History: didja' know American GIs were big-time rapists, hated for it, in France?

[Apollonian]

American WWII GIs were dangerous sex-crazed rapists who the French feared as much as the Germans, explosive book claims​

•Book 'debunks myth that the GI were manly and always behaved well'

•By 1944 women in Normandy 'filed complaints about rapes by US soldiers'

•Debauchery, lawlessness and institutional racism are chronicled in book

•Penned by Mary Roberts, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin

•Veterans Affairs rep says there is 'no way' to reprimand the U.S. soldiers

•Comes just after Sexual Assault Prevention Month in the U.S., where the military is under fire for string of high-profile assault cases

•Japanese politician also just claimed that American soldiers used their women as 'sex slaves' during WWII

By Mail Foreign Service
Published: 08:58 EST, 29 May 2013 | Updated: 20:46 EST, 29 May 2013

Link: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...nch-feared-Germans-explosive-book-claims.html

Swapping stockings for kisses and teaching girls how to jive, American GIs were meant to be a welcome ray of sunshine in war-torn Europe.

But a new book has revealed the dark side of Europe’s liberation after the Second World War.

Professor Mary Louise Roberts, from the University of Wisconsin, said within months of D-Day ordinary French women came to fear their American ‘liberators’.

In an explosive book, Roberts claims that some soldiers terrified French citizens

The professor said previous historical research on the subject paid little attention to this 'dark side' of Europe's liberation. The people in this picture are not related to the book's content

She tells how, by the summer of 1944, large numbers of women in Normandy filed complaints about rapes by US soldiers.

And their arrival prompted a wave of crime all over France, with American soldiers caught committing robberies and petty thefts.

Professor Roberts said: ‘My book seeks to debunk an old myth about the GI, thought of as a manly creature that always behaved well. The GIs were having sex anywhere and everywhere.

‘In the cities of Le Havre and Cherbourg, bad behaviour was common.

‘Women, including those who were married, were openly solicited for sex. Parks, bombed-out buildings, cemeteries and railway tracks were carnal venues.

‘People could not go out for a walk without seeing somebody having sex.

‘But the sex was not always consensual, with hundreds of cases of rape being reported.’

The locals of Le Havre were shocked by the soldiers’ behaviour and wrote letters of protest to their mayor.

Mary Louise Roberts on rape, race and the American GI

One complaint, from October 1945, said: ‘We are attacked, robbed, run over both on the street and in our houses.

ONGOING PROBLEM: SEXUAL ASSAULTS IN THE MILITARY

The book, which was released in June, focuses specifically on the soldiers of World War II and their interaction with the French people, but problems of sexual assault in the military persist to today, though now the victims are those in uniform as well.

The Pentagon is reeling from a series of sex-related scandals in recent weeks, including cases in which military advocates for victims of sexual assault were themselves accused of sex crimes.

Figures from the Department of Defense show a 37 per cent increase in reports of unwanted sexual contact, from groping to rape, last year. About 26,000 cases were reported in 2012.

'Sexual harassment and sexual assault in the military are a profound betrayal - a profound betrayal - of sacred oaths and sacred trusts,' Mr Hagel said. 'This scourge must be stamped out.'

His comments came a day after President Barack Obama delivered a similar message to graduates at the U.S. Naval Academy in Maryland, saying sexual assault threatened to erode trust and discipline in America's armed forces.
.
‘This is a regime of terror, imposed by bandits in uniform.’

Le Havre’s mayor, Pierre Voisin, complained to Colonel Thomas Weed – the commander of US troops in the region.

‘Scenes contrary to decency are unfolding in this city day and night,’ Voisin wrote, adding it was ‘not only scandalous but intolerable’ that ‘youthful eyes are exposed to such public spectacles’.

The mayor suggested the Americans set up a brothel outside the city to avoid public outrage and contain the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. However although US officers publicly denounced the behaviour they did little to curtail it.

