Mary Roberts - What Soldiers Do

71 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), 112–13; Maurice Larkin, France since the Popular Front, Government and People, 1936–1986 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 119–21.

72 See chapter 3.

73 Alice Kaplan, The Interpreter (New York: Free Press, 2005), 151.

74 ADM, 13 num 3054, 13 num 3068. See also ADMa, 132 W 276, Mission militaire française de liaison après de l’Armée américaine.

75 ADC, 9 W 53, Police, rapports journaliers, reports dated 21 April and 26 April 1945.

76 ADM, 13 num 3128.

77 ADM, 13 num 3039; NARA, RG 331, Entry 54, Box 111, reports dated 1 August and 14 August 1944.

78 See ADMar, 130 W 9, Rapports mensuels sur la situation générale adressés, report dated 28 December 1944.

79 ADC, 21 W 16, Rapports mensuels du préfet: documents préparatoires de synthèse, report dated 3 March 1945.

80 Suzanne Bigeon née Arnault, “Journal tenu pendant les jours précédant la Libération de Cherbourg: Le Débarquement. Les Allemands. Les Américains.” MDC, TE 207. Bigeon’s journal was recorded in 1944, then revised and edited by Colette Arnault in 1979–80.

81 Keith Nelson, “The Black Horror on the Rhine: Race as a Factor in Post–World War I Diplomacy,” Journal of Modern History 42 (December 1970): 613. See also Jean-Yves Le Naour, La honte noir: l’Allemagne et les troupes coloniales françaises, 1914–1945 (Paris: Hachette Littératures, 2003).

82 Nelson, “Black Horror.” See also Julia Roos, “Women’s Rights, Nationalist Anxiety, and the ‘Moral’ Agenda in the Early Weimar Republic: Revisiting the ‘Black Horror’ Campaign against France’s African Occupation Troops,” Central European History 42, no. 3 (2009): 473–508; Ruth Simms Hamilton, “Orchestrating Race, Nation, and Gender: African Peacekeepers in Germany, 1919–1920,” and Dana S. Hale, “Brothers in Arms? African Soldiers in Interwar France,” in Routes of Passage: Rethinking the African Diaspora , ed. Ruth Simms Hamilton, 2 vols. (East Lansing: Michigan State Press, 2007), 1:337, 361.

83 Nelson, “Black Horror,” 613, 619.

84 Two other sets of rape accusations point to the links between sexual violence and national humiliation during these years. First, in the Italian campaign of 1943–44, rumors circulated of Moroccan soldiers committing rape after the population was liberated by the French Army. See Olivier Wieviorka, La mémoire désunie: le souvenir politique des années sombres, de la Libération à nos jours (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2010), 262. Second, there were widespread rumors that Senegalese troops had supposedly raped German women in Stuttgart. American senator James Eastland referred to these rapes in his filibuster against the Fair Employment Practices Committee. See chapter 7.

85 ADC, 13 T II/44, Liberator , 24 June 1944. See HOBR, CMC 7518, 8:351–61 for the case in question.

86 SHAEF Intelligence report dated 21 October 1944, quoted in Andrew A. Thomson, “‘Over There’ 1944/45, Americans in the Liberation of France: Their Perceptions of, and Relations with, France and the French” (PhD thesis, University of Kent at Canterbury, 1996), 206–7.

87 Jean Galtier-Boissière, Mon journal depuis la Libération (Paris: La Jeune Parque, 1945), 35.

88 Lucien Lepoittevin, Mémoire de guerres (1692–1993) (Cherbourg: Isoète, 1994), 107–8.

89 G. Morris, Assasin, mon frère (Monaco [Paris]: Éditions de Rocher, 1990), 22, 59.

90 Louis Guilloux, Ok, Joe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 7–9.

91 Ibid., 67–70.

92 Ibid., 41.

93 Ibid., 78.

94 For wartime propaganda about the United States as the “greatest democracy in the world,” see Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, ARC 074–61 Alliés (1) and (2); ARC 074–62 Alliés (2); and ARC 074–67 Alliés (7)—États Unis.

1 Archives de la Préfecture de Police, Paris, F.446.559. In accordance with French law, I have changed the names of those involved in the accident.

2 André Siegfried, “Les États-Unis à la croisée des chemins,” Le figaro , 26 March 1945.

3 For an analysis of the photograph as a form of public culture, see John Louis Lucaites and Robert Hariman, “The Time Square Kiss: Iconic Photography and Civic Renewal in U.S. Public Culture,” Journal of American History 94, no. 1 (June 2007): 122–31. Another photograph that appears evocative in relationship to “Time Square Kiss,” is Robert Doisneau’s “Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de ville.” This equally famous photo shows a French man kissing a French woman in front of the Parisian City Hall. Taken in 1950, five years after the war, the photo can be read as an iconographic response to both Robert Morris’s 1944 photograph of a GI kissing a French woman and Eisenstadt’s “Time Square Kiss.” Doisneau posed the picture on an assignment for Life magazine, where the other two photographs initially appeared.

4 Carol Gluck, “Operations of Memory: Comfort Women and the World,” in Ruptured Histories: War, Memory and the Post–Cold War in Asia , ed. Sheila Myoshi Jager and Rana Mitter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 48.

Page numbers followed by the letter f indicate illustrations.

abattoirs (whorehouses), 140

AEF (American Expeditionary Forces), 135

African American soldiers: assignment of black soldiers to service units, 202; behavioral assumptions by both black soldiers and French women, 220–21; belief in a “special” relationship with the French people, 236–38, 333n205; French prejudices against ( see black terror on the Bocage ); military’s denial and hiding of any racial discrimination, 233–35, 332nn188–90; postliberation designation of segregated brothels, 169, 315n66; racial tensions surrounding interracial socializing, 201; rape accusations against ( see racialization of rape); segregationist policies and practices in the military, 199, 200–201, 323n23, 323n25, 323n31; white soldiers leveraging prejudices against blacks, 219–20

Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories (AMGOT), 5, 263n6

Allied Signal Engineer Corps, 49

Ambrose, Stephen, 11, 16, 17, 98–99, 116, 264n20

America Comes of Age (Siegfried), 9

American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), 135

American GIs and French civilians: black market system, 116–20, 295n37; contrast between the robust GIs and the small French, 103–4; deterioration of GI-to-civilian relations, 123–24, 297n80; French disgust at the sexual behavior of the women, 129–31, 300n140; French view of prostitutes, 115–16; GI attitude that the French owed them a debt, 124; GIs profiting from chocolate and cigarettes, 122; GIs’ belief that they deserved the sexual prerogatives of conquest, 108–9; humiliating effect of US generosity, 120–22; impact of sex as a commodity on the American liberators, 115; prostitution’s availability, 125–29; sexual behavior of French women connected to French national identity, 131–32; shift in meaning of American surplus as a token of friendship, 124–25; surplus products’ use as tools of corruption, 122–23, 297n76; US global power shaped by its wealth, 113–14, 132

American Mercury , 108, 110

American Red Cross, 150–51, 307n125

American Soldier, The (Stouffer), 264n17

American women: Life magazine’s depiction of, 70–71f; military’s use of pinups as a motivational tool for the GIs, 61–62, 63f; public’s awareness of GI bad behavior, 75; reaction to the GI photos, 68–72