Product Description

The Boys’ Crusade is the great historian Paul Fussell’s unflinching and unforgettable account of the American infantryman’s experiences in Europe during World War II. Based in part on the author’s own experiences, it provides a stirring narrative of what the war was actually like, from the point of view of the children—for children they were—who fought it. While dealing definitively with issues of strategy, leadership, context, and tactics, Fussell has an additional purpose: to tear away the veil of feel-good mythology that so often obscures and sanitizes war’s brutal essence.

“A chronicle should deal with nothing but the truth,” Fussell writes in his Preface. Accord-ingly, he eschews every kind of sentimentalism, focusing instead on the raw action and human emotion triggered by the intimacy, horror, and intense sorrows of war, and honestly addressing the errors, waste, fear, misery, and resentments that plagued both sides. In the vast literature on World War II, The Boys’ Crusade stands wholly apart. Fussell’s profoundly honest portrayal of these boy soldiers underscores their bravery even as it deepens our awareness of their experiences. This book is both a tribute to their noble service and a valuable lesson for future generations.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #470053 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-13
• Released on: 2005-09-13
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 7.99" h x .45" w x 5.18" l, .31 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This short study of the U. S. Army's most burdened branch in the final campaign against Germany does not represent its National Book Award-winning author at his highest level. It focuses on the 17-, 18-, and 19-year-olds who were the backbone of the infantry. They were also frequently thrust into combat after no more than four months' training, led by officers as green as themselves; Fussell himself was one of them. If wounded, they were returned to some other unit through the infamous Replacement Depot system, and altogether not treated much better than the trench fodder of WWI. Thorough research has not prevented some questionable pieces of historiography, such as leaving out the resistance the American army eventually generated in the Battle of the Bulge. Fussell also tends toward space-consuming jabs at rival schools of interpretations and even journalists as distinguished as Ernie Pyle. The focus bounces around, with mini-essays covering such non-infantry affairs as the Allied deception operation for D-Day, at the expense of material on the infantry as other than victim. For a minihistory or minibiography of the same subject, readers should stick with Stephen Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
This is an unsentimental crystallization of the American infantryman's experience in World War II from D-Day forward, of which Fussell knows something, as his memoir Doing Battle (1996) attests. Fussell finds his experience echoed in that of another memoirist, Robert Kotlowitz, and quotes copiously from Before Their Time (1997) to illustrate the training of a soldier; frictions with the British and the French; and being ordered into combat by mulish or inept officers. He then describes the chain taking the dead and wounded back and the replacements up, castigating the ironic chasm between its horrors and the popular penchant to remember the American soldier's experience as a righteous crusade. Ultimately, with the overrunning of the concentration camps, he was rightly exalted as a sacrificial liberator, but few footsloggers at the time felt that way--as Fussell reminds us with trenchancy and intolerance for cant. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“This is a former warrior’s haunting meditation on the terrible, yet often necessary, destructiveness of total warfare. Written with passion and fidelity, The Boys’ Crusade is a book that will not leave you after you have put it down. If there is a more powerful personal account of the ground war in Western Europe I have yet to encounter it.” —Donald L. Miller, author of The Story of World War II

“No one writes about war with greater authenticity and eloquence than Paul Fussell. The Boys’ Crusade is an extraordinarily powerful account that is at once poignant and searing. It is a truth-telling of a very high order from one of our finest men of letters.” —Rick Atkinson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of An Army at Dawn

“Fussell writes vividly and sardonically . . . painting extraordinary scenes at every turn. . . . A bracing corrective . . . and just right for a new season of war.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)


From the Hardcover edition.