The book also claims the US army ‘demonstrated a deep and abiding racism’, suggesting they pinned a disproportionate number of rapes on black GIs.

Documents show that of 152 troops disciplined by the army for rape, 130 were black.

Professor Roberts said: ‘American propaganda did not sell the war to soldiers as a struggle for freedom but as a sexual adventure.’

She points out that The Stars and Stripes, the official newspaper of the US armed forces, taught soldiers German phrases like ‘waffen niederlegen’ meaning ‘throw down your arms’.

However the French phrases it recommended to soldiers included ‘you have charming eyes,’ ‘I am not married’ and ‘are your parents at home?’ US magazine Life even fantasised that France was ‘a tremendous brothel’ inhabited by ‘40,000,000 hedonists, who spend all their time eating, drinking and making love’.

A cafe owner from Le Havre said at the time: ‘We expected friends who would not make us ashamed of our defeat. Instead, there came only incomprehension, arrogance, incredibly bad manners and the swagger of conquerors.’

The author claims when the first soldiers swarmed ashore at Omaha Beach in Normandy (pictured) on D-Day, it was 'a veritable tsunami of male lust'
The author claims that when the first soldiers swarmed ashore at Omaha Beach in Normandy (pictured) on D-Day, it was 'a veritable tsunami of male lust'

WIDESPREAD PROBLEM: JAPANESE MAYOR CLAIMS AMERICAN SOLDIERS USED WOMEN IN JAPAN AS 'SEX SLAVES' DURING WWII

Controversial: Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto said that soldiers used 'comfort women' as ways to release tension during WWII
Controversial: Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto said that soldiers used 'comfort women' as ways to release tension during WWII

The book comes just one day after a Japanese politician sparked an international row after claiming the use of sex slaves during WWII was justified has tried to shift the blame by accusing other country's of using the same practice.

Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto, co-leader of an emerging nationalist party, argued Japan's wartime practice of forcing Asian women into prostitution was necessary to maintain military discipline and provide relaxation for soldiers.

But following the public outcry over his comments, the mayor has attempted to deflect criticism by accusing America and Britain of using sex slaves for its own soldiers.

He said: 'It is a hard truth that even these nations used local women for sexual reasons. This is a historical fact and there is hard evidence that proves it was true.'

Historians say up to 200,000 women, mainly from the Korean Peninsula and China, were forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers in military brothels. While some other World War II armies had military brothels, Japan is the only country accused of such widespread, organized sexual slavery.

 

[Apollonian]

The Dark Side of Liberation​

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/books/rape-by-american-soldiers-in-world-war-ii-france.html

By Jennifer Schuessler
May 20, 2013

The soldiers who landed in Normandy on D-Day were greeted as liberators, but by the time American G.I.’s were headed back home in late 1945, many French citizens viewed them in a very different light.

In the port city of Le Havre, the mayor was bombarded with letters from angry residents complaining about drunkenness, jeep accidents, sexual assault — “a regime of terror,” as one put it, “imposed by bandits in uniform.”

This isn’t the “greatest generation” as it has come to be depicted in popular histories. But in “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War II France,” the historian Mary Louise Roberts draws on French archives, American military records, wartime propaganda and other sources to advance a provocative argument: The liberation of France was “sold” to soldiers not as a battle for freedom but as an erotic adventure among oversexed Frenchwomen, stirring up a “tsunami of male lust” that a battered and mistrustful population often saw as a second assault on its sovereignty and dignity.

“I could not believe what I was reading,” Ms. Roberts, a professor of French history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, recalled of the moment she came across the citizen complaints in an obscure archive in Le Havre. “I took out my little camera and began photographing the pages. I did not go to the bathroom for eight hours.”

“What Soldiers Do,” to be officially published next month by the University of Chicago Press, arrives just as sexual misbehavior inside the military is high on the national agenda, thanks to a recent Pentagon report estimating that some 26,000 service members had been sexually assaulted in 2012, more than a one-third increase since 2010.

