soul has not recovered.

Your reviewer highly recommends this book and all of Paul Fussell's work to the readers of these pages with this caution: Beware. The contents of these books were not prepared by a historian. The author is a prose stylist of high intelligence, a bitter man who wants to drill you right between your eyes. He lost his soul in a German forest 60 years ago.

Dr. Henry G. Gole (Colonel, USA Ret.) author of Road to Rainbow: Army Planning for Global War, 1934-1940 and a Frequent Parameters reviewer and contributor.