How US soldiers raped hundreds of French women – Firstpost

Buried beneath the rubble of history are some untold stories of suffering. A World War II victory against Germany had brought glory to the United States, but some harrowing reports of rapes and assaults of French women by U.S. soldiers tell a darker story.

It is the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings June 1944. For many in France, the historic event brings back terrible memories. One of them is Aimee Dupre.

A terrible chapter in history

Dupre was 19 years old and living in Montours, a village in Brittany, and rejoiced when the “liberators” arrived near the French landing in Normandy in June 1944.

Nearly a million U.S., British, Canadian and French soldiers landed on the coast of Normandy in the weeks after D-Day in an operation intended to signal the end of Nazi Germany’s power over Europe.

But her joy soon faded when her story took a tragic turn on August 10, when two American soldiers (so-called GIs) raped her mother on the family farm. “They were drunk and wanted a wife,” Aimee, now 99, said AFP, and produced a letter written by her mother, also named Aimee. “So that nothing is forgotten.”

In her neat handwriting, Aimee Helaudais Honore described the events of that night. How the soldiers fired their weapons at her husband, tearing holes in his cap, and how they menacingly approached her daughter Aimee.

To protect her daughter, she agreed to leave the house with the GIs. She wrote. “They took me to a field and took turns raping me, four times each.”

Aimee’s voice broke as she read the letter. “Oh mother, how you have suffered and so have I, I think about it every day,” she said.

“My mother sacrificed herself to protect me,” she said. “While they raped her that night, we waited, not knowing if she would come back alive or if they would shoot her.”

“Many women chose to remain silent,” said Aimee, who decided to speak out about the brutal attack after 80 years. “There was shame, as is often the case with rape.”

She said the stark contrast between her experience and the widespread joy at the American victory made it particularly difficult to speak out.

A rape epidemic

However, this was not an isolated incident. The American historian Mary Louise Roberts estimated that between 1944 and the departure of the GIs in 1946 there were hundreds, if not thousands, of rapes, most of which went unreported.

After the victory at the Battle of Normandy in October 1944, US military authorities prosecuted 152 soldiers for raping French women.

Roberts also blames the Army leadership, which she said promised soldiers a country with women who were “easy to get” to boost their motivation to fight.

The US Army Newspaper Stars and Stripes was full of pictures showing French women kissing victorious Americans. “This is what we are fighting for,” read a headline on September 9, 1944, along with a picture of cheering French women and the headline: “The French are crazy about the Americans.”

The incentive for sex “is best at motivating American soldiers,” Roberts said. “Sex, and by that I mean prostitution and rape, was a way for Americans to show their dominance over France and to dominate French men because they could not protect their country and their women from the Germans,” she added.

Brutality of American GIs

In Plabennec, near Brest on the westernmost tip of France’s Brittany region, Jeanne Pengam, née Tournellec, remembers “as if it were yesterday” how her sister Catherine was raped and her father murdered by a GI.

“The black American wanted to rape my older sister. My father stood in his way and shot him. The guy managed to break down the door and get into the house,” said 89-year-old Jeanne AFP.

Then nine years old, she ran to a nearby US garrison to alert them.

“I told them he was German, but I was wrong. When they examined the bullets the next day, they immediately recognized he was American,” she said.

Her sister Catherine kept the terrible secret “that poisoned her whole life” until shortly before her death, said one of her daughters, Jeannine Plassard.

“As she lay on her hospital bed, she told me: ‘I was raped during the war, during the liberation,'” Plassard said AFP.

When asked if she ever told anyone, her mother replied: “Tell anyone? It was liberation, everyone was happy, I didn’t want to talk about something like that, that would have been cruel,” she said.

The shadow of racism

French writer Louis Guilloux worked as a translator for U.S. troops after the landing, an experience he described in his 1976 novel “OK Joe!”, including the trials of GIs for rape in military courts.

“The people sentenced to death were almost all black,” said Philippe Baron, who made a documentary about the book.

Those found guilty, including the rapists of Aimee Helaudais Honore and Catherine Tournellec, were publicly hanged in French villages.

“Behind the taboo surrounding liberator rape lay the shameful secret of a segregationist American army,” Baron said.

“Once a black soldier was tried, he had virtually no chance of being acquitted,” he said. This, Roberts said, allowed the military hierarchy to protect the reputations of white Americans by “scapegoating many African-American soldiers.”

Of the 29 soldiers sentenced to death for rape in 1944 and 1945, 25 were black GIs, she said.

Racial stereotypes surrounding sexuality made it easier to convict blacks of rape. White soldiers, on the other hand, were often part of mobile units, making them more difficult to track than their black comrades, who were largely stationary.

After the publication of her book “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France” in 2013, Roberts said the reaction in the United States was so hostile that police had to regularly check on them.

“People were angry with my book because they didn’t want to lose this ideal of good war, good GI,” she said. “Even if it means we have to keep lying.”

With contributions from AFP

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