While Ms. Roberts’s arguments may be a hard sell to readers used to more purely heroic narratives, her book is winning praise from some scholarly colleagues.“Our culture has embalmed World War II as ‘the good war,’ and we don’t revisit the corpse very often,” said David M. Kennedy, a historian at Stanford University and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945.”

“What Soldiers Do,” he added, is “a breath of fresh air,” providing less of an “aha” than, as he put it, an “of course.”

Mary Louise Roberts has written “What Soldiers Do,” a book about sexual assaults by Americans fighting in France.

Ms. Roberts, whose parents met in 1944 when her father was training as a naval officer, emphasizes that American soldiers’ heroism and sacrifice were very real, and inspired genuine gratitude. But French sources, she argues, also reveal deep ambivalence on the part of the liberated.

“Struggles between American and French officials over sex,” she writes, “rekindled the unresolved question of who exactly was in charge.”

Sex was certainly on the liberators’ minds. The book cites military propaganda and press accounts depicting France as “a tremendous brothel inhabited by 40 million hedonists,” as Life magazine put it. (Sample sentences from a French phrase guide in the newspaper Stars and Stripes: “You are very pretty” and “Are your parents at home?”)

On the ground, however, the grateful kisses captured by photojournalists gave way to something less picturesque. In the National Archives in College Park, Md., Ms. Roberts found evidence — including one blurry, curling snapshot — supporting long-circulating colorful anecdotes about the Blue and Gray Corral, a brothel set up near the village of St. Renan in September 1944 by Maj. Gen. Charles H. Gerhardt, commander of the infantry division that landed at Omaha Beach, partly to counter a wave of rape accusations against G.I.’s. (It was shut down after a mere five hours.)

In France, Ms. Roberts also found a desperate letter from the mayor of Le Havre in August 1945 urging American commanders to set up brothels outside the city, to halt the “scenes contrary to decency” that overran the streets, day and night. They refused, partly, Ms. Roberts argues, out of concern that condoning prostitution would look bad to “American mothers and sweethearts,” as one soldier put it.

Keeping G.I. sex hidden from the home front, she writes, ensured that it would be on full public view in France: a “two-sided attitude,” she said, that is reflected in the current military sexual abuse crisis.

Ms. Roberts is not the first scholar to bring the sexual side of World War II into clearer view. The 1990s brought a surge of scholarship on the Soviet Army’s mass rapes on the Eastern front, fed partly by the international campaign to have rape recognized as a war crime after the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. At the same time, gender historians began taking a closer look at “fraternization” by American soldiers, with particular attention to what women thought they were getting out of the bargain.

“The standard story had been that the Soviets were the rapists, the Americans were the fraternizers, and the British were the gentlemen,” said Atina Grossmann, the author of “Jews, Germans and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany.”

Work that looked at sexual assaults by American soldiers, even on a small scale, remained controversial. J. Robert Lilly’s “Taken by Force,” a groundbreaking study of rapes of French, German and British civilian women by G.I.’s, based on courts-martial records Mr. Lilly uncovered, drew a strong response when it was published in France in 2003. But the book, which emphasized the grossly disproportionate prosecution of black soldiers, struggled to find an American publisher amid tensions between the United States and Europe over Iraq.

“American presses wouldn’t touch the subject with a 10-foot barge pole,” said Mr. Lilly, a sociology professor at Northern Kentucky University. (Palgrave Macmillan published his book in the United States in 2007.)

Today the seamier side of liberation is not entirely absent from popular accounts. “The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945,” the final volume of Rick Atkinson’s best-selling trilogy about the war, published this month, includes a brief discussion of the Army’s campaign against venereal disease (“Don’t forget the Krauts were fooling around France a long time before we got here,” an Army publication warned soldiers in December 1944), as well as a reference to Mr. Lilly’s work.

