Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 to May 7, 1945 Review

One of the sad things about the public education system is that, for most students anyway, American history courses tend to be so dry and so unevenly taught that it is boring and hard to relate to.

In high school, and later in college, I realized that there are just two types of history teacher - the creative ones who are passionate about the topic and pass on that passion through innovative teaching methods, and the "read the textbook chapters X-Y for a test on Tuesday" types who can put even the worst insomniacs to sleep with their in-class lectures.

I ought to know, because I had teachers from both categories, and unfortunatelly the boring ones outnumbered the creative ones at a ratio of 2:1.

Luckily, I've always been an independent learner, and because World War II held a strange fascination for me even before I was in high school or college, I have been reading books such as Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day, John Toland's The Last 100 Days and Stephen E. Ambrose's D-Day June 6, 1944; The Climactic Battle of World War II since I was just a tyke. 

If not for this self-motivated interest, I really believe I'd be one of those Americans who believe - honestly - that the U.S. fought on the German side against the Soviet Union during World War II.

Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 to May 7, 1945

Readers of Stephen E. Ambrose's D-Day might want to look upon Citizen Soldiers as a continuation of the earlier book, considering that it takes up the narrative on June 7, 1944  (D+1) and follows the progress of the Allied advance from the invasion beaches into the hedgerows of Normandy's "bocage" country, where the experienced German defenders made use of the ancient earth-and-hedges -- which were taller than those quaint English hedgerows which could easily be jumped over on horseback -- as natural fortifications.

Ambrose explains to the reader that there "were, on average, fourteen hedgerows to the kilometer in Normandy. The enervating, costly process of gearing up for an attack, making the attack, carrying the attack home, mopping up after the attack, took half a day...All through the Cotentin Peninsula, from June 7 on, GIs labored at the task. They heaved and pushed and punched and died doing it, for two hedgerows a day." It was a tactical situation that the U.S. First Army had failed to anticipate, having formulated a doctrine of fast armored/infantry advances in the open but "not produced anything approaching a doctrine for offensive action in the hedgerows...In peacetime, the Army would have dealt with the problem by setting up commissions and boards, experimenting in maneuvers, testing ideas, before establishing a doctrine. But in Normandy time was a luxury the Army didn't have. So as the infantry lurched forward in the Cotentin, following frontal assaults into the enemy's kill zones, the tankers began experimenting with ways to utilize their weapons in the hedgerows."

A professor of history as well as the official biographer of both Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, Ambrose is very good at explaining the Big Picture and gives credit not only to the American GIs but also to the Germans they fought against. Some German weapons, such as the panzerfaust antitank rocket launcher and the 88 mm dual-use cannon, were superior to their American counterparts.

In tanks, too, the Germans had vehicles that had better protection and better armament than the M-4 Sherman, the mainstay medium tank of the Allied forces. But in addition to numerical superiority, the "Shermans had other advantages. They used less than half the gasoline of the larger tanks. They were faster and more maneuverable, with double and more the range." For once the American forces broke out of the bocage with the success of Operation Cobra in July of 1944, their greater mobility, backed by the unprecedented productivity of American industry, became the decisive factor in the stunning and speedy Battle for France and the ensuing advance to Germany's border.

Ambrose's book examines the effects of not having decent ports in Allied hands (the Anglo-American armies had to stall their pell-mell dash to the West Wall and the Rhine when their supply lines became dangerously overstretched), the daily lives of the soldiers both at the front and behind the lines (Ambrose deplores the "repple-depple" system of assigning replacements), the contributions of other branches of the Army (the Army Air Force, the Medical Corps), and discusses not only such famous engagements as Operation Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge, but also the seldom-remembered Hurtgen and Metz campaigns.

Ambrose is also fair-minded and clear-eyed as a historian. While his admiration for the citizen soldiers is palpable, he doesn't hesitate to uncover the dark side and shortcomings of the American Army.

 In a 20-page chapter fittingly titled "Jerks, Sad Sacks, Profiteers, and Jim Crow," Ambrose starts by saying that most of the GIs did their jobs well and acquitted themselves honorably. "But," he adds, "the Army was so big...and put together so quickly, that thousands of sharp operators and sad sacks, criminals and misfits, and some cowards made it through the training process and became soldiers in the (European Theater of Operations). Some were junior officers in infantry divisions and the price for their incompetence was casualties. More were rear-echelon soldiers, completely free of a sense of 'we,' who in one way or another took advantage of the opportunities offered by the war."

Ambrose meshes explanations of strategy (the broad front Eisenhower insisted on vs. the narrow front preferred not only by British Field Marshal B. L. Montgomery and even some American commanders) with detailed descriptions of the ordinary "ground pounders" who fought from the beaches of Normandy all the way to the Elbe River in Germany. Although primarily focusing on American veterans and their experiences, the German perspective is more palpable in Citizen Soldiers than in D-Day, Band of Brothers, or The Wild Blue, Ambrose's 2001 book about the pilots and crews of the B-24s that bombed the Third Reich.

My Viewpoint:  No book or writer is perfect, and Citizen Soldiers has a few errors that I wish Ambrose had been able to fix before his death in late 2002. Although the maps are pretty good and easy to read, more would have been nice to have, particularly a more detailed map of the Market Garden operation and a few more on the Ardennes battle (a.k.a. the Battle of the Bulge). Also, Ambrose at times confuses the honorific "Volksgrenadier" title given to new or reconstituted divisions raised by Germany in the fall of 1944 and the "Volkssturm" or Home Guard, which were essentially civilians hastily trained and given rifles, machine guns, and panzerfaust launchers to fight against the Allies on both the Western and Eastern fronts.

Readers should also take into consideration that though Ambrose was one of the persons who made World War II history relevant to the average American with his very accessible books about the war and the men who fought it, he did pass away with a cloud of controversy over his head. 

Some historians and veterans' groups have questioned the accuracy of Ambrose's books, particularly those that criticize the pilots who carried U.S. airborne units into battle, and some critics were accusing Ambrose of outright plagiarism because he allegedly used other writers' materials without proper citations.