“They were drunk… looking for a wife”: French women on rape by US soldiers in World War II

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.”

The events of that night were not an isolated incident. In October 1944, after the victory in the Battle of Normandy, US military authorities tried 152 soldiers for rape French women.

In fact, hundreds or even thousands of rapes went unreported between 1944 and the GIs’ withdrawal in 1946, said American historian Mary Louise Roberts, one of only a few to research what she called the “taboo” of World War II.

“Many women chose to remain silent,” she said. “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.

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.

“Here 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.

In Plabennec, near Brest on the westernmost tip of Brittany, 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,” 89-year-old Jeanne told 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 understood that 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 told 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.

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.

“If a French woman accused a white American soldier of rape, he could easily get off scot-free because he was never near the scene of the rape. The next morning he was gone,” Roberts said.

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.”

AFP was unable to obtain official comment from the US Department of Defense on the matter.