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.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23328187)

Alongside this was the problem of prostitution, a convenient omission from Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers. By paying for sex, Roberts writes, “a GI was taught not only to use a French woman for his own ends, but also to exert control over French civilians in general… The shame of [a prostitute’s] commerce became the shame of the nation.”

If the US military was happy to turn a blind eye to such behaviour, the same could not be said for rape accusations against American GIs by French women, which did much to “undermine the myth of the American mission embodied in the manly GI.” These accusations, Roberts notes, were taken surprisingly seriously, as they “suggested what could be seen as the brutal reality of US dominance.”

However, the military’s response only exposed the brutal reality of American life. Among the most valuable statistics What Soldiers Do contains is that between 1944 and 1945, 29 public executions by hanging were performed as a result of rape convictions. Of those hanged, 25 were African-American soldiers. French women, Roberts insists, were just as culpable as the US military: scapegoating African-Americans was a means of ensuring that someone would be punished for their rapes, if not the exact culprit."

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/blog/what-soldiers-do-review-france-second-world-war/#.Ua3zlthvArI

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23328201)

So they took rape accusations seriously? That's a pretty big fucking deal and very commendable of the US command, but of course this scholar wants to say it was all just disingenuous. LOL at the idea that the US command could/should crack down on consensual sex or sex with prostitutes.

The hanging statistics sound sketchy.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23328455)

She actually talks about how the Army sent for a hangman from Texas, because the French only did guillotines.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23328480)

and i love how the author assumes it emasculated the country even more because the fell to the germans quicker than fucking poland.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23328222)

And that lieutenant's actually your brother, because your "father", the crippled Somme veteran who raised you, was alpha'd around by Hank the Yank back in 1918.

Cot damn, no wonder the Frenchies undermine us at every turn.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23328268)

Humiliation is one of the strongest, and least studied, factors in national psychology. It's useful to remember that the French (and the British) are not our friends.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23328325)

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/channel-island-people-profited-from-nazis-1353247.html

"Jersey women's behaviour was resented even more than the food shortage. One anonymous informant told his intelligence debriefer: 'The behaviour of a great number of women has been quite disgraceful. There are many illegitimate children on the island born to German fathers ... Many of the mothers are married to serving British soldiers ... The states [island parliament] at present have to pay for the upkeep of these German-sired children but what will happen after the occupation?'

He pointed out that under Jersey law a husband was responsible for the upkeep of his wife's illegitimate children and there was no redress....

The escapees described plans for revenge on unfaithful women. 'The patriotic youths of the island have their own plans well laid,' the papers say. 'They are not going to copy the French by cutting off the hair ... They have been collecting stocks of tar for the day of liberation and publicly tar and father [SIC] all Jerrybags they can lay their hands on ... The local police are determined to turn a blind eye when the husbands return because murder will be done and public opinion will in general approve.'"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23328686)

Sounds like pure unadulterated bullshit. A rumor/meme like this (which probably had a lot of truth to it) would spread like wildfire among soldiers all on its own, no way it was initiated or substantially aided by any systematic effort.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23328438)

Apparently prostitution was not even considered immoral in France and was legal for 100 years prior. So the idea had some truth to it, and this undermines the "humiliation" narrative.

This review is instructive:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R1DUQ1F23DF1B9/ref=cm_cr_pr_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00CFZAPXK&linkCode=&nodeID=&tag=#wasThisHelpful

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23328497)

The review you posted is garbage. He's not a very attentive reader, and his points, such as they are, are convoluted and irrelevant.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23328540)

Secondly, her musings and conclusions are fraught with silly 21st century American attitudes to which, as a self-proclaimed historian, she should be immune. Prostitution was legal and not considered immoral in early 20th century France. She further talks about "Gallic manhood" as if she could possibly understand the aggregation of and the deep problems of Vichy France and their surrender to the Germans. She further launches into a weird and anomalous diatribe of some nebulous concept which she labels as the "unrelenting rules of manhood"; I don't know to what she refers but I can only assume that her sororal professors deeply commiserate with this undefined concept.

