What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France
How do you convince men to charge across heavily
mined beaches into deadly machine-gun fire? Do you appeal to their bonds
with their fellow soldiers, their patriotism, their desire to end
tyranny and mass murder? Certainly—but if you’re the US Army in 1944,
you also try another tack: you dangle the lure of beautiful French
women, waiting just on the other side of the wire, ready to reward their
liberators in oh so many ways.
That’s not the picture of the
Greatest Generation that we’ve been given, but it’s the one Mary Louise
Roberts paints to devastating effect in What Soldiers Do. Drawing
on an incredible range of sources, including news reports, propaganda
and training materials, official planning documents, wartime diaries,
and memoirs, Roberts tells the fascinating and troubling story of how
the US military command systematically spread—and then exploited—the
myth of French women as sexually experienced and available. The
resulting chaos—ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to
outright rape and rampant venereal disease—horrified the war-weary and
demoralized French population. The sexual predation, and the blithe
response of the American military leadership, also caused serious
friction between the two nations just as they were attempting to settle
questions of long-term control over the liberated territories and the
restoration of French sovereignty.
While never denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery of the soldiers who took part, What Soldiers Do
reminds us that history is always more useful—and more interesting—when
it is most honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished beauty of
nostalgia to grapple with the real lives and real mistakes of the people
who lived it.
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