The Price of Discretion Mary Louise Roberts Review

Mary Louise Roberts. What Soldiers Practice: Sex and the American GI in World War II France. Chicago: Academy of Chicago Press, 2013. xii + 351 pp. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-92309-3; $19.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-226-92311-half-dozen.

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

Mary Louise Roberts's What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in Earth State of war II French republic is a provocative cultural history of the American war machine occupation of France from D-Day until 1946. Similar Paul Fussell's studies, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the 2d Globe War (1990) and The Boys' Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-45 (2003), which challenge the "skilful war" narrative that still pervades much of the popular retentiveness of World War 2, What Soldiers Do exposes an element of the American wartime experience on the margins and only briefly acknowledged past past histories and presentations of the war. It also offers a stark dissimilarity to many earlier histories of the war by using gender and cultural analysis in a topic where operational historians however hold the basis.

Roberts argues that a combination of remembered tales of lustful beliefs by American "doughboys" in World State of war I and semiofficial propaganda disseminated past the newspaper Stars and Stripes and other outlets raised expectations amongst GIs that France would become an erotic playground after they invaded the country. Once on the continent in June 1944, American soldiers apace entered into every manner of sexual relationship with French women. While some of these relationships were entirely consensual, Roberts identifies the liaisons between soldiers and prostitutes as the defining cultural run across between the French and the Americans. Senior army leaders proved reluctant to openly acknowledge or control the sexual merchandise in France lest the American public--particularly American women--learn of the debauchery. As a result, the protests of local French politicians to American military leaders to improve regulate soldiers' behavior savage on deaf ears.

The accounts and anecdotes offered by Roberts are extremely illustrative and at times quite amusing, only beneath the surface of licentiousness is a dark undercurrent of exploitation. The U.S. Army'southward materiel largesse proved irresistible to the French who had merely 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 accept advantage of the gender imbalance and to perceive France as a feminine country with absent or weak men. In this environment, the soldiers found information technology easy to turn their money and appurtenances into sex offered by a bevy of French women. Equally 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 later the Centrolineal invasion and persisted until the last soldier departed from Le Havre in 1946. The rapid Allied accelerate in the belatedly summer of 1944 offered sexual predators numerous opportunities to casualty on French women. Ground forces leaders, as they had with the prostitution issue, chose to ignore the scope of the problem. Instead, many rape accusations were directed at the African American soldiers serving generally in rear-echelon positions during the war. Every bit Roberts documents in a survey of rape courts-martial from the period, African Americans suffered from a much higher conviction rate than their white counterparts. This systemic bias seemingly confirmed the racial stereotypes of the menses of black men equally hypersexual and predatory and provided the army with a scapegoat for the larger rape problem.

What Soldiers Do is a stiff book with a compelling argument. Roberts relies on an impressive array of sources, including archival sources, oral histories, memoirs, and periodicals. She uses the soldiers' newspaper Stars and Stripes as the nearly important among many cultural signifiers of the GI experience, although some historians may quibble with her definition of the paper's relationship to the U.S. armed services. The footnotes are invaluable due to their level of detail, just the publisher unfortunately failed to include a total bibliography.

Ane of Roberts'south larger points is the specificity of American behavior in French republic during Earth State of war 2, but this ascertainment raises many questions. For example, she argues that the GI's behavior in France partially stemmed from American inexperience with political stewardship, but by 1944 the United States had been the regional hegemon in the Western Hemisphere for decades and had oftentimes interfered with the affairs of Latin American nations, aspects of which have been analyzed by historians in gendered, paternalistic terms.[1] Also, while Roberts quite assuredly demonstrates that the mythos of a sexualized France afflicted the GI's behavior, she gives little indication whether the problem extended beyond this part of the conflict. Indeed, both Britons and Australians famously characterized American fighting men in their respective countries as "overpaid, over-sexed, and over here."[2] Does the American experience in France accept any analogue in Italy--another land with a specific cultural mystique--or in the Pacific and Red china-Burma-India theaters? Did the long pre-invasion buildup--longer than most other like operations during the war--allow the soldiers' sexual expectations to heighten? Most important, exercise the trends described in her volume have whatsoever relationship to American notions of sexual activity and masculinity of the period; i.e., was the sexual conquest of France and other nations past GIs a reaction to the farthermost emasculation that the Swell Depression wrought upon American men?[3] These questions remain unanswered but would provide useful data for readers to assess the American experience in France within the context of larger historical and cultural currents. If anything, Roberts leaves the reader wanting more, and this is not necessarily a problem.

The thematic structure chosen past Roberts ofttimes, just non always, causes her to treat the whole of the American experience in France from 1944 until 1946 as a unmarried unit of time. This system of arrangement underplays how the end of the fighting in May 1945 may have physically and psychologically afflicted the soldiers and their sexual behaviors. When discussing the criminal activities of American soldiers, she states that theft and set on cases peaked in the summer and fall of 1945, but Roberts only attributes the spike to admission to alcohol and the brutalization of state of war while completely ignoring that the post-VE Solar day force confronted more lax standards of bailiwick amongst 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 any attempt at temporal contextualization by the author. Merely when discussing allegations of rape along the post-breakout front of 1944 does Roberts explicitly link aspects of her broader statement to specific phases of the military entrada in northern Europe. Roberts's option to organize her work thematically does not fatally undermine What Soldiers Do, only information technology gives readers a less-nuanced portrait of American soldiers than of the French people and their culture. It is an unfortunate choice in an otherwise smartly executed work.

What Soldiers Do is a valuable contribution to Earth War II historiography and should open up new avenues of historical research into the cultural engagement that accompanies America'southward overseas war machine campaigns. Most important, information technology 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 audience.

Notes

[1]. Meet Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); and Emily Due south. Rosenberg, Fiscal Missionaries to the Globe: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2004).

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

[3]. Michael Due south. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, 2nd. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 127-146; and Christina S. Jarvis, The Male person Body at State of war: American Masculinity during World State of war II (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004), 3-23, 186.

If there is additional give-and-take of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-state of war.

Citation: Ryan Wadle. Review of Roberts, Mary Louise, What Soldiers Do: Sexual practice and the American GI in World War Ii French republic. 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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