Fighting and Dying in Normandy

The GIs and the experience of combat — From death to memory, Normandy 1944. Who has never tried to enter the minds of the GIs plunged into the hell of the Battle of Normandy during the summer of 1944? For the first time, a work derived from a doctoral thesis finally sheds light on the combat behaviour of American Army soldiers, a subject too often neglected in favour of purely military history.

These pages address combat as experienced at ground level, as well as the violence of war in all its horror and complexity. With a fresh and singular perspective, this work revisits the fate of some 33,463 American soldiers, sailors, coastguardsmen and airmen who perished on the Norman beaches and in the Norman orchards. It dwells in particular on the thousand and one ways of dying on the battlefield and on the creation of the provisional military cemeteries that subsequently gave way to two American national necropolises established in Normandy.

In the era of commemorations, the casualties of the American Army have been and remain the subjects of an unconditional collective cult and tribute. Yet one cannot fail to note that these far-from-ordinary dead have been the object of an instrumentalisation whose contours are here meticulously analysed.