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: #410334 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-13
• Released on: 2005-09-13
• Original language: English
• 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.

Customer Reviews

unoriginal and arrogant
I understand Fussell's aim: to disabuse us of the notion that World War II was a "good war," that combat is somehow romantic. In the end, the goal of WWII was noble, but the war was as base and destructive as any other; no war can be civilized, however justified it may be. I understand and believe that. We absolutely need these warts-and-all histories, but Fussell isn't the first to make the point, and he won't be the last. I respect and admire Fussell; his book on World War I (The Great War and Modern Memory) is a true classic, one that will surely endure for years and years to come. But this book is not all that original and is marred by intellectual arrogance. From the get-go, Fussell explains that he will not--that he refuses to--use what he calls "cuteisms": nicknames such as "The Big Red One" or "deuce-and-a-half." He believes such phrases "adolescent." But isn't that the point: that this war was fought by boys, by adolescents? Did not the boys--except, apparently, Lieutenant Fussell--use such euphemisms, was that not their reality? I like Fussell's discussions of the war as a crusade, especially how discovering the slave labor and concentration camps was a turning point in making it a moral crusade. But such sparks of insight do little to redeem the book as a whole.

Story doesn't match the Title or cover
As a Georgetown ASTP cadet that transferred to the 35th Div. I looked forward to the book as something different, the story of the 18 to 20 year olds in the Infantry in Europe in 1944-45.
Thats not what the book is about.
It is a general review of the war in Europe that has litle new information, almost no specific stories of young G I's.
Fussell must have written it on a week end and pulled general information from the WEB.
To be fair the mismanagement by Gen Hodges in throwing Division after Division into the Hurtgen Forest with massive casualities is clearly spelled out. Hodges should have been removed from command. He failed to lead properly in the Hedgerows of Normandy. Hurtgen Forrest and in the Bulge.That would havwe made a better book.
My favorite book on the Infantry is Visions from a foxhole, a classic.

Rehashed WWII History
I'm sorry but this book is simply not worth the price. As a fan of Fussell's writing I was eagerly looking forward to more of his unsentimental, realistic insight as a counterpoint to pop-WWII history. Unfortunately this is a slim, scant volume with much blank space between short chapters. The main problem, however, is that the vast majority of the work is rehashed writing of well-known events.

Those of us who've read any WWII history know what happened during Operation Cobra, in the Huertgen Forest, the Ardennes and when "the camps" were liberated. There's simply very little new or enlightening material here. When I finished the book I asked myself what I had learned and, other than a couple of anecdotes that I found interesting, the answer was nothing. The subjects the author addresses are summed up in "chapters" (more like short essays) that span maybe 1 1/2 to 3 pages.

If Fussell had gone into more detail (more than his previous books) about his own experiences, further light would have been shed on the American infantry's experience in Northwest Europe in 1944-45. An example of this is "Sixty Days in Combat" by Dean Joy. As a slightly bitter former ASTP student/soldier, who's time at the Univ. of Idaho was cut short by cancellation and consignment to an infantry division, Dean's account gives an excellent picture of what it was like in a green unit during the last three months of the war.

To make matters worse, the book quotes liberally from far more touching, shocking and true-to-life memoirs, specifically "The Medic" by Leo Litwak and "Before Their Time" by Robert Kotlowitz. The latter is probably the finest account I've ever read by a WWII infantryman in the European Theater. His story epitomizes everything Fussell is trying to say so you'd be better off just reading Kotlowitz's book.

Fussell's main point in "The Boys' Crusade" seems to be that the "boys" of America didn't deserve what happened to them in WWII. He frequently refers to "boys" and "youth" and even cherry-picks a photo of a highlighted baby-faced soldier to use on the cover of his book (which may have been solely the publisher's action). When one looks closer at this well-known Normandy invasion photo, however, it is revealed that the GIs surrounding the boy look plenty old enough to be in the infantry, appearing to me to be well into their 20s and maybe even early 30s. I bring this up because, despite Fussell's assertion, the average age of the Army's GI in WWII (including frontline troops) was 25, in stark contrast to the Marines' average of 19. I know of one citizen, married with kids, who was drafted and ended up in combat at the age of 43!

I do agree with and welcome Fussell's thesis that by 1944-45 the US Army should have gotten a lot more right. They'd had a couple of years of combat experience to practice. There was no excuse, for example, for Bradley opting to ship bullets and not winter clothes to the troops just in case the popular assertion that "the war would be over by Christmas" didn't pan out. I also like to see some sober reality injected into the current genre of flag waving WWII nostalgia and don't fault the author for that.

His exercise in "Boys' Crusade," however, could have been summed up with an essay published in a history magazine. I hate to be so disparaging of this well-known and admired professor but I found the price charged and the skimpy volume of this rehashed history a rip-off.