In What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War IIFrance (2014), author Mary Louise Roberts shows how the everyday experience of sex between American GI’s and French women after D-Day became the symbol and
model of power that shaped foreign policy in the post-war period. She skillfully describes the sounds and smells of real war in Normandy and how periodicals, (in particular Stars and Stripes and Life) used photographs to sell an image of “the good war” to the American public and the soldiers themselves. In the European theatre, the classic photo was French women welcoming GI’s with smiles and open arms. Beneath that image a darker tale emerges.

She successfully argues that sex, like tobacco and chocolate, became a scarce commodity, traded on the black market. It seems to me that the topic might more correctly be the rational behavior of a “ravenous population” (116) in close
proximity with American “abundance,” (113). The asymmetry of power (190) seems to be a recurring theme, the thing that divided men from women, the Americans from the French, and black from white.

Many of the arguments she makes regarding the phenomenon of prostitution are the same ones that scholars have observed in Vietnam during the 1960’s and even in nineteenth century London, with no war, but a serious disparity in wealth. The contempt GI’s demonstrated for French prostitutes (127) was the same contempt London aristocrats showed for “five-pound virgins.”

I do agree that colonization is symbolic rape, that rape aptly symbolizes colonization. And I do see how Stars and Stripes tapped into that culture to justify war and to motivate soldiers. I don’t see the conscious, deliberate conspiracy to rule the world by controlling the female body. That particular formulations strikes me as anachronistic. The simplest explanation is perhaps not a geopolitical chess game that played “the female body” as a chess-person on its checkerboard, but a “ravenous population” doing everything it could to survive. Hunger makes people crazy.

In The World of Yesterday, Stephan Zweig assesses a parallel phenomenon in 1923 Berlin as hyperinflation humiliated an already broken people with total chaos and food insecurity. He mentions the explosion of sexual commerce, (in particular, of taxi boys), not as manifestations of perversion or conspiracy, but of cultural breakdown. And, yes, specific cultures break down in specific ways, but it would be a mistake to find anything normal about France in 1944.

There is a chapter in Charles C. Mann’s popular history, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005), in which that Mann quotes a colonizer reporting that indigenous people needed to be colonized for their own good because they were naked, hungry, sick and miserable. But the Indian that Spaniard describes is one that the Spanish invasion has pushed past the point of cultural breakdown. Sick with European diseases, running for his life from Spanish swords and blunderbusses, he was fighting the imminent extermination that most tribes, in fact, experienced. Mann’s point confirms the unfairness of American assessment of French primitiveness in 1944. And, American GI’s were stressed to cultural breakdown, too. It was Apocalypse, Now, not deliberate US policy. 

There seems to have been a very gendered military culture, independent of France in 1944, that one could say has become globally modern. There is evidence of that in Stars and Stripes, as it eroticized power and commodified everything. My maternal grandfather was too old for combat in 1940, but he enlisted and went away to Europe for the duration of the war. He didn’t have a lot of war stories, but he knew the song Richards mentions, Hinky Dinky Parley Vous. I suspect he was in supply, organizing the American abundance. Their French cooks, according to my grandfather, once made them crepes when they asked for pancakes. But the feat could not be replicated, as they had used up all the available eggs in the area. Richard’s account rings authentic. Grandfather was a commodity man. If there was a black-market element to his work, (or sex trade), we will probably never know the details.

He was also a die-hard racist. When went to meet his Manichean maker in 1975, he was working on a book about the genetic inferiority of African Americans. He claimed it was science. My mother ceremoniously burned the manuscript after his funeral. But it is not hard to imagine him giving orders to black GI’s as they unloaded the train. Nor is it hard to imagine his complicit silence as African American soldiers got lynched for rape on flimsy evidence. Part of the “civilization” American saviors brought to the table was Jim Crow. It seems fittingly tragic that the Army had to send over a Texan to do the hangings, (224). Richards says he was a quiet man who brought his own rope.

In Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark observes growing influence of a well-financed military class as a symptom of the modernity that led to war. I do agree with Richards that sexual invasion has become an ingrained and ongoing element of modern American military culture. When the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan, docked in Rio de Janeiro in 2004, it was serviced by a sizeable team of local sex workers. Then, following naval tradition, the ship rounded the Horn and stopped in Valparaíso on its way to California. There were 8,000 men on board. In spite of centuries of experience efficiently accommodating whalers, sailors and pirates, Valparaíso was overloaded. Demand exceeded supply by two thirds. 

But Chilean businessmen (and women) had learned strategic planning from the Chicago boys during the Pinochet years. Reservists were called. They arrived, directly from Rio, in countless droves. As the Reagan rounded the Horn, the ladies of the night crossed the continent by bus. Red bulbs were hung from every cheap hotel, upper room and hot dog stand; all strategically in place and ready to receive the hungry naval regiment. Some even arranged to meet up with the same clients they had fleeced in Rio. It was a testimony to the ingenious flexibility of the free market, General Pinochet’s genuine legacy to a very clever and resourceful people. Mercosur in action, capitalism’s finest hour and the US military fearlessly doing its patriotic duty on foreign shores.

A final thought, this reading leads me to many cinematic texts. One, a French film about resistance and collaboration, Lacombe, Lucien, (Louis Malle, dir., 1974) Another, about soldiers who need sex because they think they are about to die, Gallipoli, (Peter Weir, dir. 1981). A third, about the experience of a prostitute in sex-regulated Brazil, Bruna Surfistinha, (Marcus Baldini, dir, 2104). And a fourth, about war and sexuality of soldiers, Thin Red Line. Dare I say, … Best Little Whorehouse in Texas? (Lotta good will, maybe one small thrill, but ain’t nothin dirty goin on…) Well, that too. Marvin Zindler, Eyewitness News.