DDay Through French Eyes, Mary Louise Roberts
DDay Through French Eyes, Mary Louise Roberts
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

D-Day Through French Eyes
Normandy 1944

Author: Mary Louise Roberts

Narrator: Nancy Peterson

Unabridged: 7 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/31/2022


Synopsis

Silent parachutes dotting the night sky—that's how one Normandy woman learned that the D-Day invasion was under way in June of 1944. Though they yearned for liberation, the French had to steel themselves for war, knowing that their homes, lands, and fellow citizens would have to bear the brunt of the attack.

With D-Day through French Eyes, Mary Louise Roberts turns the conventional narrative of D-Day on its head, taking listeners across the Channel to view the invasion anew. Roberts builds her history from an impressive range of gripping first-person accounts by French citizens throughout the region. A farm family notices that cabbage is missing from their garden—then discovers that the guilty culprits are American paratroopers hiding in the cowshed. Fishermen rescue pilots from the wreck of their B-17, then search for clothes big enough to disguise them as civilians. A young man learns to determine whether a bomb is whistling overhead or silently plummeting toward them. When the allied infantry arrived, French citizens guided them to hidden paths and little-known bridges, giving them crucial advantages over the German occupiers. As she did in her acclaimed account of GIs in postwar France, What Soldiers Do, Roberts here sheds vital new light on a story we thought we knew.

About Mary Louise Roberts

Mary Louise Roberts is the WARF Distinguished Lucie Aubrac Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also the Charles Boal Ewing Chair in Military History at the United States Military Academy at West Point for the 2020-21 academic year. Her books include What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France and D-Day through French Eyes: Normandy 1944.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Polly on August 16, 2022

an unusual perspective So interesting to hear from the memoirs of those who experienced the process of the Allied invasion at Normandy. After being occupied for 4 years by Nazi Germany, the France had such visions of rescue by the Allies, not anticipating what it would require of them. Never expectin......more

Goodreads review by Halecki on November 30, 2022

Interesting. It explores something I never thought about This was an interesting topic. I suppose, in my mind, I knew X-Ray had to suck for the civilians. Duh!! This book describes exactly how sucky it was. With background information interspersed with personal stories, I think the book did an excellen......more

Goodreads review by Steve Watne on July 10, 2023

Pretty good… Well arranged accounts from Norman writers’ firsthand accounts of the landings and days/weeks that followed. As one may expect, there’s a fair amount of repetition in the entries, but overall an excellent sense is given of what these inhabitants must have gone through and how they felt a......more

Goodreads review by Linda on February 03, 2023

e-book - In preparation for an upcoming trip to Normandy, I thought this would be an interesting perspective - and it didn't disappoint! One thinks of the joy of liberation on June 6, 1944 but there was also much loss (human & property) and destruction to achieve that. This puts that into the equati......more

Goodreads review by Brook on July 24, 2019

Informative and insightful. I read this for a study abroad class in France and it made the war much more personal. The fear the French must have felt and the bravery many of them exhibited is truly praiseworthy. This is a quick and easy read and would recommend for research projects as well as pleas......more