What Soldiers Do

War is very much on the public mind these days, not only the present brutal wars in the Middle East and central Africa and the violent drug wars ravaging Mexico and Central America but the First World War as well. The centenary of that epic struggle has elicited an outpouring of books, commemorations, and memorials. ‘The Great War’, as it was once called, has long been considered a tragic mistake or a horrific miscalculation or a deliberate act of aggression. Its ten million dead, above all those who died in trench warfare on the Western Front, have been commemorated in poetry, novels, films and histories. But no one argues it was a ‘good war’, not even the Americans who claimed to have intervened to make the world safe for democracy. The war to end all wars was followed by the peace to end all peace.

World War Two was different, or so Americans claim. (Soviets did as well, albeit for different reasons.) According to the dominant narrative, World War Two was a good war; Americans fought to save liberalism and democracy from fascism; they won the war (the Soviet role being deliberately forgotten). Without pursuing self-interest, they provided arms and aid to their allies, fought courageously in two theatres, and built democracy and prosperity in postwar Western Europe and Japan. At the centre of celebratory memories and histories stands the American soldier – heroic, uncompromised by collaboration, spared past defeats. He was properly manly, and sexually well-behaved, avoiding coercion and prostitution. He was welcomed by those he liberated and occupied and is rightly seen as a member of the greatest generation. This is a distorted and incomplete picture, but one to which Americans cling because it contrasts so positively with that of the Vietnam War and because it encourages the United States to believe that military interventions abroad can end happily.

Mary Louise Roberts challenges the myth of the good war by exploring what military historians ignore – sex and sexual violence. Her meticulously researched and elegantly written study of the everyday interactions between American soldiers and French women and men in 1944 and 1945 uncovers the pervasive experiences of and discourses about romance, prostitution and rape. Drawing on French and American newspapers, memoirs and court records, and making particularly effective use of photographs and cartoons, she reconstructs the assumptions of American officers and GIs (soldiers) about French masculinity, femininity and sexuality. Roberts argues that sex was a key arena in which questions of French sovereignty and American power were worked out. Sex, which encompassed everything from casual liaisons and streetwalking to regulating brothels and venereal disease, functioned as ‘myth, symbol and model of power’ (p. 11). Sexual interactions, discourses and policies among the Allies were as fraught as those between enemies, such as Germany; in the case of the French probably more so. At stake in struggles over sex and control of women’s bodies were French territorial autonomy and grandeur and the nature of American postwar hegemony in Europe.

Roberts is not the first to challenge the image of the ‘good war’. William Hitchcock’s The Bitter Road to Freedom showed in great detail that ‘a war of liberation is still a war’, with all its attendant death, destruction, disease and displacement. Ian Buruma’s Year Zero shows that Allied liberation was accompanied not simply by gratitude and exultation, but also by hunger, moral confusion, and desires for revenge. The film Fury (2014) tries to counter the romance of Private Ryan by showing how GIs really fought and killed. Hitchcock and Buruma do not completely ignore sex as they chip away at the myth of the good war; Hitchcock briefly discusses rapes in Normandy, and Buruma touches on the sexual appeal of virile Americans and the felt inferiority of European men in relationship to them. Neither makes sex – as experience, as discourse and as a means of negotiating power relations between nations – a central part...