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Sex and the American GI in World War II France
University Of Chicago Press
May 2013
On Sale: May 10, 2013
364 pages
ISBN: 0226923096
EAN: 9780226923093
Kindle: B00CFZAPXK
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
How do you convince men to charge across heavily mined
beaches into deadly machine-gun fire? Do you appeal to their
bonds with their fellow soldiers, their patriotism, their
desire to end tyranny and mass murder? Certainly—but if
you’re the US Army in 1944, you also try another tack: you
dangle the lure of beautiful French women, waiting just on
the other side of the wire, ready to reward their liberators
in oh so many ways. That’s not the picture of the Greatest Generation that we’ve
been given, but it’s the one Mary Louise Roberts paints to
devastating effect in What Soldiers Do. Drawing on an
incredible range of sources, including news reports,
propaganda and training materials, official planning
documents, wartime diaries, and memoirs, Roberts tells the
fascinating and troubling story of how the US military
command systematically spread—and then exploited—the myth of
French women as sexually experienced and available. The
resulting chaos—ranging from flagrant public sex with
prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal
disease—horrified the war-weary and demoralized French
population. The sexual predation, and the blithe response of
the American military leadership, also caused serious
friction between the two nations just as they were
attempting to settle questions of long-term control over the
liberated territories and the restoration of French
sovereignty. While never denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery
of the soldiers who took part, What Soldiers Do reminds us
that history is always more useful—and more interesting—when
it is most honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished
beauty of nostalgia to grapple with the real lives and real
mistakes of the people who lived it.
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