What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War II France

Abstract

MARY LOUISE ROBERTS What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2013, 368 pp.The intimate relationships that developed between American soldiers and French women during the Second World War as represented in American films such as Catch Me If You Can (2002) or Words (2012) are shown to be always romantic, adventurous, and ending up with the formation of a family. By contrast, French films that deal with the same subject depict the harsher realities of such connections. In Leon Morin, pretre (1961), for example, the main character, a French woman, is heading home with her daughter when two GI's they meet on the way decide to escort them, one offering to carry her bag. When they arrive home, the aforementioned soldier insists that the woman accompany him upstairs, and then proceeds to slowly force himself upon her, being stopped only by the woman's cries and his friend's intervention1.Mary Louise Roberts' book, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France, is concerned precisely with the difficult encounters such as the one described above, which were made possible by the Allied invasion of in 1944. Amply documented, the author shows an impressive command of both American and French archival sources, as well as of the existing secondary literature dealing with the epoch.Right from first pages, the reader gets a sense of the taboo subject the book is dealing with when Roberts mentions that her late father felt uneasy with the prospects of his daughter unearthing what went wrong in Normandy (xii). However, unlike other recent revisionist historians who have dealt with WII, Roberts does not question the morality of the war2, but rather certain decisions and behaviors of American troops following D-Day.Divided into three parts, Romance, Prostitution and Rape, the book successfully brings light on the development of sexual connections - both consensual and non-consensual - between American soldiers and French women, placing them in the context of twentieth century French politics and international relations. The notion that the personal is political has become common knowledge today, yet scholars who take note of this tend to restrict it to the policies of the nation state. By going beyond this trend, Roberts' study makes for an important addition to the literature on the history of sexuality.The first part of the book deals with the American invasion of and the early contacts between the American army and the French civilian population. When dealing with the invasion, Roberts uses techniques from Alltagsgeschichte, the Annales School type of cultural history, postcolonial and gender studies to go beyond standard military descriptions of the subject. She is concerned with the manner in which both the Americans and the French reacted, and successively adapted to the sights, sounds and smells, of war torn Normandy.Nonetheless, one cannot feel but wish that when handling such a subject, Roberts would pay more attention to certain matters instead of others. For example, when dealing with the way that Normans dealt with the dead bodies of American and German soldiers, she notes that the French universally showed respect for the fallen Americans and nothing but contempt for the Germans, so much so that even small children took part in grave robbing. Considering that Roberts previously showed that Americans received a rather ambiguous reception in Normandy, one is struck by the stark contrast between the attitude showed towards the living and the dead. The motive for this differentiation is left unanswered, and the reader is left puzzled. …