A revisionist theme seems to have settled on this year’s 65th anniversary commemoration of the Normandy landings.
The tone was set in Antony’s Beevor’s new book, D-Day, which tries to debunk certain received ideas about the Allied campaign.
Far from being an unmitigated success, Mr Beevor found, the landings came very close to going horribly wrong.
And far from being universally welcomed as liberators, many troops had a distinctly surly reception from the people of Normandy.
The reason for this was simple. Many Normandy towns and villages had been literally obliterated by Allied bombing.
The bombardment of Caen, Mr Beevor said, could almost be considered a war-crime (though he later retracted the comment).
Many historians will retort that there is nothing new in Mr Beevor’s account.
Harrowing experience
After all, the scale of destruction is already well-established.
Some 20,000 French civilians were killed in the two-and-a-half months from D-Day, 3,000 of them during the actual landings.
In some areas – like the Falaise pocket where the Germans were pounded into oblivion at the end of the campaign – barely a building was left standing and soldiers had to walk over banks of human corpses.
As for the destruction of Caen, it has long been admitted that it was militarily useless.
The Germans were stationed to the north of the city and were more or less untouched.
Twenty-five years ago, in his book Overlord, Max Hastings had already described it as "one of the most futile air attacks of the war."
Though these revisionist accounts were written elsewhere, it is in France that these ideas strike more of a chord today.
It is not as if the devastation wrought by the Allies is not known – it is just that it tends not to get talked about.
And yet for many families who lived through the war, it was the arrival and passage of British and American forces that was by far the most harrowing experience.
"It was profoundly traumatic for the people of Normandy," said Christophe Prime, a historian at the Peace Memorial in Caen.
"Think of the hundreds of tons of bombs destroying entire cities and wiping out families. But the suffering of civilians was for many years masked by the over-riding image – that of the French welcoming the liberators with open arms."
‘Sullen’ welcome
According to Prime, it was during the 60th anniversary commemoration five years ago that the taboo first began to lift.
At town meetings across Normandy, witnesses – now on their 70s – spoke of the terrible things they had seen as children.
June 6, 2009