In short, I'm tempted to believe this book is yet another example of poor, non-peer-reviewed scholarship of a lesbian professor who is desperately trying to inflict her views of history on the world. I will keep reading this book if only to point our more examples of this silly leftist propaganda.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R1U5A7YIZWX35L/ref=cm_cr_pr_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0226923096&linkCode=&nodeID=&tag=#wasThisHelpful

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23328520)

If only the world could be filled with deep and thoughtful scholars who REALLY SEE THINGS AS THEY ARE like ............,...............,.....,.;;;;;;....! Oh, what a world it would be!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23328700)

That simple point was beyond the grasp of this doltish reviewer, who goes into a long-winded and completely irrelevant defense of French permissiveness towards prostitution. Well, no shit, that's why they wanted the GIs contained in brothels instead of running around with married women and schoolgirls. That's what sparked French ire. You can't read the book and miss this.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23328724)

So just to clarify, Frenchwomen had generally been acting like a bunch of shameless whores (risque cabaret shows, socially liberal attitudes towards sex, legalized prostitution for a century before WWII, etc.) for decades by the 1940s, and were in fact well known for being kind of slutty long before this...

...and yet we are to believe that it was a 'systematic' attempt to sexualize all of France's female population by The Powers That Be in The Evil American Military that lead to a bunch of young American GIs who faced death every day and desperately needed an outlet to blow their collective load treating them like a bunch of hookers?

Got it. This is indeed deep insight right here, thank you.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23328744)

I'll poast more later for the benefit of people who weren't lobotomized as infants.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23328807)

...So you mean like the general perception of America (based on our popular culture) as a souless, vacuous land filled with sluts and moral decay? I.e., the very same prevailing view of America in the Muslim world that has poured fuel on the fire of the "us vs. them" mentality that leads Islamists to plan and execute terrorist attacks against America?

Yeah it's amazing how widespread generalizations about a culture can impact how other cultures perceive and interact with the people from that culture. Almost like that backs up the point I was making or something.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23329002)

The point you're now making that (lol) "widespread generalizations about a culture can impact how other cultures perceive and interact with the people from that culture" is so banal it belongs in the human resources handbook for a colony of retards.

Of course, none of this gets at my criticism of the illiterate Amazon reviewer. That France legalized prostitution is irrelevant to the book's argument. The French authorities offered to set up brothels for American soldiers. The American commanders, for a variety of reasons (including justifiable fears about venereal disease), turned them down. Instead, they encouraged fraternization, which turned into de facto prostitution: sex for bread.

The French were appalled because Americans solicited (in fact, preferred) sex with schoolgirls and married women. You have to remember that parts of France were still very traditionalist and Catholic. Eventually, American commanders relented on prostitution, but not before a venereal firestorm broke out and French soldiers, equipped with American weapons, threatened to fire on American soldiers.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23332404)

If we see this problem in other occupied territories--and it's my understanding that we do--doesn't this imply something necessary to the power structure between the people (and, specifically, the women) of an occupied territory and the conquerors/liberators (of course, the men) of that territory? Do we see it vary at all between a putatively liberating force and a putatively occupying force?

Naturally this would enhance, not detract, from the author's argument if she phrased it generally: look, there is something pernicious about men in positions over power over vulnerable populations. Tale old as time, song old as rhyme, etc. But then if her argument is about American hegemony or patriarchy specifically, it is reduced to an instance rather than an exemplar or uniquely bad instance--unless there was something peculiarly shitty about the Americans' treatment of French women.

I'm not sure that bromides about patriarchy explains what would appear to me to be a pretty complicated systems of power relations spanning across economic, political, cultural, and other domains though, especially since in cases such as this we could easily see the patriarchy 'explanation' equally predicting mutually-contradictory results. For example, it is unquestionable that refusing, rather that permitting, the establishment of legal brothels reduces the instances of (what a feminist would consider to be) exploitative use of sex to survive in Vichy France, for example. Yet the American application of 'patriarchal' power guaranteed just that, whatever other evils it may have generated. So how does she explain this, or does she bother?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23336602)

okay, which one of you faggots wrote this review

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23328595)

LJL, evil shitlibs. I just wish there was a promise of French pussy for defeating you, because you are worse than the Nazis.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23328594)

DECONSTRUCTION: A CUCKOLD'S REVENGE

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23328603)

faithless whores.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2273314&forum_id=2#23336484)