Louts in Uniform

Abstract

or those who celebrate World War II's Normandy invasion as a high point of good war, Mary Louise Roberts's book adds a dose of sobering reality. War, of course, is hell on all sides, with terror, destruction, maiming, and death. And, as Roberts shows, even in moments of shared victory, military celebration can come conjoined with violence and viola- tion. In this history of U.S. military in wartime France, GIs of greatest generation—the ones who helped liberate France from Nazi occupation—behaved in loutish and criminal ways. The U.S. drank, fought, pawed, pillaged, raped, and murdered. Roberts relates a history of sexuality, but this is not sweet sex of wartime lovers finding comfort in each other's arms. This is, instead, a history mostly of rowdy exploitation, hard-eyed exchange, brutal assault, and rank injustice. A number of recent scholarly works provide scaffolding on which Roberts carefully builds. We now have historical accounts of vast sex work industry near U.S. military bases during and after World War II and of rape committed by GIs in war zones and occupied territories. 1 We also have a growing body of literature on gendered discourse of twentieth- century foreign relations, in which U.S. officials understood their own nation as virile, positioning others as feminized subordinates. 2 Roberts weaves these historiographic strands together with those from French history. She argues that heterosexuality shored up battered masculinity of GIs trau- matized by war and also helped to naturalize rising American hegemony in Europe through a fantasy of sexual control and virile achievement (67). Roberts begins her book with romance. Here she sidesteps social history of everyday dating, mating, sex, and love, and focuses on representa- tions in which welcoming women came to symbolize rescue of France by heroic GIs. In U.S. military publication Stars and Stripes and eventually in Life magazine, photos of French women kissing GIs cast the American mission in Europe . . . as heterosexual romance (59). In this visual trope, a grateful feminine France literally embraced its manly American saviors. In book's second section—on prostitution—sex workers replace smiling women who offered only kisses. The prostitute came to stand for a France that was defeated, subordinated, and bought. The GI liberators expected sexual rewards from French women, and they also took on sexual impunity of an occupying force. They bought sexual services with cigarettes, food, and money, and then expressed contempt for indigent