Anyone familiar with the war-related films made by the U.S. government during World War II–all of which are in the public domain and can be seen from time to time on TCM and the Documentary Channel–knows that the best of them are priceless cultural time capsules. In recent weeks I’ve watched “Resisting Enemy Interrogation,” “With the Marines at Tarawa,” the first part of Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight” and John Huston’s “The Battle of San Pietro” and “Let There Be Light.” I found them all to be both immensely interesting and (if this is the right way to put it) hugely entertaining. Thus I made a special point of requesting a review copy of Instructions for American Servicemen in France During World War II (University of Chicago, 72 pp., $12), a hard-bound facsimile edition of the pocket guide that was distributed to every American soldier in England just prior to D-Day. It is, like the training films those soldiers watched, a powerfully evocative souvenir of an America that no longer exists save in the deeply etched memories of the gray-headed men who long ago risked their lives to save the West.
A Pocket Guide to France (to call the book by its original title) is a concise, clearly written manual that crackles with no-nonsense idealism from the first page onward:
You are about to play a personal part in pushing the Germans out of France. Whatever part you take–rifleman, hospital orderly, mechanic, pilot, clerk, gunner, truck driver–you will be an essential factor in a great effort . . . The Allies are going to open up conquered France, re-establish the old Allied liberties and destroy the Nazi regime everywhere. Hitler asked for it.
Note the utter straightforwardness of that introduction. No moral relativism, no postmodern irony, no doubts of any kind whatsoever: World War II was worth fighting, period.
No less bracing is the Pocket Guide‘s equally unequivocal assertion that “the French have what might be called a national character. . . . To them property represents the result of work. To destroy property means to belittle work.” Contemporary readers will doubtless smile at such simplifications, but I was struck by how deftly the anonymous author sketched the bourgeois virtues of prewar France:
If you are billeted with a French family, you will be in a more personal relation than if you were in barracks or a hotel. Remember that the man of the house may be a prisoner of the Nazis, along with a million and one half others like him. Treat the women in the house the way you want the women of your family treated by other men while you’re away….A whole French family would spend less on pleasure in a month than you would over a week-end. The French reputation for gayety was principally built on the civilized French way of doing things; by the French people’s good taste; by their interest in quality, not quantity; and by the lively energy of their minds. The French are intelligent, have mostly had a sensible education, without frills, are industrious, shrewd and frugal.
No doubt there were plenty of “ugly Americans” then, just as there are today, but any soldier who read A Pocket Guide to France and took it to heart would have come away with a realistic respect for the country he was fighting to liberate.
To be sure, one inevitably wonders in retrospect just how realistic it was. The Pocket Guide, as it happens, has strikingly little to say about the French collabos. That was the way we did things in World War II: allies were allies, enemies enemies. Perhaps it was naïve of us to think that way, but a world in which naïveté is no longer possible is one in which it is not very pleasant to live. Small wonder that Americans of my generation (I was born in 1956) continue to idealize the generation that brought us into the world. Our parents, after all, were capable of writing books like “A Pocket Guide to France”–and acting on them.