The Boys' Crusade: American G.I.s in Europe: Chaos and Fear in World War Two (UNIVERSAL HISTORY) - Tapa dura

This is a former warrior's haunting meditation on the terrible, yet often necessary, destructiveness of war. Written with passion and fidelity, The Boys' Crusade is a book that will not leave you after you have put it down. If there is a more powerful personal account of the ground war in Western Europe I have yet to encounter it. (Donald Miller, author of The Story of World War II)

No one writes about war with greater authenticity and eloquence than Paul Fussell. The Boys' Crusade is an extraordinarily powerful account that is at once poignant and searing. It is truth-telling of a very high order. (Rick Atkinson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize)

A remarkable and timely reminder that those Americans who fought for our freedom were adolescent 'boys' rather than automata in helmets. Fussell's extraordiary book is one of the most honest and powerful accounts of the Second World War I have read. (Michael Burleigh, author of THE THIRD REICH)

There will be few more powerful or disturbing books published this year than this examination of the true face of war. (LITERARY REVIEW)

This is... a powerful book that leaves the reader thinking not only about the horrors of the second world war but also about the curious relationship of the Americans to the rest of the world, about their boundless generosity and willingness to help others "sort things out", and their equally limitless compulsion to make a bloody mess of things. (THE SUNDAY TIMES)

Few writers have done more to deconstruct the heroic myths of western warfare in the 20th century than Paul Fussell... The book is an antidote to the anniversary fever that has attended memories of D-Day 60 years on... His strident rejection of the anniversary version of the US army's role in the conflict is spoken in the articulate voice of one who went through the real thing... moving and often bitter vignettes... both indignant and humane... (Richard Overy NEW STATESMAN)

... revelatory... Military romanticists - and they are legion, though they often deny it - will find Fussell's grave and powerful judgments impossible to refute. (William Boyd TLS)

There is always a place for debunking notions of glamour and heroism in war, and Fussell brings some fascinating insights. (Gary Sheffield TLS)

This book is a brilliant antidote to the military romanticism of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN or BAND OF BROTHERS. Part memoir, part history, it presents a series of episodes from the arrival of American troops in Britain through to the discovery of the concentration camps in early 1945. The experience of these young (often very young) soldiers was not always unpleasant - he explains why the `boys' were so popular with British women (better paid, better dressed, better washed) - but especially after D-Day it usually was. The American Army was involved in 1944-45 in some of the most ferocious fighting of the war, for which it was totally unprepared militarily or psychologically. But after the discovery of the concentration camps, the American soldier no longer had any difficulty in hating the Germans and came to see the war as the Crusade that Eisenhower had believed in from the start.