What I Watched: The fourteenth episode of Crusade in Europe, a documentary series adapted from Dwight Eisenhower’s book of the same name. The adaptation was done by Fred Feldkamp, and narrated by Westbrook van Voorhes and Maurice Joyce. This episode aired at 9:00 PM on ABC on August 4, 1949, and is available on DVD and Amazon Prime.
What Happened: Eisenhower “has to endure” the wait between deciding to go ahead with the landing and the execution of the plan. Man, he really has it tough. Thousands of men and ships get loaded onto ships in preparation for “the greatest military gamble in history.”
Bombers continue to attack the French infrastructure, isolating the coast. ON the morning of D-Day, paratroopers land behind the lines, capturing small towns and assessing German strength. Meanwhile, the giant naval attack force crosses the channel without opposition from air or sea.
The Germans, caught unawares, finally realize that something is up and begin defending the coast. Our old friend the American G. I. takes centre stage, as the infantry sets up to storm the beaches. Feldkamp gets really exited, intoning about how victory in the war hung in the balance.
American forces struggle to gain control of Omaha Beach. Casualties are heavy, and the weather conditions difficult. By the afternoon, however, American artillery guns had made it onto the beaches, making it more of an even fight. At that time, most of the beaches had been taken, with the Allies moving inland to solidify their grasp on the territory. There are obstacles, however: a forest of mines, and what Eisenhower describes as “formidable hedgerows.”
The day after D-Day, Eisenhower finally gets to leave his cave and tour the scene of the invasions. With the beaches taken, the Allies ship tons of supplies to them, preparing for a long slog of a campaign for France, and fearing the kind of trench warfare that dominated World War I. The immediate target was the capture for the French city of Cherbourg.
What I Thought: I spend a lot of time writing about the narrative of these episodes, but in a sense focusing on that really sells the series short. The chief pleasure to be found in Crusade in Europe is the carefully-pruned newsreel footage, presenting some of the most striking and intimate film shot during the war. One marvels at seeing the backs of GIs as they begin to storm the beaches, with the German barricades in sight, or the cascade of bombs falling on France, looking like little tadpoles wavering in the wind.
One also begins to realize how thoroughly media-saturated the war was. This is the power of
film, and by extension television, has: it can put us in the position of a bomber, or an infantryman, and in a few seconds make us feel a sudden burst of sympathy with these men from long ago. No doubt it was that power of sympathy which the military’s propaganda wing sought to exploit: by visually putting the viewer in the position of the soldier, they could maintain the empathetic connection between military and civilian spheres needed for total war.
But enough about that. What about D-Day? This was the headline event of the war, and hence appears naturally at almost the halfway point of the series. D-Day has since been endlessly mythologized by everything from Saving Private Ryan to Call of Duty. The aquatic invasion has a grip on our imagination for reasons both obvious and not.
On the obvious side, D-Day signalld the start of the decisive stage of the Western front. Normandy was as much German territory as Italy, but it had entirely different connotations. By taking territory in France, the Allies were finally undoing the shocking invasion that had started the war. It was an attack launched directly from England, the Allied stalwart, instead of the round-about approach of the Mediterranean campaign. And it was, of curse, a huge undertaking that had a big impact on the future course of the war, one of the most uncomplicated victories in American history.
There are other symbolic resonances. America, whose memory of being a colony was distant but much-mythologized, had now reversed the flow of history and was occupying territory in a former colonial power. All of the cultural associations built up to justify American expansion, both into the West and through taking of its own territory, were triggered again. This was a type of conquest with all the excitement of the West and none of its vague sense of guilt.
I wonder if there isn’t also a psychosexual appeal to D-Day — the incursion onto the yonic symbol of the beach, the triumphant masculine vigour of the GI, the bulging and round ring of American territory, the gigantism of the whole operation. It gives men of a certain age great pleasure to think about. Of course, military manouevres are (mostly) not done for symbolic reasons, and certainly not for Freudian ones. But triumphant memories of violence are inevitably caught up in our cultural sense of the erotic.
In this episode, the D-Day legend is not yet certain. Feldkamp feels a need to keep re-enforcing the scope of the battle, and the importance of its result. There’s almost a sense of anti-climax when the beaches fall within only a day. But of course, there is always a next battle, always more territory to conquer. And so we move on to the next installment, called “Beachhead and Breakthrough.” Maybe I was onto something with the Freudian angle.
Coming up next: Crusade comes right back with the follow-up to D-Day.
The Eternal Couch Potato 