The few scholars who have looked more closely at rape by G.I.’s have attributed its racially skewed prosecution to “the Jim Crow army,” which was happy to depict rape as a problem only among the noncombat support units to which black soldiers were mostly limited.

“White soldiers got a pass because of their combat status,” said William I. Hitchcock, author of “The Bitter Road to Freedom” (2008), a history of the liberation of Western Europe from the perspective of often traumatized local civilians. “The Army wasn’t interested in prosecuting a battle-scarred sergeant.”

Ms. Roberts, who closely studied transcripts of 15 courts-martial in Northern France, certainly sees American racism at work. “Let’s Look at Rape!,” a 1944 Army pamphlet credited to “a Negro Chaplain,” contained a prominent illustration of a noose — a clear suggestion that the Army was going to “protect the color line,” she writes. (Among the soldiers hanged for rape and murder was Louis Till, the father of Emmett Till.)

But her analysis is hardly more flattering to the French, whose often shaky accusations, as she sees them, reflected their own need to project the humiliations of occupation onto a racial “other.” (“We have no more soldiers here, just a few Negroes who terrorize the neighborhood,” one civilian remarked in April 1945.)

Ms. Roberts said the book has attracted strong interest from French publishers, where willingness to explore the darker side of liberation jostles with a lingering fear of seeming ungrateful. At home, she insisted, her goal is not “to sour the story of Normandy.”

“I truly believe what we did there was amazing,” she said. “But I’m interested in providing a richer and more realistic picture.”

 

[Apollonian]

Did Allied troops rape 285,000 German women? That's the shocking claim in a new book. But is the German feminist behind it exposing a war crime - or slandering heroes?​

•Book claims Allied troops raped 285,000 German women during invasion

•There are numerous cases of rape recorded by Allied officers during war

•However, the alarming figure is based on assumptions and lacks evidence

•British and U.S. soldiers could, and were, executed for committing rape

Link: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...ist-exposing-war-crime-slandering-heroes.html

By Guy Walters for the Daily Mail
Published: 18:40 EST, 25 March 2015 | Updated: 04:03 EST, 26 March 2015
There were rules against Allied soldiers fraternising with civilian women during the Second World War but they were routinely ignored

There was no doubt that Private Blake W. Mariano of the 191st Tank Battalion was a brave man. As part of the American Army's 45th Infantry Division, he had killed many Germans as he fought through Africa, Italy and southern France, before finally, in March 1945, he and his Sherman tank had crossed the Rhine into Germany.

By April 15, 1945, Mariano had been away from his home in New Mexico for nearly three years. A father of three, the 29-year-old was divorced, although he did have a girlfriend in England.

His loved ones, however, were far from his mind that evening. During the day, his unit had successfully overrun the large village of Lauf on the edge of the Black Forest in south-western Germany, and Mariano decided it was time to celebrate.

Accompanied by another American private, Mariano went out drinking. After finding a well-stocked cellar, the two men quickly became inebriated on cognac, at which point they went looking to complete their evening.

They found what they wanted in an air raid shelter under the town's castle. Huddled there were 17 villagers, two of whom were children.

Mariano pointed his rifle at a young woman called Elfriede. Aged just 21, Elfriede worked in an office, and had a fiancé who was away fighting. Mariano took her outside and raped her. After he had finished, his companion did the same.

Still not sated, Mariano returned to the shelter and chose a 41-year-old woman called Martha. When it became apparent that she was menstruating, Mariano shot her. It would take Martha until the following morning to die.

In a final act of savagery, Mariano selected one more woman, a 54-year-old shopkeeper called Babette, who he also raped. His 'entertainment' now over, Mariano finally returned to his tank.

The following morning, Martha's husband returned to the village after being discharged from the Army. He might have thought that he and his wife were now safe, having survived six long years of war.

As soon as he had discovered what had happened, the widower went straight to the Americans, who immediately launched an investigation.

