"Mary Louise Roberts's provocative counter-narrative of America's 'good war' reveals the fraught entanglements of gender and race, sex, sexual violence and racism, commerce and romance, in the Franco-American encounter from D-day through the first year of uneasy peace. Rigorously researched and evocatively written, What Soldiers Do analyses the centrality, both material and symbolic, of women and their bodies to France's ambiguous relationship as a liberated but dishonored nation with the newly dominant American victors and demonstrates yet again--in disturbing detail--how much 'foreign affairs' are indeed about sex and gender."

"This is a book that matters. It will provoke heated discussion and critical responses from those who are made uncomfortable by its arguments, and those arguments merit engagement both by those who agree and by those who might not want to face the evidence that the author has gathered so expertly. The prose is bracingly clear, the argument is free of sensationalist exaggeration, and, most important, it is persuasive. This remarkable book deserves to be widely read."

"This remarkable book attacks the myth of the 'Greatest Generation' by showing that young Americans went to war in Europe to find sex rather than to sacrifice themselves for Europe's salvation. It stands as a corrective to all the best-selling celebratory renderings of World War II in the United States over the past quarter century. It will be shocking and controversial."

"Throughout this book the links between sex, the body, national and transnational politics are made plain. While some readers may query the argument that the behaviour of GIs can be conceptualised as the 'growing pains' of a nation moving into world leadership, many will appreciate this nuanced history of sex, war and power. The sexual behaviour of an army, and the sexual abuse it propagates, are to do with more than the personal choices of select individuals. Looking beyond 'a few bad hats', as British Army officers are wont to say of abusers, is instructive, not just for a deeper understanding of the complex liberation of France but also of the broader links between military power, sexual dominance and gender relations."

"In this vivid account of GIs in wartime France, Mary Lou Roberts documents how the Greatest Generation was sometimes as badly behaved beyond the battlefield as it was brave in combat. What Soldiers Do is not a conventional history. It deeply--and often colorfully--textures our understanding of the experiences of men at war, the contours of mid-twentieth-century sexual (and racial) mores, and the frequently ignorant and even lurid attitudes toward other peoples that attended America's ascent to global hegemony."

WHAT SOLDIERS DO

Sex and the American GI in World War II France

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Soldier, Liberator, Tourist

IN THE WEE HOURS of 6 June 1944, Angèle Levrault, a sixty-year-oldschoolmistress from Sainte-Mère-Église, awoke with a start. Sherose from her bed and exited the back door to use her outhouse. Sheheard odd fluttering sounds. What she found in her backyard wasstranger still: a man with a face streaked in war paint had landed inher garden and was trying to cut himself free from a parachute. MadameLevrault stood frozen in her nightgown. The man's eyes methers. He raised his finger to his lips, signaling her to be silent, andthen slipped away into the night. Although she did not know it at thetime, Madame Levrault had just met Private Robert M. Murphy ofthe Eighty-Second Airborne Division, one of the first Americans toland in France on D-day. A few hours after their encounter in the garden,thousands of Murphy's countrymen would take their first steponto French land at Omaha and Utah Beach. Thousands of otherswould take their last step on that sand, if they took a step at all. Beforethe end of that day, 2,499 Americans would perish on the beaches ofNormandy. They would reach the shores of France but die beforethey met even a single French person. Still others, of course, survivedthe beaches and fought their way across the north of France. Thosesoldiers are the subject of this book.

For good reason, the Normandy landings have become a sacredevent in the American imagination. Historians, politicians, and filmmakershave celebrated the campaign as a great moment in the historyof the Second World War. There is no doubt they are right. Butthe story, at least as it has been told by American historians, suffersby focusing too narrowly on military strategy. As the new militaryhistory has demonstrated, wars cannot be separated from the valuesand preoccupations of those peoples fighting them. It is also crucial,then, to widen our analytic lens in order to consider the encounter betweenthe American soldier and the French civilian. That relationshipbegan at dawn on the sixth of June in places like Angèle Levrault'sgarden; it ended in Le Havre some two years later when the last GIgot on a boat home.

