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The War Complex

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

Prologue: After 9/11........................................................................................ixINTRODUCTION ? Hiding in Plain Sight...................................................................1ONE ? D-Day............................................................................................21TWO ? Eichmann's Ghost.................................................................................45THREE ? Citizens of the Holocaust: The Vernacular of Growing Up after World War II.....................71FOUR ? Unexploded Bombs................................................................................95FIVE ? "They are ever returning to us, the dead": The Novels of W. G. Sebald...........................115CONCLUSION ? Toward an Ethics of Identification........................................................133Afterword...................................................................................................147Notes.......................................................................................................149Index.......................................................................................................195Illustrations follow page...................................................................................195

Chapter One

On the Beach

On the beaches today, there 's not much to see in a material sense: a few rotted and deserted landing craft; intermittent monuments where groups stop to read inscriptions; a small museum and remnants of portable harbors; a few surviving German bunkers, and (at Pointe du Hoc) huge, moonlike craters made by the Allied bombardment. Random picnickers, children at play, a few surfers. Dramatic sky, with roiling clouds against the blue bluster, and intermittent showers, even in July.

But it would be wrong, finally, to say that there is nothing to see on the beaches. The sky testifies to the invasion's risks, since weather in such a climate might quickly change. The small groups include families sharing information with children or teens—a generational chain into the future. Most of all, from Sainte-Mère-Èglise and Utah Beach in the west to Cabourg in the east, the full front of the invasion measures some fifty miles—and the visual impression of distance is impressive in itself.

At Omaha, the bloodiest beach by far, the one the Americans spent all day on, I walked down to the water and then considered the view toward the land. At Colleville-sur-Mer, one would have found a shingle of stones soldiers reached for protection, now a slightly vertical row. One would have seen roads from the beach, which would probably have formed special targets for attack and defense. One would have seen a bluff, now green and peaceful, with other tourists looking down on the beaches while I looked up at them. GIs and Germans would have been in the same visual proximity. Distant. But still discernible as tall or short—much like singers in an opera, seen from the upper balcony.

But what really counts in Normandy is the symbolism of the place, the way that this sand, these beaches, have become a synecdoche for the Allied victory, for the triumph of democracy over totalitarianism, and, once the Nazi camps had been breached and opened, for the defeat of a system of evil that shocked the world. In 1984, President Reagan used the site to invite the Soviets, his former "evil empire," back into the circle of Allies; in 2004, President Bush used the site to shore-up a sagging Atlantic Alliance. When it comes to Normandy, the symbolism is enormous; and, for American presidents, there is truly something about D-Day.

Like its entry into World War I, the U.S. entrance into land combat in Western Europe came very late. Americans had fought for years in the Pacific and had already landed in Italy, capturing Rome at roughly the same time as Operation Overlord; they would fight in Europe for almost a year after D-Day, including the very difficult and costly Battle of the Bulge. Still, D-Day has come to represent the United States' most significant land presence in the Nazi war. After 1945, it came to justify the triumph of American wealth and power and to naturalize the story of American triumphalism, which leads strongly from 1945 to the present.

Some facts, found in almost every history of the war: the Germans expected the invasion at Calais, the shortest distance across the English Channel and a harbor able to receive the supplies and reinforcements any invasion force would need. Because surprise was key to success in Normandy, the Allies surrounded their plans with substantial secrecy. They staged fake build-ups in the south of England to support the idea that the invasion would come at Calais; having broken Nazi codes, they sent false messages intended to be intercepted and to mislead. They built two manmade harbors called mulberries over an extended period of time, breaking them into parts and submerging them underwater so that they wouldn't be seen by German aircraft before they were surfaced, towed after the invasion fleet, and quickly reassembled. Operation Overload had a complicated plan that depended on secrecy and on all components working well. It also depended on tides and weather.

The original date, June 4, 1944, had to be postponed. Continuing bad weather lulled the Germans into thinking no invasion could come in early June when the tides otherwise favored one. Eisenhower cast a roll of the dice when he decided to launch the invasion on June 6 since the next window of opportunity, two weeks later, might have given the Germans time to break the secrecy so important to the Allied plan. He wrote a short, frank letter taking full responsibility if the invasion failed.

With 5,000 ships, the invasion fleet was the largest ever launched and left England slightly after midnight on June 6; landings began around dawn and continued through the day. As anticipated, some of the landings were relatively easy, while others were brutally hard. On Sword and Juno beaches, where the British and Canadians landed, casualties proved light, less than 1 percent of those landed. On Utah beach, successful bombardments also eased resistance, resulting in what John Keegan calls "little loss" there as well (Second World War, 386). Cloud cover misled pilots over Omaha Beach, so that the Americans who landed there not only found the fiercest resistance, they also found the least protective cover. Descriptions stress how, at Omaha, the Americans were "visitors to Hell."

Already, the familiar story of the invasion tells only part of the truth. Contemporary sources like the New York Times and Life covered the story in detail both in advance of the much-anticipated invasion and afterward—how could they not? But the coverage differs from what many today would expect. Pitched in cultural memory as a matter of a single day, of winning or losing the war, the invasion on June 6, 1944, formed only one of a plethora of important military stories albeit, in early June, the newest one and first among equals. The headline of the extra edition of the New York Times for that day reads "Allied Armies Land in France in the Havre-Cherbourg Area; Great Invasion Is Under Way." It showed an accurate map, though the full...