World War II—Transnationally Speaking

Although World War II has inspired more scholarship in a greater range of languages than most other wars, for the most part, this work has remained firmly embedded in national history writing. The mold, thankfully, is starting to be broken. The recent interest in transnational and global history has just produced the first volume on Africa and World War II, and Cambridge University Press, home of numerous volumes and series related to the study of war, has in production its first multivolume history of World War II, one that aims to examine the war as a global phenomenon.¹ Mary Louise Roberts’s What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France is a welcome contribution to this trend. By taking into account both American and French records of the conduct of American GIs in World War II France, Roberts highlights the shifting boundaries and coexisting modes of sexuality and romance in wartime and during occupation. What Soldiers Do brings into sharp focus the very ambivalence of France’s status—conquered, occupied, collaborating, resistant, liberated—and the intrinsic significance of sex for the particular mode of war making there. In so doing, it tells a story whose significance transcends the particular location and even the particular soldiers who are the book’s focus.

Roberts sees herself speaking to an American audience that has regarded its nation’s role in World War II as fighting “the good fight,” and carefully notes that her intention is not to challenge that claim, but rather to separate it from the actual conduct of American GIs once on the ground. What Soldiers Do constitutes a milestone on the road toward a truly transnational historiography of World War II that can put such contemporary American (and other national) sensibilities aside, a historiography that does not need to claim undying patriotism or to contain soldiers’ misconduct by reminding us of their humanity (xxii).² What else could they possibly be if not human? Such a historiography, instead, will consider the disturbing similarities between the case at hand and strategies and conditions elsewhere. It will work toward sharpening the contours that Roberts has so carefully drawn of what was specific to American military (sexual) policy and this French-American encounter, and exploring where else these contours may be observed. After all, the feminizing and infantilizing attitude that “the French were morally degraded and therefore perhaps not able to govern themselves” was echoed elsewhere (2). Halfway around the world, General Douglas MacArthur, who oversaw the occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1951, believed that the Japanese were like twelve-year-old children. Thus, his rationalization that the emperor—the Commander in Chief, hailed as a godlike creature and the father of all Japanese during the imperialist era—could not be taken away from them during the U.S. occupation without inviting chaos.³

The fact that the U.S. invasion was portrayed “in mythic terms as a mission to save French women from the evils of Nazism” and more generally understood “in traditional gender terms as manly men rescuing helpless women” has a familiar ring to anyone cognizant of the Japanese imperialist rhetoric of the time (8, 59). The state promoted Japan’s aggression in Asia as a grand strategy of fatherly Japan liberating Asia from western colonialism. Perhaps similarly disturbing, recent American justifications for the Iraq War included the necessity to “liberate Iraqi women” from oppression. Anecdotally, one of my former students, a Marine veteran who had participated in the Battle of Baghdad in early April 2003, found among his most disturbing memories how “much abuse of women” by oppressive Iraqi men he saw.⁴

Roberts forcefully and convincingly argues that “sex was fundamental to how the US military framed, fought, and won the war in Europe. Far from being a marginal release from the pressures of combat, sexual behavior stood at the center...