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 & mass murder? Certainly
- but if youre 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. Thats not the picture of the Greatest Generation that weve been given but its the one Mary Louise Roberts paints to devastating effect in What Soldiers Do". Drawing on an incredible range of sources including news reports propaganda training materials official planning documents wartime diaries & memoirs Roberts tells the fascinating & troubling story of how the US military command systematically spread
- & then exploited
- the myth of French women as sexually experienced & available. The resulting chaos
- ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to outright rape & rampant venereal disease
- horrified the war-weary & demoralized French population. The sexual predation & 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 & 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
- & more interesting
- when it is more honest & when it goes beyond the burnished beauty of nostalgia to grapple with the real experiences & real mistakes of the people who lived it."