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  • GIs in the Global History of Gender and Sexuality
  • Sarah Kovner (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).

In recent years, scholars have conducted extensive new research on social relations between soldiers and civilians during war and occupation. Historians of gender and sexuality in particular have found this fruitful ground for new insights, not just about men’s and women’s experience of conflict, but about how the female body itself can become a site for political struggle. A conflagration of the scale and scope of the Second World War also makes it possible to draw comparisons and connections between multiple countries and countless different communities, including places where U.S. troops continue to be stationed in the present day.

In What Soldiers Do, Mary Louise Roberts focuses on American servicemen in France and “how sex was used to negotiate authority between the two nations” (7). Her book is rooted in the Norman bocage where U.S. servicemen and French men and women encountered each other in the crucial years of 1944 and 1945, whether through romance, prostitution, or rape. But she draws insights and information from the work of many other scholars who have used gender to elucidate international relations, such as the historians Maria Höhn and Petra Goedde on GIs in Germany, and Naoko Shibusawa and John Dower on Japan.1 On France specifically, the historian Frank Costigliola has written for many years on how U.S.- French relations were expressed through ideas and imagery of gender and sexuality, especially the female body, while the historians Robert Lilly and William Hitchcock have recently published impressive research on the incidence of rape.2

We are now in a position to begin putting together both an international and transnational history of how U.S. soldiers and occupation officials negotiated gender and sexuality in many different countries. It prompts one to ask what was unique about the experience of GIs in France, and how this can this help us understand the longer trajectory of U.S. military power overseas—both in countries where U.S. bases were eventually expelled, like France, and others, like Japan, Korea, and Germany, where they endure?

Roberts credits much of this earlier scholarship in constructing her argument. But she chooses to engage mainly with popular history and popular memory. The late Steven Ambrose, author of Band of Brothers and a Hollywood consultant, is mentioned perhaps more than any other historian. As Roberts notes, the Normandy landing has become a “sacred event” in the American imagination (15). This heroic narrative slights the French and [End Page 147] leaves half the story untold. The great strength of the book is in completing the picture through a deeply contextualized account of what happened in towns and cities like Saint Lô and Le Havre.

Roberts sets the stage for the rest of the book in part one, on “Romance,” which she interprets in three ways: the soldier as tourist, as savior of helpless women, and as a threat to French manhood. She makes particularly effective use of diaries to retell the Battle of Normandy and its aftermath from multiple perspectives: the deafening sounds, the stink of death, the might of the U.S war machine, and the barriers of language and culture that contributed to mutual incomprehension. Americans were shocked by the dirty, “primitive” Normans, who in turn thought these new invaders seemed like overgrown children or gun-slinging cowboys (51).

This account ironically tends to make the French mere observers of history when they were not its victims. To be sure, power relations were hardly equal. Roberts details French poverty and trauma with telling details, right down to the candy and chewing gum with which GIs bought children’s affections, even as many showed contempt for their parents. She also offers a subtle analysis of how Americans belittled and marginalized even members of the French resistance. But it is hard to understand why, in three chapters on romance, Roberts makes no more than passing mention of the...

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