In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Louts in Uniform
  • Joanne Meyerowitz (bio)
Mary Louise Roberts. What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France. University of Chicago Press, 2013. Xii + 368 pp.; ISBN 978-0-226-92309-3 (cl); 978-0-226-92311-6 (pb).

For those who celebrate World War II’s Normandy invasion as a high point of the “good war,” Mary Louise Roberts’s book adds a dose of sobering reality. War, of course, is hell on all sides, with terror, destruction, maiming, and death. And, as Roberts shows, even in moments of shared victory, military celebration can come conjoined with violence and violation. In this history of the U.S. military in wartime France, the GIs of the “greatest generation”—the ones who helped liberate France from Nazi occupation—behaved in loutish and criminal ways. The U.S. “liberators” drank, fought, pawed, pillaged, raped, and murdered. Roberts relates a history of sexuality, but this is not the sweet sex of wartime lovers finding comfort in each other’s arms. This is, instead, a history mostly of rowdy exploitation, hard-eyed exchange, brutal assault, and rank injustice.

A number of recent scholarly works provide the scaffolding on which Roberts carefully builds. We now have historical accounts of the vast sex work industry near U.S. military bases during and after World War II and of rape committed by GIs in war zones and occupied territories.1 We also have a growing body of literature on the gendered discourse of twentieth-century foreign relations, in which U.S. officials understood their own nation as virile, positioning others as feminized subordinates.2 Roberts weaves these historiographic strands together with those from French history. She argues that heterosexuality shored up the battered masculinity of GIs traumatized by war and also helped to “naturalize rising American hegemony” in Europe through a “fantasy of sexual control and virile achievement” (67).

Roberts begins her book with “romance.” Here she sidesteps the social history of everyday dating, mating, sex, and love, and focuses on representations in which welcoming women came to symbolize the rescue of France by heroic GIs. In the U.S. military publication Stars and Stripes and eventually in Life magazine, photos of French women kissing GIs cast “the American mission in Europe … as heterosexual romance” (59). In this visual trope, a grateful feminine France literally embraced its manly American saviors.

In the book’s second section—on prostitution—sex workers replace the smiling women who offered only kisses. The prostitute came to stand for a France that was defeated, subordinated, and bought. The GI liberators expected sexual rewards from French women, and they also took on the sexual impunity of an occupying force. They bought sexual services with cigarettes, food, and money, and then expressed contempt for the indigent [End Page 134] women they paid. “The GIs’ encounters with prostitutes … radically shaped their view of the French,” Roberts writes, “as an immoral, subservient people” (129). The romance had lost its affectionate glow; sex in its commercial form instead had bred contempt.

But Roberts does not focus solely on the U.S. military, American publications, or the behavior of GIs. As a historian of France, she mined French archives, newspapers, and memoirs to elucidate the view from the other side. For the French, the horrors of war included Allied bombing as well as German occupation. The French welcomed the GIs but also distrusted and resented them. When the GIs ran amok in Normandy and Paris, the French experienced it as disrespect and defeat by another occupying force. As Roberts notes, the allies were also conquerors. French men, in particular, felt humiliated because they had lost their role as protectors of their families and “also feared they had lost sexual possession of their women” (86). The GIs’ sexual relations with French women offended both French masculinity and national pride. For Frenchmen, Roberts claims, the ubiquitous prostitutes came to symbolize their nation’s decline and its selling out to Americans.

On some issues, French and American men agreed. On both sides men bolstered their own fragile masculinity by “belittling the manhood of the other,” and on both sides they saw sexual intercourse as necessary for men...

pdf

Share