AFP
The rapes of French women by American GIs in 1944, a broken taboo
For 80 years, Aimée Dupré preferred to remain silent about the rape of her mother in 1944. But as the celebrations for the Landing of the Allied troops in France approached, she no longer wanted to remain silent: the rape was committed by two soldiers Americans, an “act of war”. On June 6, 1944, 156,000 American, British and French soldiers landed on the beaches of Normandy. In her small Breton village, in Montours (Ille-et-Vilaine), Aimée is 19 years old and like all her neighbors, she rejoices at the arrival of these “liberators”, which heralds the end of the German occupation. But very quickly, she becomes disillusioned. On the evening of August 10, two GIs – the nickname given to American soldiers – entered the family farm. “They were drunk and they needed a wife,” Aimée, now 99 years old, modestly summarizes to AFP. From an old piece of furniture, she takes a letter that her mother, Aimée Helaudais Honoré, wrote to her daughter, “so as not to forget anything”. In careful writing, the farmer first recounts how the soldiers shot her husband, the bullets piercing his beret, then moved menacingly towards her daughter. “I went out to protect her and they taken to the fields. They raped me four times each, while turning,” she recalls. Eighty years later, her daughter’s voice breaks as she reads it. “Oh, Mom, you suffered, and I think about it every day too,” she whispers. “Mom sacrificed herself to protect me. While they raped her, we waited in the night without knowing if she would return alive or if they would shoot her.” In October 1944, at the end of the decisive Battle of Normandy, American military authorities tried 152 soldiers for the rape of French women. A number “largely underestimated “, says Mary Louise Roberts, one of the rare historians to have looked into this “great taboo of the Second World War”. “Many women preferred to remain silent: in addition to the shame linked to rape, the “The atmosphere was one of joy, of celebration of the liberators”, she explains. – “Easy women” -To motivate the GIs to fight so far from home, “the army promised them a France populated by women easy”, underlines the American specialist. The Stars and Stripes newspaper, published by the American armed forces and read avidly by the thousands of soldiers deployed in Europe, is full of photos of French women kissing the liberators. “French women are crazy about the Yankees ( …) this is what we are fighting for”, headlines the newspaper on September 9, 1944. “The prospect of sex motivated American soldiers to fight. And it was, particularly through prostitution and rape, a way of dominating France, dominating French men who had been incapable of protecting their country and their women against the Germans,” explains Ms. Roberts. “We can estimate that Hundreds, if not thousands, of other rapes by American soldiers were not reported between 1944 and the departure of the GIs in April 1946.” – “Not to be believed” -Not far from Brest (Finistère), near Plabennec , Jeanne Pengam, née Tournellec, 89 years old, remembers “as if it were yesterday” the rape of her older sister, Catherine, and the murder of her father by a GI “The black American, he wanted to rape my big sister . My father intervened and the soldier shot him dead. The man managed to destroy the door and enter the house,” she said, surrounded by her nieces. Then aged nine, the little girl ran to warn an American garrison stationed at Loc Maria, a few kilometers away. “I said he was a German, I was wrong. When they saw the bullets the next day, they immediately understood that it was an American,” she said. Catherine kept within herself “this secret which poisoned her all her life” until the approach of her death, confides Jeannine Plassard, one of her daughters. On her hospital bed, “she told me: I was raped during the war, at the Liberation. I asked him: have you managed to tell anyone about it? She said to me: tell someone about it? But it was the Liberation, everyone was happy, I wasn’t going to say something like that, I wasn’t going to be believed!” – “Crime noir” -In his book “OK Joe!”, published in 1976, the writer Louis Guilloux talks about his experience as a translator within the American troops after the D-Day landings. He was notably assigned to the trials for rape of GIs by American military tribunals and noted that “those sentenced to death are almost all black” , underlines Philippe Baron, author of an eponymous documentary on this novel, and of a work, “The Shadow of the Liberation”. These GIs will then be hanged in the public squares of French villages, as was the case for the rapists of Aimée Helaudais and Catherine Tournellec. “It’s a complicated story,” underlines Mr. Baron. “Behind the taboo of rape by liberators, there is the shameful secret of a segregationist American army (. ..) sometimes aided by racist local authorities.””Once before the court martial, a black soldier had almost no chance of being acquitted. There is something terribly current about it because even today, black men are presumed guilty in court,” he notes. For Ms. Roberts, when the military command realizes that “the situation is out of control” , he “chose to make black soldiers the scapegoats in order to transform rape into a ‘black crime’ (…) to absolutely maintain the reputation of white Americans.” The statistics are “stunning”: between 1944 and 1945, out of 29 soldiers sentenced to death for rape, 25 were black GIs, hanged by “an executioner who came expressly from Texas.” The army explained this by the fact that +the black man was a potential rapist+, that they had +a sexuality exacerbated+, a racist stereotype of the South” of the United States, she notes. “In reality, black GIs were often assigned to logistics units, permanently stationed in the same place, with therefore more contact with the local population , including women.””The white soldiers were in mobile units. They could rape a French woman in the evening and leave in the morning, without ever being arrested. And if this was the case, the victim’s testimony was most often called into question”, notes the historian. Placed under police surveillance in 2013 after the publication of her book “Of GIs and Women”, Ms. Roberts believes that, 80 years after the D-Day landings, “the myth of the GI continues.” The Second World War is THE good war, since all the wars led since then by our government have been moral defeats, like Vietnam or Afghanistan”, analyzes the historian. “No one wants to lose this American hero who makes us proud: the brave and honest American GI, protector of women”, she notes. “Even if it means perpetuating the lie.” all/et /mb/tes