Because historical narratives focus almost exclusively on the day-to-dayheroics of the American GI, they slight the French and leavehalf the story untold. French civilians appear only at the peripheriesof the scene, their roles reduced to inert bystanders or joyous celebrantsof liberation. In short, they form nothing more than a landscapeagainst which the Allies fight for freedom. Stephen Ambrose'svery popular histories of the Normandy campaign typify this marginalizationof the French. In Citizen Soldiers, a history of the armyfrom Normandy to the Battle of the Bulge, Ambrose mentions theNormans only once, implying that they were collaborationists: "[Thelandings] came as a shock to the Normans, who had quite accommodatedthemselves to the German occupation." In Ambrose's threehistories of the campaign, he recounts only one incident in which theNormans help the Allies, and several in which they betray the GIs.Otherwise, they appear to be children eager to kiss the Americans'hands, delighted at their liberation, but largely passive and mute. Insum, Ambrose reproduces what he sees as the general GI view ofFrench civilians—as "ungrateful, sullen, lazy and dirty."

One aim of this chapter is to amend that view by revisiting theNormandy campaign as it was seen through French eyes. What wasD-day like for the Normans? How did they respond to having theirhomes, their fields, and their farms turned into a theater of war? Normanaccounts of the invasion, recorded in diaries, letters, and memoirs,give us an extraordinarily fresh, vivid account of the monthsprior to and after the invasion. If Normans appeared to be "ungrateful"and "sullen" to the GIs, as Ambrose believed, they had goodreason to be. For them, D-day did not begin on the sixth of June.Rather it started in the fall of 1943, when the Allies initiated preinvasionbombing on northern France. The Normans watched their railways,bridges, workplaces, and homes burn to the ground. For thisreason, they dreaded as much as awaited the landings. The war cameas a distant thunder, then crashed like an angry storm. As it broke, itproduced horrific sights and smells—the rot of animal and humanflesh, the stench of death. Normans recounted their encounter withdeath in a terrible grammar of sounds, sights, smells, and tastes. Anestimated 19,890 civilians lost their lives in the Battle of Normandy.During the first two days of the campaign alone, about three thousandwere killed—roughly the same number of Allied soldiers killedin that period.

Nevertheless the Normans also felt profound gratitude to the Alliesfor restoring their freedom. However horrible the squall of war, iteventually delivered Americans, with their funny-looking jeeps, theirspectacular boots, and their honey-smelling cigarettes. Every Normanremembers the moment when they saw their first American."We simply did not believe our eyes," recalled Jacques Perret. "Afterso many years of occupation, deprivation, alerts, bombings, therewere our liberators, 'our Americans.'" Jacques-Alain de Sédouy, aboy of eight in 1944, remembered his first GI in this way: "He couldhave been a Martian who had fallen out of the sky and we wouldnot have examined him with more curiosity. I could not take my eyesoff this man who had come from his distant land in order to liberateFrance."

Revisiting the campaign from the French side not only gives us anovel, more comprehensive view of the campaign, but also correctsAmbrose's portrayal of French civilians in three crucial ways. First, farfrom being traitors or passive by-standers, ordinary Normans readilyjoined the Allies in their struggle against the Germans. Besides takingup arms, civilians provided crucial intelligence about the terrainand the enemy. They also risked their lives to hide fallen parachutists,harbor stranded infantrymen, and care for the wounded. Withvery few exceptions, they were comrades and fighters. Second, whilethere is no question that French civilians welcomed their liberatorswith wonder and gratitude, it is too simple to portray them as happycelebrants of their own liberation. Although Normans felt enormousrelief when the Germans at last departed, they were also forced toendure the war in their own backyard. A fundamental contradictioncharacterized the Allied mission: the GIs were to both conquer andliberate, demolish and reconstruct. As one journalist said of the civiliansin Caen, "their liberators are also destroyers." In this part ofFrance, anger, fear, and loss stripped the moment of its bliss. Liberationwas a harrowing experience in which happiness had to share theheart with sorrow. Putting Franco-American relations at the center ofthe story revises our understanding of the costs paid in the Normancampaign. The Americans did not have a monopoly on suffering, nordid they fight alone.

