I've worked in this field for several years now myself, so I can really appreciate the very impressive job Roberts did with researching this book. She must have spent months in archives both in France and in Washington combing through all the documents of which she makes use here. And it's very good use: she avoids the easy, politically-correct conclusions that could be arrived at and, instead, really goes into the complex reasons for what happened and why both the Americans and the French imagined certain things to have happened with no proof. She is not a polemicist, she is an historian in the best sense of the term.
If you read some of the negative previous comments on here, you’ll see that much of her careful balancing and weighing went for naught for some angry readers, who were evidently so blinded by their negative reactions that they simply did not see some of what she wrote. That’s a shame, of course, but I suppose inevitable with such a sensitive topic.
I will admit that in certain cases I think Roberts sees certain issues playing more of a role in Franco-American post-war affairs than I suspect they did, but it’s hard not to see the subject of your research as really important when you’ve been buried in it for years, as Roberts clearly was. I don’t know, for example, that the American military saw any need to use French prostitution as an argument for American superiority over France. Between the Germans during the Occupation and the Allied bombing of the nation before and during our liberation of it, much of France was reduced to rubble by the end of 1944. That, and the fact that the functioning French army was little more than a token force armed by the Americans, already made it abundantly clear that France was no longer an economic or military power of any importance. On the other hand, the American military knew by August of 1944 that the U.S. had abandoned its original idea of occupying France (AMGOT) as they occupied, or would occupy, Italy, Germany, and Japan. So, again, I suspect they didn’t feel any need to justify governing France.
Some previous reviewers dispute Roberts’ claim that the military depicted France to GIs headed for it as a land of loose but attractive women. I don’t think they have a leg to stand on. American culture throughout the 1930s, as for example in our movies, had depicted French women—Parisian women, more specifically—as much more liberated about extramarital sex than the average American women. The American military didn’t have to create that idea out of whole cloth. It was already there in the minds of the American public.
I do have several caveats for potential buyers of this book, none of which reflect negatively on Roberts’ work and all of which, I suspect, were the choices of the publisher.
First, the paperback edition of this book was bound very cheaply. I got a like-new copy, and far too many pages detach from the spine as I turn them. So I'd recommend getting a hard-cover copy.
Second, there is no bibliography here, and the index is incomplete and does not cover the footnotes at all. As a result, if you see a footnote that says "Terkel, p. 35," for example, the only way to find the title of that book and the full author's name is to go through all the preceding footnotes. Since there are 80 pages of footnotes, that really becomes impractical once you're a fair ways into the book.
Third, the book, in particular the middle part on prostitution, needed a better editor/copy editor. There is a LOT of repetition in those middle three chapters. Roberts does thank someone for spending hours editing the book, and that person may have made real improvements, but those middle three chapters, and the reader, would have benefited from some pruning of repetitions and a clearer line of organization. By the third of those three chapters I didn’t see what new was being offered.
Fourth, the title is misleading. This book deals very specifically with what went on in Normandy and, on occasion, Brittany. For all intents and purposes it does not deal with the American presence in the rest of France during 1944-46. On the other hand, it does not just deal with the negative actions of American GIs. It also covers some of the things some French people in that area did to our soldiers.
Again, however, I see those as minor caveats that do not prevent this from being a most impressive and, perhaps sad to say, most important book. It would be wonderful to think that all the men we sent to liberate France were upstanding young Americans, but they were not. Many books and movies have glorified those who were good. This one shows us those who were not.
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