Brilliant piece by Irish writer Kevin Myers in the Sunday Telegraph here.
Commenting on this piece, another friend (an Irishman) sent me the following
thoughts:
“The official version of the Normandy campaign was never keen on dwelling on
the misbehaviour of allied troops, (quite a lot of local women were raped)
or the appalling civilian casualties, most of which were completely
unnecessary. I used to go on hols quite regularly to Normandy, and got the
definite impression that the Brits and Americans were not terribly popular
there, largely due to the numbers of people that the allies managed to kill
in 1944. I am sure you know about Douglas-Hume’s court martial, and the
destruction of Le Havre: the frogs’ widely held theory was that it was
deliberately destroyed so as to remove a potential rival to Southampton for
the transatlantic trade: but that’s the French for you. I was in a town
called (I think) Eu, which was virtually erased, with massive civilian dead
on the night of June 5th 1944 by heavy bombers, in the mistaken belief that
there were SS tanks stationed there.
“Have you read Max Hastings ‘Overlord’? He made the point that many of the
British squaddies were veterans of the 1940 debacle, and probably disliked
the French far more than they disliked the Germans. There were several
incidents when Norman civilians who came out to strip dead bodies of their
watches, wallets etc were unceremoniously put up against a wall and shot by
NCOs.
“The late Alan Clark was quite good in his book also. He made the obvious
(but still controversial) point that, wherever the German Army met the
Anglo-American forces in anything like equal numbers, they wiped the floor
with them. You have to hand it to the Krauts: they were beaten by superior
numbers in the end.
“Hastings also makes the point that the French peasantry had to a large
extent reached a modus vivendi with the Germans: the regular soldiers were
actually not that unpopular in many districts. The resistance was largely a
myth in many areas, and as they were frequently Communist dominated, not
always wildly popular where they did operate. I read an amazing statistic
recently that there were 250,000 babies born to French women from German
soldiers in 1940-1944: by now there must be about a million French people
descended from such liaisons. I remember a holiday I spent in Normandy once
when I commented to an aged rustic local about all the tall, strapping blond
blue eyed kids in the local village school: I said that this showed the
Normans’ Viking blood: he replied rather cynically that there had been a
German barracks up the road during the war.”