After D-Day

After D-Day" fits into a growing but still small body of works that examine the Allied liberators of France. This study focuses especially on what the French experience of the U. S. military was both during the liberation and shortly afterward. It complements Fuller's The Struggle for Cooperation, Liberated France and the American Military (2018), which examines the French government's interaction with the Allies during the same period. Using research in French and American archives, as well as dozens of memoirs, diaries, letters, and newspapers, Robert Fuller follows French and American interactions as their forced contact expanded, starting in the skies over France in 1942 and ending with the liberation of Alsace in 1945. With prose designed to appeal to general readers as well as specialists, Fuller examines French life in war zones, where living under constant shelling offered miserable experiences for those forced to endure it. The French stoically withstood those horrendous travails-sometimes inflicted by the Americans-when they understood the purposes and saw their sacrifices as the price of liberation and victory over Germany. As Fuller shows, when the French did not believe afflictions brought by the Americans advanced the cause of success, their tolerance waned, sometimes dramatically. Like other scholars, he suggests that the Allied bombing of France was an important yet too often overlooked chapter of the Second World War, one that inflicted more death and destruction than the ground war still to come. That campaign, which began with the Allied invasion of Normandy, was successful only because of the enormous violence it unleashed; violence that killed, injured, and rendered homeless tens of thousands of French civilians. Fuller includes a close look at French and American records of the fate of civilians in the principal battle zones, Normandy and Lorraine, as well as overlooked liberated regions, such as Orlâeanais and Champagne, that largely escaped widespread damage and casualties. Despite French gratitude toward the Americans for their liberation, relations began to cool in the fall and winter of 1944 as progress on the battlefield first slowed and then appeared to reverse with the German offensive in the Ardennes. Revealing in stark detail the experiences of French civilians with the American military, "After D-Day" presents a compelling coda to our understanding of the Allied conquest of German-occupied France"--