“Escape, Exile, and Annihilation,” details how, between 12 and 16 June 1944, about 110 paratroopers, with the vital help of villagers, escaped Graignes and returned to combat in Normandy. Captain Brummitt and Lt. Francis Naughton led the main group to safety. The Rigault family saved the lives of twenty-one paratroopers, hiding them for three days in the family barn. The Rigault daughters, Odette and Marthe, were especially prominent in the rescue mission. The Germans punished the villagers by forcing them to abandon their village in the summer of 1944. The chapter speaks of the perilous journey that the villagers endured. Finally, the chapter explores the fate of the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division in the summer of 1944. Allied forces destroyed the division, leaving only a handful of the German soldiers alive.

“Days of Friendship, Hope, and Waiting,” focuses on the period from 6 to 10 June 1944, when the paratroopers and villagers bonded over their mutual desire for liberation and victory. Under the direction of Major Johnston and Captain Brummitt, the paratroopers built a strong perimeter defense around Graignes and carried out aggressive patrolling in the surrounding area. Captain Abraham Sophian, the battalion surgeon, set up a medical aid station. The villagers, especially the leading women of the village, provided the support services the men needed to prepare for battle. At rest, the paratroopers exchanged stories and songs with the people of Graignes.

“Overseas,” explores the experiences of the defenders of Graignes in their journey toward the battlefield. The paratroopers trained in western Nebraska and did a variety of demonstration jumps in the area, including near Denver, to stimulate the sale of war bonds. Thereafter, they made the arduous journey by train to New York and across the Atlantic Ocean. They trained in Portrush, Northern Ireland and near Nottingham in England. The chapter makes the point that the socio-cultural experiences of the paratroopers in the United Kingdom would be similar to their experiences in Graignes. The chapter concludes with General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s decision to overrule Sir Arthur Trafford Leigh-Mallory’s opposition to using paratroopers on D-Day.

“Liberators and Friends,” recounts the dramatic events of D-Day – the airborne transit from England to Normandy, the jump, and the shock of landing in a place that was not on the maps of the paratroopers. The flooded areas, the marais, further compounded the problems the paratroopers encountered. The commanding officer, Major Charles Johnston, overruled subordinates, like Captain David Brummitt, and decided to stay and defend Graignes. That the paratroopers found themselves able to wage their own private war can only be explained by the astonishing commitment of the people of Graignes. Led by Mayor Alphonse Voydie and café owner Germaine Boursier, the village organized itself to support and feed the paratroopers.

The Introduction provides a synopsis of the book. It presents major themes and a chapter outline, and it reviews the limited historiography on Graignes. What has been written about Graignes has been largely limited to amateur historians who focus on weapons and combat. The introduction highlights that this study is based on multi-national research and that it points to the roles of non-elites in making foreign and military policy. In particular, the women of Graignes played major roles in aiding US paratroopers.

“Graignes in Historical Memory,” explains why little was known about the meaning of Graignes for more than four decades. The villagers and the paratroopers pursued their own lives. Both groups were curious about the fate of the other, but contact between the veterans and the villagers was largely non-existent. Memorials were dedicated in Graignes. After the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, however, the ordinary people who did extraordinary things began to reach out to one another. Veterans of Graignes, Colonel Frank Naughton and Lt. Colonel Earcle Reed, who had been career military officers, lobbied the Department of the Army to honor the civilians who had aided the paratroopers in 1944. In June 1986, in a grand ceremony, the Secretary of the Army awarded Distinguished Civilian Service Medals to eleven residents of Graignes. Since then, there have been numerous reunions between the villagers and their descendants and the paratroopers and their descendants.

Chapter 1 examines the construction of large-scale national systems for rehabilitating the war disabled, which began in the final months of 1914, with the establishment of the first wartime institutions for vocational re-education, and grew, over the course of the conflict, to include administrative bodies, organisational structures, and legal frameworks for the provisioning of care. They were constantly retooled and restructured in order to make them more efficient and more responsive to the needs of nations at war. By 1918, they had become remarkably sophisticated and, moreover, strikingly similar to one another – the result of a dedicated transnational movement of people and ideas and of a shared aim. This unity of purpose, however, did not exclude revisionist interpretations of rehabilitation programmes that overstressed their dissimilarities and imagined such systems – and the men they served – as nationally or ethnically particular nor did it resolve tensions between competing ideas about care, philanthropy, and the state.

Chapter 3 examines the Permanent Inter-Allied Committee for the War Disabled (PIC), which, from 1917 to 1922, hosted annual conferences, created an institute on the Rue du Bac in Paris for the study and cataloguing of pertinent information, and published the Inter-Allied Review to circulate the results of their efforts. PIC members and affiliates – many of whom were prolific contributors to the Allied culture of rehabilitation – shared a common vocabulary for, and framing of, the work of rehabilitation. They also, by and large, shared an understanding of their role within it, in terms that preserved the social hierarchy through preservation of their masculinity vis-à-vis the working-class soldier. The cooperative space created by the PIC, where government and military officials, social reformers, and medical practitioners came together, encouraged the reimagination of belonging, but whether the soldier and his sacrifice belonged to the nation, the Allies, or to humanity – and therefore whether nations ought to maintain exclusive responsibility for the disabled soldier – was never fully resolved.

Chapter 4 examines the manufacture and provision of artificial limbs reveals, demonstrating that the maintenance of masculine bodies as national bodies, in the strictest sense, was of paramount concern during the war. While wartime flows of technical knowledge ultimately meant that prosthetic limbs throughout the Allied nations became largely indistinguishable, government authorities who oversaw production were determined to see men refitted with goods that were in essence ‘national’, in their actual construction and in their materials. Technological processes could be transnational composites but the bodies that they managed could not. Wartime prosthetic devices embodied the values of the Allied culture of rehabilitation, manifesting the remaking of the working-class body according to middle-class values. New devices allowed men to perform according to the pre-war masculine ideal and to carry out the demands of labour, but the promises of science to return men to their pre-war forms fell short and veterans participated in various modes of self-fashioning and advocacy to achieve satisfactory solutions on their own terms.

Bodies of Work examines the transnational development of large-scale national systems, international organisations, technologies, and cultural materials aimed at rehabilitating Allied ex-servicemen, disabled in the First World War. It considers the ways in which rehabilitation was shaped by both durable and discrete influences, including social reformism, paternalist philanthropy, the movement for workers’ rights, patriotism, class tensions, cultural ideas about manliness and disability, nationalism, and internationalism. In recognising rehabilitation systems as complex and multi-faceted sociocultural constructions, it sheds light on the ways in which they became sites for the contestation and maintenance of boundaries of belonging. Internal to such systems, the book argues, were the limits of expansion of services to the industrially disabled. In interrogating the post-war quest to extend rehabilitation rights to civilians, the book provides insight into the development of social rights and statist welfarism and the evolution of ideas about the means, ends, and objects of humanitarianism.