What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France

Last but not least, thinking transnationally allows us to understand the campaign as a school in global ascendancy. The American rise to superpower status took place not just in Teheran or Yalta but also in the foxholes of the bocage. There GIs reading Stars and Stripes began to think of the world as "coming to America for help and leadership." The violence they visited upon French citizens arose as much from growing pains as it did from war trauma. A nation rarely acquires power in a graceful manner. One aim of this book has been to confront the giants with their trail of clumsy destruction. Remembering the "good war" has also meant forgetting as well. By affording a view beyond the national frame, historians can make the memories of the war both more truthful and more complex.

While there are over a hundred reports of crimes committed by the Americans in the police file APP, BA 1822 Libération, not one report implicated a British soldier, and only three cases targeted Canadian soldiers. These reports represent only a fraction of alleged crimes against the GIs, as the American military police often handled problems without the French police. No arrondissement of Paris was spared from American violence, although trouble centered on the grands boulevards and in red light districts of the eighth, ninth, and tenth arrondissements. In Liberators: The Allies and Belgian Society, 1944–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 243, Peter Schrijvers notes that similar types of crimes in Belgium—assault, public drunkenness, rape, and theft—were overwhelmingly American.

Throughout Curzio Malaparte's The Skin (which became a best seller and was immediately translated into French), the Italian journalist explores how sexual relations between the GIs and Italian women both diminish Italian manhood and materialize American dominance. Malaparte describes "the virgin of Naples" who opens her legs for the price of a dollar. In long lines, the GIs queue to see her. When an American officer voices his disgust at the sight, his Italian companion angrily responds: "If you had lost the war there would be an American virgin on that bed instead of that poor Neapolitan girl.