An Energetic View Of Normandy Invasion

"Normandy: The Landings to the Liberation of Paris," by Olivier Wieviorka; translated from the French by M.B. DeBevoise (Belknap/Harvard University Press, $29.95)

Olivier Wieviorka's "Normandy" is, I suppose, a revisionist history at bottom, but its impact on the reader seems somewhat less revolutionary than that: a "let's-re-examine-insufficiently-observed-facts history," perhaps. Whatever you want to call it, it is possibly the best summary of the Normandy campaign I have yet read.

Wieviorka, a prominent French historian, says of the monumental three-month campaign, "soldiers and historians alike have often preferred its heroic charms to the harsh realities of the day, in relegating to the margins of silence everything that contradicts the legend." He brings the contradictory, harsh realities out from the margins into the center of the page.

He refers, for instance, to the "myth of inevitability," that the "arsenal of democracy" would without question be able to crush the Germans. The Allies (the United States, Britain and Canada) did not think so at the time, nor does a later examination of events support the notion.

The D-Day landing was not as bloody as was expected or as it has been made out to be. That despite the fact that prelanding exercises revealed grave shortcomings in motivation and performance of U.S. troops. On the other hand, the difficulty of the subsequent combat through the infamous hedgerows of Normandy has not been sufficiently emphasized, Wieviorka believes.

Nor was it a holy war fought only for principles. National interests were always under consideration. Each nation involved was watching out for its own.

Soldiers, too, fought not mainly for glory or principle, but to get it over with and go home. As Paul Fussell, man of letters and historian and an American veteran, has said, the war has been "sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty."

Wieviorka does have this startling revelation: When it was decided that a French unit would march in to liberate Paris, American and British commanders insisted that it be made up entirely of white troops.

"Normandy" is a well-organized, solidly documented overview of the campaign. The overall impression is of a writer thoroughly in command of all aspects of his subject. It is not at all dry or slow-moving, and seems to be smoothly translated.