Just over three weeks later, on May 8, Mariano was arrested and charged. In his defence, he claimed not to remember a thing. The villagers of Lauf would have no such problem. What Mariano had done in a few hours that one night would remain with them for decades.

Never mind that the German population was complicit in countless horrors.

One of the enduring narratives of World War II is that during the invasion of the Third Reich, British and American troops largely behaved well, and it was the soldiers of the Soviet Union's Red Army who raped hundreds of thousands of German females, aged from eight to 80.

However, a new book published in Germany makes the shocking and disturbing claim that the Americans raped a staggering 190,000 women in the decade from the invasion until West Germany became a sovereign country in 1955.

In When The Soldiers Came, historian Professor Miriam Gebhardt also suggests the British raped 45,000 German women, and the French a further 50,000.

It should be stressed that Dr Gebhardt is not a specialist World War II historian, but is better known for her works on other topics, such as the feminist movement in Germany, the philosopher Rudolf Steiner and the history of education.

She has also spoken at conferences on Left-wing politics, and it is therefore tempting to regard Dr Gebhardt as one of many academics who is not entirely minded to view countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom in a positive light.

But, if these figures are correct, then we would not only have to alter dramatically the way we look at how the Allies overran Germany, but also need to make a radical reassessment of what we call 'our greatest generation'.

Is it really possible that the numbers are so high?

In her new book When the Soldiers Came, Professor Miriam Gebhardt (pictured) suggests the Americans raped 190,000 women between 1945 and 1955

Naturally, it would be naïve to deny that the British and American armies had bad apples who carried out such atrocities. But these figures are huge, and would suggest that rape was almost as unexceptional as it was in the Red Army.

What then, is the truth?

When American troops first arrived in Britain in early 1942, they brought with them not only stockings, money and chewing gum, but also sex. For many young GIs, the prospect of being far from the strictures of home in a place where there were many single and available women, was an appealing one.

As is well known, countless relationships developed, from quick flings to marriages that have lasted until today. A huge, open resentment built up against the figure of the 'oversexed' GI, but what was barely discussed was the fact some of the Americans were rapists.

According to an official U.S. Army report, American troops committed 121 rapes when they were stationed in Britain.

Because rape is a notoriously under-reported crime, the true figure is doubtless far higher.

According to the criminologist Sir Leon Radzinowicz, only five per cent of rapes are ever reported, which suggests the Americans could have raped some 2,400 British women.

It is impossible to ever know the truth, but such a figure, although distressing, does seem low compared to the fact 1.5 million U.S. troops were eventually stationed here.

However, it was during the invasion of continental Europe after D-Day that an increasing number of GIs turned to rape.

Although France was an ally, that did not stop U.S. troops from raping an estimated 3,600 French women.

It was during the invasion of Germany (pictured) that incidences of rape grew much higher. File image used

A total of 152 American soldiers were tried for the crime, of whom 29 were hanged.

But it was during the invasion of Germany that incidences of rape grew much higher. As the Americans stormed into the crumbling Reich, troops would shout out at terrified German women: 'Sleep with me!'

And indeed, many German women did sleep with GIs, partly to obtain luxuries, and partly because they wanted to.

However, many sexual encounters were not consenting, and were also accompanied with particularly brutal violence, as some GIs used the act of rape to hit back at a hated enemy.

Many examples are too distressing to report in detail, especially the rapes carried out on children, with one victim being just three years old. Frequently, the crimes would be committed by marauding gangs of drunken GIs, such as the rapes of a woman called Katherine and her 18-year-old daughter, Charlotte, in Sprendlingen, about 40 miles southwest of Frankfurt.

Shortly before midnight one night in March 1945, a group of GIs burst into their home. The two women were forced upstairs, where they were repeatedly raped in the same room for two hours by six Americans, during which Charlotte kept desperately crying out: 'Mama, mama!'

Many such incidents were reported to parish priests. In his journal for July 20, 1945, Michael Merxmüller, a priest near Berchtesgaden, recorded: 'Eight girls and women raped, some of them in front of their parents.'

