What Soldiers Do Sex and the American Gi in Wwii France (2013) Book Review

Mary Louise Roberts. What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. xii + 351 pp. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-92309-iii; $19.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-226-92311-half dozen.

Reviewed past Ryan Wadle
Published on H-War (May, 2014)
Commissioned past Margaret Sankey (Air University)

Mary Louise Roberts's What Soldiers Exercise: Sexual activity and the American GI in Earth War 2 French republic is a provocative cultural history of the American military machine occupation of French republic from D-Twenty-four hour period until 1946. Similar Paul Fussell's studies, Wartime: Agreement and Behavior in the 2d Globe War (1990) and The Boys' Cause: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-45 (2003), which claiming the "good state of war" narrative that still pervades much of the popular retention of World War II, What Soldiers Do exposes an element of the American wartime experience on the margins and only briefly acknowledged by past histories and presentations of the state of war. It as well offers a stark contrast to many earlier histories of the state of war by using gender and cultural analysis in a topic where operational historians nevertheless concord the ground.

Roberts argues that a combination of remembered tales of lustful behavior by American "doughboys" in World War I and semiofficial propaganda disseminated by the paper Stars and Stripes and other outlets raised expectations amidst GIs that France would become an erotic playground after they invaded the country. One time on the continent in June 1944, American soldiers quickly entered into every manner of sexual relationship with French women. While some of these relationships were entirely consensual, Roberts identifies the liaisons betwixt soldiers and prostitutes as the defining cultural encounter between the French and the Americans. Senior regular army leaders proved reluctant to openly acknowledge or command the sexual merchandise in France lest the American public--especially American women--learn of the debauchery. Every bit a result, the protests of local French politicians to American military machine leaders to better regulate soldiers' behavior fell on deaf ears.

The accounts and anecdotes offered by Roberts are extremely illustrative and at times quite amusing, but beneath the surface of licentiousness is a night undercurrent of exploitation. The U.S. Regular army's materiel largesse proved irresistible to the French who had only known depravation since the German invasion. Complicating the situation was the seeming dearth of French men; many had been killed or were forcibly detained by the Germans, thus causing massive civil dislocation and inadvertently encouraging the GIs to take advantage of the gender imbalance and to perceive France as a feminine country with absent or weak men. In this surroundings, the soldiers establish it easy to turn their money and goods into sex offered by a bevy of French women. As a result, many women turned to prostitution to back up themselves or their families and completely upset the orderly, regulated system of prostitution that the French had long tolerated.

Roberts also tackles the subject of sexual violence. Allegations of rape of French women by American servicemen surfaced soon after the Allied invasion and persisted until the last soldier departed from Le Havre in 1946. The rapid Centrolineal accelerate in the late summer of 1944 offered sexual predators numerous opportunities to prey on French women. Army leaders, every bit they had with the prostitution consequence, chose to ignore the scope of the problem. Instead, many rape accusations were directed at the African American soldiers serving mostly in rear-echelon positions during the war. As Roberts documents in a survey of rape courts-martial from the period, African Americans suffered from a much college conviction charge per unit than their white counterparts. This systemic bias seemingly confirmed the racial stereotypes of the menses of black men as hypersexual and predatory and provided the ground forces with a scapegoat for the larger rape problem.

What Soldiers Do is a potent book with a compelling argument. Roberts relies on an impressive assortment of sources, including archival sources, oral histories, memoirs, and periodicals. She uses the soldiers' paper Stars and Stripes every bit the nigh important amongst many cultural signifiers of the GI experience, although some historians may quibble with her definition of the paper'south relationship to the U.South. armed forces. The footnotes are invaluable due to their level of detail, but the publisher unfortunately failed to include a full bibliography.

One of Roberts'due south larger points is the specificity of American behavior in France during World War Two, but this ascertainment raises many questions. For instance, she argues that the GI'southward behavior in French republic partially stemmed from American inexperience with political stewardship, but by 1944 the U.s. had been the regional hegemon in the Western Hemisphere for decades and had ofttimes interfered with the affairs of Latin American nations, aspects of which have been analyzed by historians in gendered, paternalistic terms.[1] Likewise, while Roberts quite convincingly demonstrates that the mythos of a sexualized France afflicted the GI's behavior, she gives picayune indication whether the problem extended across this function of the disharmonize. Indeed, both Britons and Australians famously characterized American fighting men in their respective countries equally "overpaid, over-sexed, and over here."[2] Does the American feel in France have any counterpart in Italia--another country with a specific cultural mystique--or in the Pacific and China-Burma-India theaters? Did the long pre-invasion buildup--longer than virtually other similar operations during the war--allow the soldiers' sexual expectations to raise? Most important, practice the trends described in her book accept any relationship to American notions of sex and masculinity of the menstruation; i.e., was the sexual conquest of France and other nations past GIs a reaction to the extreme emasculation that the Great Depression wrought upon American men?[3] These questions remain unanswered but would provide useful information for readers to appraise the American experience in France within the context of larger historical and cultural currents. If annihilation, Roberts leaves the reader wanting more, and this is not necessarily a trouble.

The thematic structure called by Roberts often, but not ever, causes her to treat the whole of the American experience in France from 1944 until 1946 equally a single unit of time. This system of organization underplays how the cease of the fighting in May 1945 may have physically and psychologically affected the soldiers and their sexual behaviors. When discussing the criminal activities of American soldiers, she states that theft and assail cases peaked in the summer and fall of 1945, but Roberts only attributes the spike to access to booze and the brutalization of war while completely ignoring that the postal service-VE Day forcefulness confronted more lax standards of discipline amid the drudgery of occupation duty. A specific criminal incident in July 1945 mentioned later involving soldiers attacking French policemen attempting to abort a pair of prostitutes likewise escapes whatsoever attempt at temporal contextualization by the author. Only when discussing allegations of rape along the postal service-breakout forepart of 1944 does Roberts explicitly link aspects of her broader argument to specific phases of the military machine campaign in northern Europe. Roberts'south pick to organize her work thematically does not fatally undermine What Soldiers Do, but it gives readers a less-nuanced portrait of American soldiers than of the French people and their civilization. Information technology is an unfortunate choice in an otherwise smartly executed piece of work.

What Soldiers Do is a valuable contribution to World War II historiography and should open up new avenues of historical research into the cultural appointment that accompanies America's overseas armed services campaigns. Most important, it serves to showcase the possibilities for incorporating more cultural and gender analysis into military history. It may be controversial, but information technology deserves a wide audition.

Notes

[i]. Come across Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Castilian-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); and Emily S. Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2004).

[2]. The exact origins of this phrase are obscure, merely have been used in reference to both Uk and Australia in the decades since.

[three]. Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, 2nd. ed. (New York: Oxford Academy Press, 2006), 127-146; and Christina S. Jarvis, The Male Body at War: American Masculinity during Globe War Ii (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Printing, 2004), three-23, 186.

If in that location is additional discussion of this review, y'all may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-cyberspace.org/h-war.

Commendation: Ryan Wadle. Review of Roberts, Mary Louise, What Soldiers Do: Sexual practice and the American GI in Globe State of war 2 France. H-War, H-Net Reviews. May, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=39434

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Source: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=39434

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