D-Day Through French Eyes

Normandy 1944

By: Mary Louise Roberts

Narrated by: Nancy Peterson

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.

©2014 The University of Chicago (P)2022 Tantor

The sensitivity to cultural differences

Sometimes, the author's writing is not as evocative as the various source material. The story gently loves the various personalities who share their wartime experiences. I learned a lot more than military history. I learned of the devastation of the countryside by Allied bombs caused great hardship, yet the French seemed to believe that was the price of freedom