D-Day Tourism and Covering Up History

I was already plenty aware that a lot of the myths Americans like to tell themselves about World War II and how great our soldiers were in freeing Europe were full of it.

For one thing, historians now know that American soldiers engaged in a gigantic rape fest across France that was not equal to what the Russians did in Germany, but wasn’t as far off as we’d like to think. Basically, American soldiers already thought of France as a land of loose women and they couldn’t wait to get their taste and weren’t too interested in asking the women what they thought about it. And I assume this probably includes my relatives as well as yours, there’s no reason to think it was the “other people” when it was probably your people too.

What I was not aware of was the sheer number of unnecessary dead French after D-Day due to the kind of unsuccessful carpet bombing campaigns that marked the end of the war, killing far more civilians than enemy soldiers. I consulted with Farley about this and he said it is known in his circles, which makes sense, but as someone who isn’t a military historian and who also doesn’t teach the World War II class, I’m not surprised that I wouldn’t know.

What I really wasn’t aware was that talking about this in France was effectively not allowed until recently because American tourists who wanted a pure “we are the heroes” narrative and thus came to Normandy in huge numbers to engage in that belief became a huge part of the postwar French economy and no one wanted to upset that apple cart. There’s a really excellent piece about this in the New York Review of Books. Here’s a couple of excerpts.

This June 6 world leaders, thousands of tourists, and some families of liberating troops will gather for the eightieth anniversary of D-Day. It will be either the last major commemoration attended by veterans of the war or the first without any. But few will know the darkest part of D-Day’s story: the slaughter of French civilians by a British and American carpet-bombing campaign considered by historians and even some of its commanders to have been of little or no military purpose.

During the three months that followed D-Day, nearly 18,000 French civilians were killed by British and American bombers—nearly two fifths of at least 51,380 killed by Allied bombing during the war. That is low compared with the 420,000 Germans estimated to have been killed by Allied bombs, but roughly equivalent to the 60,000 British civilians killed in the Blitz. (The same number of Italian civilians were also killed by Allied bombing, two thirds of them after the armistice was signed in September 1943.)

Yet while the Blitz is a cult in British historical memory, these French victims of Allied bombs were almost invisible for five decades after D-Day and have occupied a marginalized corner of the war’s history in the years since. They are absent not only from official British and American accounts but from French ones, too—it was considered ungrateful to offend the liberators, and the Norman economy is significantly reliant on D-Day tourism. Visitors come to hear about victory, not a massacre of innocents by their own air forces.

…..

French presidential silence on the bombing was baffling, starting with that of Charles de Gaulle. “His memoirs give an idea of how damaged France was, but none that the British and Americans did it. To my knowledge, he never protested,” says Knapp. “De Gaulle never came to the D-Day beaches or commemorations,” says Stéphane Grimaldi, the director of the Caen Memorial, “or paid tribute to his compatriots killed by bombing.”

Finally, in 2014, at Grimaldi’s urging, President François Hollande referred to civilian casualties in his speech commemorating the seventieth anniversary of D-Day. President Emmanuel Macron is expected to pay tribute to the dead in a speech this year at Saint-Lô, though reportedly not at the beach commemorations. But when the rhetoric resounds this June 6, how many speakers will echo the words of Jean Quellien?

Hundreds of men, women and children never got to see the end of that historic day; which dawned in hope, and ended in consternation and tears. In total, raids by the US Air Force left a thousand dead and very many wounded. Aerial photographs reported in Britain showed the destruction—but it was judged insufficient. They had to do it again!… The combined bombardments of the June 6 and night of June 6–7 cost the lives of about three thousand civilians.

No American or British leader has ever made reference, let alone paid homage, to the French dead on any public occasion.

“When the D-Day industry began during the 1950s,” said Passera,

“no one talked about people killed by the Allies, or the lives of survivors…. The idea of D-Day commemoration was pilgrimage: at first families and veterans came, rightly, to visit their dead in the cemeteries. And after them came the tourist business. The local population was thus obliged to transfer its duty of memory to the fallen British and Americans, and thereby to the British and American people…. The survivors had a different history—a victim history that was not glorious, and that challenged the economic opportunities of victory…. Resentment built up. It became a conversation around the kitchen table. Until the early 1980s, when retired students at the Inter-Age University said: “Enough—we want the dead counted, and our story told.””no one talked about people killed by the Allies, or the lives of survivors…. The idea of D-Day commemoration was pilgrimage: at first families and veterans came, rightly, to visit their dead in the cemeteries. And after them came the tourist business. The local population was thus obliged to transfer its duty of memory to the fallen British and Americans, and thereby to the British and American people…. The survivors had a different history—a victim history that was not glorious, and that challenged the economic opportunities of victory…. Resentment built up. It became a conversation around the kitchen table. Until the early 1980s, when retired students at the Inter-Age University said: “Enough—we want the dead counted, and our story told.”

This all seems pretty reasonable to me. I am really curious why anyone would resist this story being told, in any of the involved countries. I do recognize that Americans don’t like to complicate stories about their own awesomeness and I also recognize that even issues such as aerials bombings get controversial because people just really want to believe in their effectiveness.

Me, I want stories told that reflect the complexity of the time and whether that is rape or massacre of the French by American and British bombers, it doesn’t take away from the fact that it was good to defeat the Nazis.