June 6, 1944 and Operation Overlord is in full swing. A group of US soldiers find themselves unfortunately displaced 15 miles away from their drop zone, deep behind enemy lines. Luckily they find allies in the local French village of Graignes as they dig in and prepare to resist the oncoming German force. They have six days…
Robert Venditti, Kevin Maurer and Andrea Mutti’s book is subtitled “the incredible story of D-Day’s lost chapter” – but I’m not sure what about this story is incredible? It starts promisingly – the failed drop, regrouping, preparing for the war to reach them – and then it ends so anticlimactically. I kept expecting that “incredible” aspect to appear and it never did. I don’t know if spoilers apply to this book given that it’s real history but a bunch of US soldiers and French civilians are killed by the Germans and the village is burned down… that’s it.
It’d be like if in Saving Private Ryan, shortly after the storming of the Normandy beaches, Tim Honks and co. tried to take out the machine gun nest, got mown down, and the movie ended. You’d be left wondering – what, that’s the movie? I expected so much more!
I’m not sure what the importance of the story was or what we’re meant to take away from it. I mean, it’s sad and tragic but that was WW2 all over – it sucked. There were a thousand stories just like this happening all across France post-D-Day. Graignes got burned down but so did other, larger towns that resisted the Nazis. One of the most horrendous as an example: in the wake of Operation Anthropoid, when a high ranking Nazi official, Heydrich, got assassinated in Prague, the Nazis killed thousands of civilians and wiped out the towns of Lidice and Lezaky in retribution.
American soldiers and French civilians worked together for six days – ok, and? If this was meant to be a tale of doomed camaraderie, you don’t really get a strong sense of it here. The significance of “six days” was totally lost on me. Once the fighting started, it was really hard to tell which side was which as everyone looked the same.
I couldn’t tell you one character’s name as none of them stood out – they were all simply archetypical American GIs/French civilians from this era. That’s why that ending has zero impact on me – it’s just some random GI writing a letter to another random American mother who lost another random son to the war. We never got to know any of the characters enough to care.
It’s set up well and takes you to that time but it’s not hard for me to see why this episode of the war is largely unknown. No clue what we’re meant to take away from the book beyond the usual “war is hell” thang. If you’re after some absolutely incredible WW2 comics, I highly recommend Garth Ennis’ War Stories and Battlefields series instead.
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