What Troopers Do: Intercourse and the American GI in World Conflict II France

How do you persuade males to cost throughout closely mined seashores into lethal machine-gun hearth? Do you attraction to their bonds with their fellow troopers, their patriotism, their want to finish tyranny and mass homicide? Definitely—however when you’re the US Military in 1944, you additionally strive one other tack: you dangle the lure of lovely French girls, ready simply on the opposite facet of the wire, able to reward their liberators in oh so some ways.

That’s not the image of the Best Technology that we’ve been given, however it’s the one Mary Louise Roberts paints to devastating impact in
What Troopers Do. Drawing on an unimaginable vary of sources, together with information studies, propaganda and coaching supplies, official planning paperwork, wartime diaries, and memoirs, Roberts tells the fascinating and troubling story of how the US navy command systematically unfold—after which exploited—the parable of French girls as sexually skilled and out there. The ensuing chaos—starting from flagrant public intercourse with prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal illness—horrified the war-weary and demoralized French inhabitants. The sexual predation, and the blithe response of the American navy management, additionally precipitated critical friction between the 2 nations simply as they had been making an attempt to settle questions of long-term management over the liberated territories and the restoration of French sovereignty. 

Whereas by no means denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery of the troopers who took half,
What Troopers Do reminds us that historical past is all the time extra helpful—and extra attention-grabbing—when it’s most sincere, and when it goes past the burnished fantastic thing about nostalgia to grapple with the actual lives and actual errors of the individuals who lived it.