80 Years of Normandy landings: How US soldiers raped hundreds of French women

Buried under the rubble of history lie some untold tales of suffering. A World World II victory against Germany had brought glory to the US, but some harrowing rape and assault accounts of French women by US soldiers narrate a darker story.

It will be 80 years since the Normandy landings in June 1944. For many in France, the historic event brings back dreadful memories. One of them is Aimee Dupre.

A dreadful chapter of history

Dupre was a 19-year-old living in Montours, a village in Brittany, and was delighted to see the “liberators” arrive near France’s Normandy landings in June 1944.

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Nearly a million US, British, Canadian, and French soldiers landed on the Normandy coast in the weeks after D-Day in an operation that was to herald the end of Nazi Germany’s grip on Europe.

But then her joy soon evaporated as her story, took a tragic turn on 10 August, when two American soldiers (known as GIs) raped her mother at the family’s farm. “They were drunk and they wanted a woman,” Aimee, now 99, told AFP, producing a letter that her mother, also called Aimee, wrote. “So nothing is forgotten”.

In her neat handwriting, Aimee Helaudais Honore described the events of that night. How the soldiers fired their guns in the direction of her husband, ripping holes in his cap, and how they menacingly approached her daughter Aimee.

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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 from the letter. “Oh mother, how you suffered, and me too, I think about this every day,” she said.

“My mother sacrificed herself to protect me,” she said. “While they raped her in the night, we waited, not knowing whether she would come back alive or whether they would shoot her dead.”

“Many women decided to remain silent,” Aimee said, who decided to speak about the brutal assault after 80 years. “There was the shame, as often with rape.”

She said the stark contrast of their experience with the joy felt everywhere over the American victory made it especially hard to speak up.

A rape epidemic 

However, this was not an isolated case. American historian Mary Louise Roberts, estimated that hundreds, if not thousands, of rapes occurred between 1944 and the departure of the GIs in 1946, which largely went unreported.

Following the Normandy battle’s victory in October 1944, US military authorities prosecuted 152 soldiers for the rape of French women.

Roberts also blames the army leadership who, she said, promised soldiers a country with women who were “easy to get” to add to their motivation to fight.

The US Army newspaper Stars and Stripes was full of pictures showing French women kissing victorious Americans. “Here’s What We’re Fighting For,” read a headline on 9 September 1944, alongside a picture of cheering French women and the caption: “The French are nuts about the Yanks."

The incentive of sex “was to motivate American soldiers”, Roberts said. “Sex, and I mean prostitution and rape, was a way for Americans to show domination over France, dominating French men, as they had been unable to protect their country and their women from the Germans,” she added.

Brutality by American GIs

In Plabennec, near Brest on the westernmost tip of France’s Britanny, Jeanne Pengam, nee Tournellec, remembers “as if it was yesterday” how her sister Catherine was raped and their father murdered by a GI.

“The Black American wanted to rape my older sister. My father stood in his way and he shot him dead. The guy managed to break down the door and enter the house,” 89-year-old Jeanne told AFP.

Nine at the time, 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.

“Lying on her hospital bed she told me, ‘I was raped during the war, during the Liberation,’” Plassard told AFP.

Asked whether she ever told anybody, her mother replied: “Tell anybody? It was the Liberation, everybody was happy, I was not going to talk about something like this, that would have been cruel,” she said.

The shadow of racism

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 GIs for rape in military courts.

“Those 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 hanged publicly in French villages.

“Behind the taboo surrounding rapes by the liberators, there was the shameful secret of a segregationist American army,” said Baron.

“Once a Black soldier was brought to trial, he had practically no chance of acquittal,” he said. This, said Roberts, allowed the military hierarchy to protect the reputation 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 on sexuality facilitated the condemnation of Blacks for rape. White soldiers, meanwhile, often belonged to mobile units, making them harder to track down than their black comrades who were mostly stationary.

After her book “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France” appeared in 2013, Roberts said the reaction in the US was so hostile that the police would have to regularly check on her.

“People were angry at my book because they didn’t want to lose this ideal of the good war, of the good GI,” she said. “Even if it means we have to keep on lying."

With inputs from AFP