Mary Roberts - What Soldiers Do

32 Claude Malon, Le Havre colonial de 1880 à 1960 (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2006), 516–17, 532, 545.

33 ADM, 1366 W, MT , Yves Bouder, “La rédaction imaginaire,” 101.

34 Pierre Aubéry, “Le Camp Tareyton,” Le Havre-éclair , 12 June 1945.

35 Danièle Philippe, J’avais quinze ans… en juin 44, en Normandie (Paris: Éditions France-Empire, 1994), 144. See also Front National , 12 September 1944.

36 NARA, RG 331, Entry 6, Box 11, report dated 16 March 1945.

37 The parallel to 1789 is again helpful. Fear was a pervasive emotion in the French countryside in 1789, not only because of political upheaval but also low grain supplies.

38 NARA, RG 331, Entry 6, Box 11, report dated 28 November 1944.

39 Quoted in Footitt, War and Liberation , 91.

40 Mémorial de Caen (hereafter MDC), TE 277, Marcelle Hamel-Hateau, “Des mémoires d’une petite maîtresse d’école de Normandie: souvenirs du Débarquement de juin 1944,”19.

41 HOBR, CMC 3859, 10:391–407.

42 MDC, Séries FN–France Normandie, Trevières, “Américains—Normands—Omaha—1944,” 35. Marguerite Gidon was twenty-six in 1944. Bernesq is a small village at the base of the Cotentin Peninsula. In this document, see also the témoignage of Madame Marie Jeanne Leneveu, 43.

43 NARA, RG 331, Entry 6, Box 11, report dated 15 December 1944.

44 NARA, RG 331, Entry 6, Box 11, report dated 21 November 1944.

45 Service Historique de la Gendarmerie Nationale, (hereafter SHGN), 76E 200, Brigade territoriale de Cany-Barville, registres de correspondance courante au départ, 7 September 1944 to 11 December 1946, report dated 8 February 1945. Not all civilians had a negative view of black soldiers. See, for example, MDC, Séries FN–France Normandie, “Grancamp-Les-Bains-Maisy, 1939–1945, témoignages, ouvrage réalisé par l’association Grexpo,” 1994, témoignage of Madame Claude Anquetil.

46 NARA, RG 331, Entry 6, Box 11, report dated 1 April 1945.

47 ADC, 9 W 45, Rapports du préfet, rapports mensuels et bimensuels, 1945, reports dated 30 April, 20 May, 24 May, 10 June, 25 June. See also ADC, 9 W 55/2 Police, rapports bimensuels de gendarmerie, report dated 3 May 1945; ADC, 21 W 17, Rapports mensuels de préfet, documents préparatoires de synthèse, 1945, reports dated 20 April, 19 June.

48 ADC, 9 W 45, Rapports du préfet, rapports mensuels et bimensuels, report dated 23 December 1944. See also ibid., reports dated 23 February, 28 February 1945; and ADC, 21 W 16, Rapports mensuel du préfet, documents préparatoires de synthèse, report dated 19 March 1945.

49 ADC, 21 W 16, Rapports mensuels du préfet: documents préparatoires de synthèse, report dated 19 February 1945.

50 AMH, FC H4 15–6, letter dated 19 September 1945. Voisin himself so disliked African American soldiers that on the first anniversary of the liberation of Le Havre, he ordered his assistant to call local American officials in order to let them know that “only white soldiers will be admitted” to the celebration. See AMH I1 46–7, letter dated 6 September 1945.

51 There were accusations of rape in the Marne. See Archives Départmentales de la Marne (hereafter ADMar), 16 W 268, Affaires réservees: Incidents avec les troupes alliées, report dated 20 September 1944. Overwhelmingly, however, the police reported thefts and minor assaults.

52 See chapter 7.

53 See chapter 1.

54 Herval, Bataille de Normandie , 1:70.

55 ADM, 13 num 3047.

56 For complaints about American requisitioning of property in Le Havre, see AMH, FC H4 14–15; FC I1 68–4; FC H4 15–5. For the Marne, see ADMar, 16 W 266, Relations avec les autorités alliées; ADMar, 132 W 276, Mission militaire française de liaison après de l’armée américaine. For Caen, see ADC, 21 W 16, Rapports mensuels du préfet: documents préparatoires de synthèse, report dated 19 February 1945; ADC, 726 W 16 905, Correspondance avec les autorités militaires alliées au sujet de sépultures alliées et enemies.

57 Roger Hilliquin, Les années de guerre d’un adolescent havrais, 1939–1945 (Luneray: Éditions Bertout, 2002), 118.

58 Le Havre-éclair , 12 August 1945.

59 ADM, 1366 W, MT , memoir of Raymond Avignon, 30.

60 ADM, 1366 W, MT , diary of Henri Dabrin, 175.

61 Footitt, War and Liberation , 72, 86. She concludes that “the population felt swamped by the presence of the Liberators.”

62 ADC, 726 W 16, 865 Prostitution, report dated 5 March 1945. In November 1944, Yvette Mesnil, accused by the police of prostitution in Cherbourg, knew to evade the charge by arguing she was too “disgusted” to have sex with the black soldiers at a nearby camp. See ADM, Séries 3 U, Justice, Fonds du Tribunal de première instance de Cherbourg, procès-verbal (hereafter Séries 3 U), report dated 14 November 1944.

63 ADM, Séries 3 U, reports dated 24 January 1945 and 26 July 1945.

64 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 63. In the secondary literature, see Richard Fogarty, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914–1918 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), chap. 6.

65 Pamela Scully, “Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa,” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (April 1995): 338. The Indian mutiny of 1857 is perhaps the most famous example of the links between political rebellion and sexual transgression. See Jennie Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993), 57–84. Historian Ann Stoler has observed the coincidence of political tensions in interwar Algeria with the widespread diffusion of images defining Algerian men as sexually hyperaggressive. See Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 58–59.

66 See Pap Ndiaye, La Condition noire: Essai sur une minorité française (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2008), 130–33. According to Ndiaye, 134,000 Senegalese soldiers fought in France during the First World War. See also Marc Michel, Les Africains et la Grande Guerre: l’appel à l’Afrique (1914–1918) (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2003).

67 See Raffael Scheck, Hitler’s African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Gregory Mann, Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 111–16; Myron Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West Africa, 1857–1960 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991), chap 6; Ndiaye, La Condition noire , 148–61.

68 Jean Yves Le Naour, Misères et tourments de la chair durant la Grande Guerre: Les moeurs sexuelles des Français, 1914–1918 (Paris: Aubier, 2002), 204–5; Christelle Taraud, La prostitution coloniale: Algérie, Tunisie, Maroc (1830–1962) (Paris: Éditions Payot, 2003), 341–42, 346–47; Fogarty, Race and War in France , chap. 6. Some GIs remembered the brothels trailing behind North African units. See Robert Adleman and George Walton, The Champagne Campaign (Boston: Little, Brown and Company), 219.

69 Vincent Joly, “Sexe, guerres et désir colonial,” in François Rouquet et al., eds. Amours, guerres et sexualité, 1914–1945 , ed. François Rouquet et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 67.

70 Taraud, La Prostitution coloniale , 351–52.