Friendly Invasions

Drunken soldiers careening through the streets in jeeps, groping waitresses, urinating against store fronts, and getting knee-tremblers from prostitutes in back alleys. Whole sections of the city were becoming ‘impossible for women and young girls’, despaired one local (p. 181). This was the French port of Le Havre by the summer of 1945 as depicted in Mary Louise Roberts’s gripping study of the conduct of U.S. troops after the Allied invasion of Normandy. In What Soldiers Do, G.I.s do not just conquer sandy bluffs, German defences and countryside hedgerows. They come crashing through communities, marketplaces and family homes. Being liberated by your allies was often a ‘harrowing experience’, Roberts shows by juxtaposing French archives and memoirs against American accounts – and it was treacherous not just because of the aerial bombing, destruction, and general chaos, but also because of the complex sexual politics that the soldiers brought with them (p. 18).

Sex, Roberts argues, was far from a ‘sideshow’ in World War Two (p. 11). It was a mobilizer for conscripts who risked death. It was a meal ticket for women struggling to feed their children. And it was an international language through which U.S. foreign policy and Franco-American relations could be conceptualized and contested.

Each of the book’s three parts – Romance, Prostitution, and Rape – tacks back to the very public uses and power dynamics buried in seemingly isolated sexual encounters. In Part One (a section actually short on genuine romance and long on conflict), Roberts analyses how American war coverage portrayed the Liberation as a love affair between gallant G.I.s and Frenchwomen looking for outside heroes. Such misleading narratives, Roberts ventures, not only bucked up American servicemen’s resolve during the fighting but also helped to prepare Americans for larger roles as world leaders in the conflict’s aftermath. At the same time, this casting of France as a nation of women and children in need of saving by American men exacerbated Frenchmen’s own feelings of humiliation and loss of authority, control which some of them would most graphically try to regain by shaming and punishing women accused of sexual collaboration during the occupation. Part Two builds on this by exploring the widespread use of sex as currency in the continent’s collapsed economy where survival depended on scavenging, bartering, and winning the favour of visitors bearing PX rations. And, as Roberts uncovers in Part Three, when G.I. prerogatives led to outbreaks of widespread assault and rape, in all too predictable fashion U.S. authorities scapegoated and executed African American soldiers rather than coming to terms with the true nature and scope of the problem.

What Soldiers Do adds another puzzle piece to an emerging picture of the far-flung exploits of U.S. servicemen as they filtered through the staging grounds of Britain and Australia (where Americans earned the label ‘overpaid, oversexed, and over here’), through African ports and Pacific islands, and into the conquered lands of Germany and Japan. Of course many soldiers and sailors were model invaders. But emerging evidence from archives around the world shows similar patterns of misbehaviour from Belfast to Bombay. Put together these regional case studies paint a portrait of a vast G.I. diaspora leaving in its wake a trail of diplomatic headaches, war babies, and venereal disease.¹

But like much of this growing literature on sex and U.S. servicemen, What Soldiers Do has a curious blind spot, an assumption about the exceptionalism of the American home front – of its apartness from the war’s sexual minefields.² Roberts gets dramatic mileage out of contrasting U.S. soldiers’ treatment of women in France with the conditions that supposedly existed for Americans back home. The notion that ‘US military policy protected American families from the spectacle of G.I. promiscuity while leaving French families unable to escape it’ furnishes one of the book’s recurring themes (p. 4...