St. Lo and our (mis)perception of history

One of the things that struck me while I was working on my biography of Omar Bradley* is how much misperception there is of the man. He’s not so much the blank slate of World War II but the punching bag.

Everyone from historians to political columnists have used him as a straw man for whatever sort of prejudice they have or point they want to make. Mostly that’s because:

a) readers don’t really know much about him, and

b) neither do historians.

There are a number of reasons for this, which I go into in the book. But it’s not just the fact that Bradley hasn’t had much attention. Much of what we focus on when looking at the history of World War II helps distort who he was.

Take, for example, the battle of St. Lo in Normandy. Capturing the city was an important accomplishment during the campaign that followed D-Day; it was an American victory. It was also a bloody mess that resulted in a pile of rubble and not much else. Because of the geography, lack of ammunition and a host of other factors, it was a slow, plodding affair, absolutely not what the Americans, or Bradley, wanted.

It happens, though, that because the battle lasted so long, we have a lot of specific information on it, which has allowed historians to focus on it. It’s often used as the last battle of the D-Day campaign – which of course it’s not. (That would be Cobra, a decidedly different affair, and the one plan completely drawn up by Bradley and followed to his specifications. And contrary to some historians’ contentions, there’s little evidence that Bradley saw St. Lo as the precursor to Cobra.)

There are a lot of things you can say about that battle. But if you look at it and think that it represents Bradley or American doctrine during the war, you’d be totally mistaken. Even if the historian writing about it doesn’t think that or say that, many readers will certainly get that impression if they spend a lot of time reading about it.

I should note that the documentary I’m in does end at that battle, and for that and many other reasons I don’t mean to exempt myself from the criticism of inappropriate context. But we do have to keep in mind that history, even at its most accurate, comes to us with many hidden strings. What we know is not always what we think we know, and what we think is often not what we know.

* which you can get here and here.