The Boys' Crusade

On my flight over to the UK, I tore through a short book which I commend to your attention, The Boys' Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945, by Paul Fussell.

There are apparently timeless tendencies - which I encourage you to correlate to political affiliation - which can be expressed as, respectively, "to love uncritically" and "to criticize unlovingly." An alternative ideal which would, in quasi-Hegelian fashion, absorb and supersede them both could be expressed as "to love critically/to criticize lovingly." It's precisely this ethos which comes through in The Boys' Crusade.

The title evidently plays off of the legendary "Children's Crusade" of the 13th century, that quintessential mixture of the high-minded, the horrifying, and the flat-out absurd which (to varying degrees) surely characterizes every war, however noble in aim and necessary in fact.

In a series of very readable vignettes, one gets a feel for some of the major combat operations in the western European theater, leading from Omaha, to Hurtgen Forest, to the shocked arrival of Patton's boys at Ohrdruf-Nord. Each of them vividly suggests the smells, sights, sounds, and raw terror - the viscera - which assailed the typical dogface. Only the hard of heart can remain unmoved by the terrifying lot of these young conscripts.

Fussell's aim is clearly to de-mythologize the allegedly "Good War" - to show the endemic mistakes, misfortunes, internecine conflicts, rivalries, and (to say the least) questionable morality which animated various allied operations and tactics. (As an instance of the latter, Fussell alleges intentional allied bombing of "collateral" targets at Calais as a diversion for the impending landing at Omaha Beach; it's my understanding that there's a real question about that particular allegation, though certainly there are many other undisputed Allied misdeeds which could be cited). Thankfully, Fussell has nothing of the Village Leftist about him, for whom only one's own side is imprecated. He clearly recognizes that there's wrong - and there's (much greater) wrong; the Yanks and the Brits were the force, however flawed, for good. At the same time, Fussell's narrative tacitly leads the reader to empathize with the enemy, such as the Nazi's fried in the conflagration at Falaise. The reader himself feels battered upon emerging from a chapter, and is tempted to conclude that life is essentially absurd; that apparent lack of ultimate intelligibility seems embodied - or underscored - in war, which certainly qualifies as a "holocaust" in the original sense of the term.

There's a convergence between Fussell's narrative and, say, Tolstoy's asides in War and Peace concerning the essential chaos and unpredictability - uncontrollability - of war; "military planning" is much closer to an oxymoron than is "military intelligence." I assume that there must, somehow, be such as thing as "military genius," but I'm hard-pressed to articulate in what it consists. Inspiring a certain enduring ethos of fortitude and self-belief in one's troops may come closest. In any event, there's little doubt that combat affords the expression of valor and heroism, alongside the more shameful human qualities - and Fussell does not stint on recording the former either.

Though a short work, The Boys' Crusade is rich in lessons for assessing recent and current wars; by implication, those lessons cast in an unflattering light much of the current 'cant-and-rant' concerning "war crimes," "incompetence," "lack of planning," etc. One sociological note which I found of interest - and relevance, since I was reading the book on my way to England - was how functionally "perennial" are the tensions between Brit and Yank, in terms of both style and substance; embodied, e.g., in the ongoing conflict between Bernard Law Montgomery ("Monty") and Ike. It's easy to overlook the fact that there's an element of realpolitik even between the closest of allies. Don't tell that to the Manicheans, though.