The boys' crusade - Paul Fussell

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.