British troops march through the streets of Udem, Germany, in 1945

A few days later, Father Andreas Weingand, from a village near Munich, noted how 'heavily-drunk Americans' had raped a married woman, a single woman, and a 'spotless girl of 16-and-a-half'.

Such acts were not exclusively committed by Americans — British troops also raped German women.

On April 16, 1945, for example, three rapes were reported to have been carried out by British soldiers in the town of Neustadt, 30 miles west of Heidelberg.

Elsewhere, in a village called Oyle, two soldiers dragged a girl into some woods. Unsurprisingly, she started to scream, whereupon one of the troops shot her dead.

But such horrific acts appear to have been rare. As one soldier pointed out years after the war, there was no 'need' to rape women, as many were available for little more than a packet of cigarettes.

One Army major later recalled that he had never come across an incidence of rape by a British soldier, although he acknowledged 'it may well have happened elsewhere'.

In both the British and American armies, the punishment for rape was usually life imprisonment, and in particularly brutal cases, perpetrators were hanged.

Commanding officers, however, were often keen to avoid their men being found guilty, as it would bring shame to a unit, and there are some instances of rapes being covered up.

Nevertheless, courts-martial were by no means reluctant to convict. There is one recorded instance of a British officer being charged with rape, and convicted on the flimsiest of evidence in 1945.

Busted to the ranks, he was imprisoned, and then divorced by his wife. However, two years later, he received a full pardon from the King.

In fact, much of the sex that took place between the British and Germans appeared both consenting and in violation of Montgomery's strict non-fraternisation orders.

'Non-frat was as dead as a Dodo from the time Montgomery closed his mouth,' said one junior officer. 'I didn't go out and chase my chaps away from the women. I didn't have time — I was doing it myself!'

The breaching of the order was so flagrant, that one soldier recalled seeing a 'No Fraternising' sign adorned with six condoms, while another spoke fondly of how buses would be organised to collect German girls to attend parties.

Although it would be wrong to paint a rosy picture, the image that emerges seems somewhat less grim than that painted by Professor Gebhardt.

It was during the invasion of continental Europe after D-Day (pictured) that an increasing number of GIs turned to rape

So where does she get her high figures of 190,000 rapes by the Americans, and 45,000 by the British?

According to the U.S. Army's figures, American troops carried out 552 rapes in Germany. Even if one applies the 'five per cent rule', then this would mean that the total figure is around 11,000.

This is a shockingly high number, to be sure, but nowhere near that of nearly 200,000 by U.S. troops alone.

Instead, Dr Gebhardt has looked at childbirth statistics in West Germany, and has assumed that five per cent of the children born to unmarried women from 1945 until 1955 were as a result of rape.

Of these, she says 1,900 were born to American men.

Even if one were able to accept these assumptions, Dr Gebhardt then takes things to an implausible level. Estimating that for each of these 1,900 births there were 100 rapes, she arrives at her bizarre figure of a total of 190,000 German rape victims.

This number is far too high, and is not supported by any documentary evidence whatsoever. One can only assume that Dr Gebhardt is motivated more by some Leftist anti-American agenda than by proper historical inquiry.

Such absurd claims distract from the nature of the horrors that did occur.

The 21-year-old Elfriede never recovered from her rape by Private Mariano. Her fiancé refused to marry her and she ended up as an alcoholic recluse and died unmarried several years later.

Her rapist, meanwhile, was convicted of murder and rape. During his court-martial, it was revealed that he had a history of sexual offences, and a medical board had classified him as a 'high-grade moron'.

At 11.02am on October 10, 1945, Mariano was asked if he had any last words to say before he was hanged. He did not.

He was declared dead 20 minutes later. In a way, his demise was more merciful than the fates of those he and so many others had destroyed.

 

[Ensis]

****ing Allied scum! Hitler was Right!