Review
of Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II
France (University of Chicago Press, 2013), xii + 351
pgs., hardcover.
Another
D-Day (June 6) celebration on has come and gone. It has been ten years since I
posted this on the LRC blog:
According to an article about
Antony Beevor’s new book, D-Day, 20,000 French
civilians were killed within three months of the D-Day landing. Some villages
in Normandy only recently began having D-Day celebrations. What? How ungrateful
these people were for the “hundreds of tons of bombs destroying entire cities
and wiping out families.” Or perhaps it was because of the “theft and looting
of Normandy households and farmsteads by liberating soldiers” that “began on
June 6 and never stopped during the entire summer.” Or perhaps it was the
“3,500 rapes by American servicemen in France between June 1944 and the end of
the war.”
I
recently came across another book on D-Day that greatly expands upon this last
point.
I
have been putting off for some time now a review of Mary Louise Roberts’
important book What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in
World War II France (hereafter What
Soldiers Do). I don’t normally review books that are over a year or
two old but I must make an exception in the case of this book. And since we
have just been bombarded with propaganda about how great American soldiers were
who liberated France from the Nazis on D-Day, it is now or never if I am ever
going to get this book reviewed.
What
Soldiers Do proves and documents, without doubt or gainsaying, whether
the author intended it or not, that U.S. soldiers in World War II were the
greatest generation of whoremongers in the history of the American military.
Mary
Louise Roberts is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin. She is
also the author of D-Day Through French Eyes: Normandy 1944 (University
of Chicago Press, 2014), and at least two other books that I am aware of.
What
Soldiers Do begins with an introduction and ends with a conclusion. In
each case, the port city of Le Havre in Normandy is mentioned. In the
introduction we read that in 1945, a year after D-Day, thousands of American
GIs in Le Havre were waiting for a boat home. The mayor of the city penned a
letter to the American regional commander complaining that “the good citizens
of his city were unable to take a walk in the park or visit the grave of a
loved one without coming across a GI engaged in sex with a prostitute.” At
night, “drunken soldiers roamed the street looking for sex, and as a result
‘respectable’ women could not walk alone.” “Scenes contrary to decency” were
taking place “day and night.” In the conclusion we read that “GIs were
emboldened to believe the nation was theirs for the taking.” In garrison towns
like Le Havre, the GI’s “disregard for French social norms meant they had
public sex with prostitutes and assaulted women on the streets.”
According
to the author, What Soldiers Do “explores how
sex was used to negotiate authority” between the United States and France. It
focuses on the “three kinds of sex between GIs and French women during the US
military presence: romance, prostitution, and rape.” These subjects make up the
three sections of the book. The book concludes with almost 80 pages of notes,
including many French sources, followed by a very detailed index.
Roberts
explains that “with very few exceptions the GIs had no emotional attachment to
the French people or the cause of their freedom.” The Normandy campaign was billed
as “an erotic adventure.” Sexual fantasies about France motivated “the GI to
get off the boat and fight.” However, “such fantasies also unleashed a
veritable tsunami of male lust.” Once aroused, “the GI libido proved difficult
to contain.” Roberts maintains that “sex was fundamental to how the US military
framed, fought, and won the war in Europe.” She contends that “this book
presents GI sexual conduct as neither innocent of power nor unimportant in
effect.” Military historians, including Stephen Ambrose, “have largely ignored
the sexual habits of American soldiers.”
And
what were these sexual habits?
- The
GIs propositioned women right in front of their husbands or boyfriends.
- Women
could not walk the streets alone; sexual relations occurred in broad daylight
under the eyes of children.
- The
local girls flocked to the large camps north of town, where the American
soldier was “jumping on, even raping, anything which fell under his dick.”
- During
their time in France, the GIs bought an extraordinary amount of sex.
- The
GIs bartered for sex no differently than they did alcohol and cigarettes.
- Trading
Army products for sex was common GI practice throughout Europe.
- One
thousand to fifteen hundred men could pass through [a brothel] in a day,
forcing a woman to take on fifty to sixty customers.
- Sometimes
a prostitute would fulfill her duties in an alleyway, blacked-out doorway,
or under a bridge. These encounters the GIs called “knee-tremblers.”
- Sex
was most often had for GI products such as soap, cigarettes, chocolate,
and K rations.
- Cooperation
between GIs and prostitutes ensured a steady supply of sex.
- An
estimated dozen divisions started their own brothels.
- Soon
after D-day, military officers realized that they could not control GI
sexual activity in France.
- GI
promiscuity took place in parks, cemeteries, streets, and abandoned
buildings in cities.
- Sexual
relations because unrestricted and public; sexual intercourse was
performed in broad daylight before the eyes of civilians, including
children.
- Once
in France, GIs received condoms along with their food rations.
- The
soaring rate of infection signaled the army’s incapacity at every level to
regulate sexual relations between GIs and French women.
- One
military study found that 50 percent of married soldiers and 80 percent of
unmarried soldiers had intercourse at some point during the war.
- Some
of these MPs because full-time pimps, allowing the prostitutes to enter in
exchange for a share of their earnings.
- If
the GIs did not find women to satisfy their desires, they would rape
“honest” women.
- The
warm weather facilitated outdoor sex.
- An
unwanted, homeless population of diseased women being shuttled from town
to town—these prostitutes compromise the legacy of the American occupation
in Normandy.
- The
US military was struggling mightily with the problems of GI promiscuity.
As we have seen, clandestine prostitution was rampant; venereal disease
rates were escalating, and accusations of rape were legion.
- The
sexual exploitation of French women allowed the US military to test out
the new gears of its global authority.
- US
officers tried to contain the damage to their reputation by scapegoating
black GIs and proclaiming rape to be a “black” crime.
- Prostitutes
were considered the French commodity par excellence. In the mind of a GI,
a prostitute differed little from a cigarette, save in the price on the
black market.
U.S.
soldiers in World War II were heroic, they were brave, they were altruistic,
but they were also the greatest generation of whoremongers.
Laurence M. Vance [send him mail] writes from central Florida. He
is the author of The War on Drugs Is a War on Freedom; War, Christianity, and the State: Essays on the Follies
of Christian Militarism; War, Empire, and the Military: Essays on the Follies of
War and U.S. Foreign Policy; King James, His Bible, and Its Translators,
and many other books. His newest books are Free Trade or Protectionism? and The Free Society.