Books > History > World history > From 1900 > Second World War
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What Soldiers Do (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R948
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What Soldiers Do (Hardcover)
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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 and
mass murder? Certainly--but if you're 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.
That's not the picture of the Greatest Generation that we've been
given, but it's the one Mary Louise Roberts paints to devastating
effect in "What Soldiers Do." Drawing on an incredible range of
sources, including news reports, propaganda and training materials,
official planning documents, wartime diaries, and memoirs, Roberts
tells the fascinating and troubling story of how the US military
command systematically spread--and then exploited--the myth of
French women as sexually experienced and available. The resulting
chaos--ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to
outright rape and rampant venereal disease--horrified the war-weary
and demoralized French population. The sexual predation, and 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 and 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--and more interesting--when it is most
honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished beauty of nostalgia
to grapple with the real lives and real mistakes of the people who
lived it.
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