Jeannine Plassard’s mother, Catherine, was raped and her father murdered.
Plabennec, France:
Aimee Dupre has always remained silent about the rape of her mother by two American soldiers after the Normandy landings in June 1944. But 80 years after the brutal attack, she finally felt it was time to speak out.
Nearly a million American, British, Canadian and French soldiers landed on the coast of Normandy in the weeks following D-Day, in an operation that would herald the end of Nazi Germany’s rule in Europe.
Aimee was 19 years old, lived in Montours, a village in Brittany, and was enchanted by the arrival of the “liberators”, as was everyone around her.
But then his joy evaporated. On the night of August 10, two American soldiers – often called GIs – arrived at the family farm.
“They were drunk and wanted a woman,” Aimee, now 99, told AFP, presenting a letter that her mother, also called Aimee, wrote “so that nothing is forgotten.”
In her elegant handwriting, Aimee Helaudais Honore described the events of that night. How the soldiers fired at her husband, blowing holes in his cap, and how they approached her daughter Aimee menacingly.
To protect her daughter, she agreed to leave the house with the soldiers, she wrote. “They took me to a field and raped me in turns, four times each.”
Aimee’s voice cracked as she read the letter. “Ah, mother, how you suffered, and so did I, I think about it every day,” she said.
“My mother sacrificed herself to protect me,” she said. “While they raped her during the night, we waited, not knowing if she would come back alive or if they would shoot her dead.”
The events of that night were not isolated. In October 1944, after the battle for Normandy had been won, US military authorities put 152 soldiers on trial for raping French women.
In fact, hundreds or even thousands of violations between 1944 and the soldiers’ departure in 1946 went unreported, said American historian Mary Louise Roberts, one of the few who has researched what she called “a taboo” of World War II.
“Many women have chosen to remain silent,” she said. “There was shame, as there often is with rape.”
She said the stark contrast between their experience and the joy felt everywhere over the American victory made it especially difficult to speak out.
– ‘Easy to get’ –
Roberts also blames Army leadership, which she says promised soldiers a country with women who were “easy to get” to increase their motivation to fight.
The U.S. Army’s Stars and Stripes newspaper was full of photos showing French women kissing victorious Americans.
“This is why we are fighting,” read a headline on September 9, 1944, alongside a photo of French women celebrating and the caption: “The French are crazy about the Yankees.”
The sex incentive “was to motivate American soldiers,” Roberts said.
“Sex, and I mean prostitution and rape, was a way for Americans to show dominance over France, dominating French men, since they had not been able to protect their country and their women from the Germans,” he added.
In Plabennec, near Brest in the far west of Brittany, Jeanne Pengam, born Tournellec, remembers “as if it were yesterday” how her sister Catherine was raped and her father murdered by a soldier.
“The black American wanted to rape my older sister. My father stood in his way and shot him dead. The guy managed to break down the door and enter the house,” Jeanne, 89, told AFP.
Nine at the time, she ran to a nearby American garrison to warn them.
“I told them he was German, but I was wrong. When they examined the bullets the next day, they immediately understood he was American,” she said.
Her sister Catherine kept the terrible secret “that poisoned her entire life” until shortly before her death, said one of her daughters, Jeannine Plassard.
“Lying in the hospital bed, she told me: ‘I was raped during the war, during the Liberation’,” Plassard told AFP.
Asked if she ever told anyone, the mother replied: “Tell anyone? It was the Liberation, everyone was happy, I wasn’t going to talk about something like that, it would have been cruel”, she said.
French writer Louis Guilloux worked as a translator for US troops after the landings, an experience he described in his 1976 novel “OK Joe!”, including the trials of soldiers for rape in military courts.
“Those sentenced to death were almost all black,” said Philippe Baron, who made a documentary about the book.
– ‘Shameful secret’ –
The culprits, including the rapists of Aimee Helaudais Honore and Catherine Tournellec, were publicly hanged in French villages.
“Behind the taboo surrounding the rapes committed by the liberators was the shameful secret of a segregationist American military,” Baron said.
“Once a black soldier was put on trial, 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 soldiers, she said.
Racial stereotypes about sexuality have made it easier to convict black people of rape. White soldiers, in turn, often belonged to mobile units, making them more difficult to locate than their black comrades, who were mostly stationary.
“If a French woman accused a white American soldier of rape, he could easily get away with it because he was never near the rape scene. The next morning he disappeared,” Roberts said.
After her book “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France” was published in 2013, Roberts said the reaction in the U.S. was so hostile that police would have to check on her regularly.
“People were angry with my book because they didn’t want to lose this ideal of the good war, of the good soldier,” she said. “Even if it means we have to keep lying.”
AFP was unable to obtain any official comment from the US Department of Defense on the matter.
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