As I sat in the tiny room of a local archive in Le Havre, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Spread out in front of me on the wooden desk was a collection of angry letters, dated 1945, written by citizens of this French port to their mayor. The target of their rage were the thousands of American soldiers stationed north of town.
“Attacked, robbed, run over both on the street and in our houses, this is a regime of terror, imposed by bandits in uniform,” wrote one irate citizen.
A local police blotter in the file provided the reason for this fury: It listed one crime after another committed by the GIs . On June 11, 1945, for example, there were six incidents of breaking and entering, two with assault and two with theft, as well as four other assaults and two other thefts — all at the hands of the Americans. From one end of Le Havre to another, the GIs were wielding their guns and fists to get what they wanted, whether it was cognac, money or women.
Why had I never heard this story about Normandy? As a college professor, I had lectured for years on the achievements of the Allied army in the European theater, from its liberation of France to its victory in Berlin. I thought I knew a lot about the Allied presence in Europe. But I had never heard anything like this.
Worse still, the violence was not confined to Le Havre. In the following months, I would look at similarly angry letters in Caen, Reims, and Paris. And in Cherbourg and St. Lô, I would read local police reports charging American soldiers with the rape of Norman women. In regions where GIs were stationed, crimes such as theft and rape were widespread, not incidental.
Why did I not know about this before?
The answer lies in how we have heard the story of Normandy. American historians of the European theater have focused mostly on the day-to-day heroics of the GI. Such an approach is, of course, laudable: American soldiers fought bravely in Normandy and made enormous sacrifices. But such narratives almost completely leave the French out of the picture. The French people form a mere landscape against which the GIs fight for freedom. In movies such as “Saving Private Ryan,” as well, the French are almost entirely erased from view.
In part, the problem is practical. French law stipulates that government documents cannot be opened to the public for 60 years. Many documents from the war years only opened in January 2005. In Le Havre, I was the first American to read them.
What I found was that many French civilians were happy — very happy — to be liberated from German occupation. But freedom in Normandy carried a high price tag. Cities such as St. Lô were almost completely destroyed. An estimated 19,890 civilians lost their lives in the battle. During the first two days of the campaign alone, about 3,000 men, women and children were killed — roughly the same number as the Allied soldiers who died in that period.
The real trouble began at war’s end, when the GIs found themselves stuck in port cities like Le Havre waiting for a boat home. As a group, they were exhausted and traumatized. They had survived horrors and felt they deserved a little fun. Lost friends crowded their dreams; guilt consumed them. Drinking and whoring kept the demons away, at least for a while, so they prowled the town for women. As a result, the citizens of Le Havre were unable to take a walk in the park or visit the grave of a loved one without coming across a GI engaged in sex. “Respectable” women dared not go out, not even in broad daylight.
Expressing outrage that even children were exposed to “scenes contrary to decency,” mayor Pierre Voisin urged the American commander, Col. Weed, to construct a brothel north of town supervised by medical personnel. Venereal disease was rampant among prostitutes serving the Americans.
But Weed washed his hands of the crisis, claiming that the problem was not his to solve. And he was categorically opposed to any regulated brothel because it would be impossible to keep the matter from the press, and thus the American public. What Weed failed to consider, of course, was how his decision might affect the local population.
Hearing this story of Weed’s indifference upsets our notion of the Second World War as the “good war.” One might object by arguing that soldiers have always behaved in this manner. But to naturalize a soldier’s erotic desire — to see it as inevitable rather than incidental — comes too close to excusing the sexual violence such desire might produce. Sex is a form of power. In the case of Le Havre, it became a way to assert American dominance over France.
One might also ask, why bring up the subject at all? My belief is that we honor our soldiers’ memory best by telling the entire truth of the war. Really good history does not sanitize our heroes. Instead, it portrays them as the flawed but honorable human beings they were.
Mary Louise Roberts is the author of “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France” (University of Chicago Press), out now.