Lastly, a transatlantic approach alters our view of the Americanexperience in Europe. By focusing on encounters between GIs andcivilians, we can appreciate the full extent of the soldiers' precariousposition in the ETO (European theater of operations). Not only werethey warriors fighting for their lives, but also strangers in a strangeland. An incident recounted by infantryman John Baxter evokes thissense of alienation. One morning, Baxter's unit drove by convoythrough a small village. A French peasant stood and watched thempass through. "We stopped briefly at an intersection and one of ourArkansas soldiers, a man named Mathis, leaned out of the truck andaddressed the old man. 'Hey, Mister!,' he barked, 'How far are wefrom Okalona, Arkansas?' It broke up the convoy." Mathis's jokerested not only on the French man's ignorance of Okalona but alsoon the idea of the GI as a tourist. It presented the American soldier asa lost traveler trying to find his way home. Unlike tourists to France,the Allies did not expect a warm greeting on Omaha Beach. A goodthing, too, as the Germans decidedly did not give them one. But liketravelers, they were deposited in an alien landscape, forced to navigateunknown streets, witness unfamiliar customs, and converse withpeople in a language they did not understand.

The full complexity of the American mission in Europe emergesonly when we see the campaign in this way: as an encounter betweentwo allies as well as two enemies. While France was a battlefield, itwas also an unknown place, and as such, experienced by GIs in termsnot unlike those of a tourist. Such cultural encounters have beenoverlooked by military historians reluctant to take their eyes off thebattlefield. But for millions of GIs, the discovery that a very differentworld indeed lay beyond the Jersey shore—or San Francisco Bay,for that matter—was central to their war experience. For the GIs, therecognition of cultural difference was unavoidable, astonishing, andoften life changing. "From the moment we hit the beaches," wrote infantrymanAramais Hovsepian to his brothers, "you could tell it wasa different country. The air even smelled different!" "England was alittle like home but France is really a foreign country," recorded JanGiles in his diary. GI Orval Faubus titled his memoir of France A FarawayLand. With the awareness of difference came the excitement ofbeing in a strange, distant place. Minutes after Charles E. Frohman'scompany arrived in Normandy, someone pointed out a French streetsign. "Everything else was forgotten in a series of awed Oh's and Ah's,"remembered Frohman, who was from Columbus, Ohio. "It was thefirst distinctly French thing we had ever seen. It looked like somethingout of a fairy tale book. It just didn't look real." Like many visitorsto France, the GIs peered over maps, babbled in high school French,wondered why the second floor was called the first floor, and stared inutter bewilderment at bidets.

The recognition of cultural difference, with its lessons of toleranceand humility, became a legacy of the war for a generation of Americanmen, and thus merits closer historical attention. Thinking aboutthe GI as a tourist can also help to explain the arrogance he oftenfelt toward the French. As soldiers, the Americans bore weapons andwielded enormous power. But as tourists, they were dependent oncivilians for local knowledge of geography, language, and customs.In this way, they tacked back and forth between authority and dependence,command and vulnerability. Like many tourists, the GIs dealtwith their helplessness by making large (and largely unfounded) generalizationsabout the French. When in their discomfort Americanssuccumbed to this reflex to categorize, they made sex the definingelement of French civilization.

Countless GIs arrived in Normandy with the notion that Francewas a playground of easy women and loose morals. Once there, theygave candy to children, shook the hands of young men, learned aboutthe woods from peasants, and saved the lives of old women. In otherwords, they interacted with civilians in complex, very different ways.At the same time, when confronted with a strange culture, the GIsclung to prejudices they already held about the French. In particular,they focused on French behaviors concerning the body, includingpublic nudity, kissing, and love making. By the end of the summer,the French had become—as an entire people—primitive and oversexed.This view of the Gallic race as uncivilized echoed Americanimperial thinking in the past. Here it would degrade French effortsto restore an autonomous government, as well as justify US militarymanagement in matters of health, sanitation, and transportation.

