French Deathtoll During the Normandy Campaign: Something We Are Not Being Told?
I was reading the paper about the civilian loss during the War of Iraq and the author commented that eighteen thousand Frenchmen died during the Battle of Normandy. That is NOT including the assault on Paris or the subsequent campaigns.
I searched this claim on wikipedia and google and apparently it is true. I'm quite shocked. How could 18,000 Frenchmen be killed in ''bombing campaigns'', when almost all the German soldiers were located on the Atlantic Wall?
Unfortunately such ''revision'' of mine would not be tolerated (even today), because it would look sympathetic to the German cause. Much like there isn't a whole lot of books about the Dresden bombings.
If you've read the accounts of German soldiers, there wasn't much a bombing campaign during the Normandy Campaign, other than shortly before the initial landings at those beaches. It seems impossible that 10,000 men could had died from the first bombing wave and another ten thousand during the entrenchment process.
It seems more plausible to me that French Colonial (Neger and Arab) Soldiers and Americans, were perhaps having too much ''fun'' with the local French. I.E. Shooting and raping them. But this would had looked bad for the Allied cause and no doubt this is the reason why the deaths were claimed as causalities of bombing campaigns.
Perhaps this is the same reason why the French were not allowed to use their colonial soldiers to liberate Paris?