A Surrealist Mixed Spectacle of Deliverance and Death

While everyone in Europe awaited the invasion, what it meant foran individual depended on where he or she happened to be in thesummer of 1944. Anne Frank was in hiding in Amsterdam. For herand her family, the "long-awaited liberation" meant hope. "It fills uswith fresh courage and makes us strong again," she wrote in her diaryon the sixth of June. Anguish was what Françoise Seligman wasfeeling in Paris that morning. "A kind of inner panic paralyzed me,"the French woman remembered. "If they fail, if they leave, the proofwill have been made that France has become an impregnable bastionof Nazi power, and we will never ever be liberated." For the civiliansin Normandy, where the battle claimed both homes and human lives,the landings took on yet another meaning. A woman named Yvonneliving near Mortain called her day of liberation a "surrealist mixedspectacle of deliverance and death."

The burden of loss was not new on D-day. The invasion had createda reason for the French to endure the weary days of scarcity,humiliation, and deprivation. At the same time, for months beforethe landings, Allied bombardment had wreaked havoc with Normanlives. Military planners had launched a bombing campaign the previousfall to prevent the Nazis from moving troops and supplies tothe front in the opening weeks of the Normandy campaign. So asnot to betray the location of the Allied landings, bombing occurredover all of France, with the targeting of bridges, roads, and railwaysas well as oil depots and other German installations. In the year 1944alone, 503,000 tons of bombs fell on France, and 35,317 civilians werekilled. The populations of Nantes, Cambrai, Saint-Étienne, Caen,and Rouen all suffered heavy casualties, with hundreds or thousandsreported dead or wounded. A bombardment of B-17s on a train inwhich resistance member Jean Collet was traveling appeared to himas a "strange ballet of death: you saw the bombs unleashed from theplane and falling in your direction. Then they disappeared from viewdue to their rapidity of speed. Then one instant after a terrifying whistlethey would explode in a dreadful crash. Meanwhile we were flattenedagainst the ground to avoid the explosions." Civilians sufferedthe devastation of homes, workplaces, and farms. As a result, manyfelt more fear than hope about the coming invasion. "The landingsare both yearned and dreaded," wrote a Caen prefect in early 1944,"one hopes for a decisive victory while also making a selfish wish thatit won't happen where one lives."

It was only human to want the Allies to come—only somewhereelse. But specific circumstances also aggravated fear and resentment.For one, the Nazis chose to use bombardment like a hammer to nailin anti-Allied feeling. In widely disseminated handbills and otherforms of propaganda, the Germans claimed that the United Stateshad a "Machiavellian plan," which was to take over the French Empire,destroy France, and colonize Europe itself. (See figure 1.1.) Becausethey could kindle anti-Allied feeling with the destruction causedby the bombing, the Nazis provided neither a warning system nor atemporary shelter for the Normans. To counter such propaganda, theAllies air-dropped leaflets reassuring civilians. "We know that thesebombardments add to the suffering of certain among you. We donot pretend to ignore that," conceded one brochure. "Move away asmuch as possible from ironworks, railway stations, junctions, traindepots, repair shops." The warnings were considered to be earnestbut pointless as civilians had no choice but to work and live aroundstrategic targets.

A second major issue was imprecision in bombing. The "flying fortress"B-17 bomber—the pride of the American air force—provoked aclenched French fist for missing its target so often. The Normans consideredthe British to be superior to the Americans in precision bombing.As early as October 1943, the Gaullist resistance organ CFLN(Comité français de la libération nationale) reported that the Frenchwere sick "of accumulating ruins and deaths without results." Whilesome civilians found comfort in the French adage that to make anomelet, you have to break eggs, others wondered, "why was it necessaryto break so many?" Nor did civilians perceive any rational plan,according to the CFLN. Bridges were destroyed several times over in aperiod of days, then left alone for months, so that the Germans couldrebuild them. The bombings were "barbarian," and they should bestopped. In their reports on public opinion, the CFLN claimed civiliansbelieved Nazi warnings concerning American imperial ambitions.Besides economic greed, the Americans were guilty of harshnessin the Versailles treaty, indifference to German rearmament inthe 1930s, slowness in entering the war, and collaboration with Vichyofficial Admiral Darlan in North Africa. Even the delay in the invasionbecame a kind of "treason."
(Continues...)Excerpted from WHAT SOLDIERS DO by Mary Louise Roberts. Copyright © 2013 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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