The Gis War

Author : Mary Louise Roberts
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226923096
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book What Soldiers Do written by Mary Louise Roberts and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-05-17 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Bill Yenne
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 9780312354640
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rising Sons written by Bill Yenne and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-07-10 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sample Text

Author : Maria Höhn
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807860328
Total Pages : 358 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book GIs and Fräuleins written by Maria Höhn and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-04-03 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the outbreak of the Korean War, the poor, rural West German state of Rhineland-Palatinate became home to some of the largest American military installations outside the United States. In GIs and Frauleins, Maria Hohn offers a rich social history of this German-American encounter and provides new insights into how West Germans negotiated their transition from National Socialism to a consumer democracy during the 1950s. Focusing on the conservative reaction to the American military presence, Hohn shows that Germany's Christian Democrats, though eager to be allied politically and militarily with the United States, were appalled by the apparent Americanization of daily life and the decline in morality that accompanied the troops to the provinces. Conservatives condemned the jazz clubs and striptease parlors that Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe opened to cater to the troops, and they expressed scorn toward the German women who eagerly pursued white and black American GIs. While most Germans rejected the conservative effort to punish as prostitutes all women who associated with American GIs, they vilified the sexual relationships between African American men and German women. Hohn demonstrates that German anxieties over widespread Americanization were always debates about proper gender norms and racial boundaries, and that while the American military brought democracy with them to Germany, it also brought Jim Crow.

Author : Brian McAllister Linn
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674973755
Total Pages : 392 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Elvis’s Army written by Brian McAllister Linn and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the Army drafted Elvis in 1958, it set about transforming the King of Rock and Roll from a rebellious teen idol into a clean-cut GI trained for nuclear warfare. Brian Linn traces the origins, evolution, and ultimate failure of the army’s attempt to reinvent itself for the Atomic Age, and reveals the experiences of its forgotten soldiers.

Author : Kate Werran
Publisher : Pen and Sword History
ISBN 13 : 1526759551
Total Pages : 315 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book An American Uprising in Second World War England written by Kate Werran and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2020-07-19 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The shocking story of a WWII shootout between black and white GIs in a quiet Cornish town that put the British-US “special relationship” on trial. On September 26, 1943, racial tensions between American soldiers stationed in Cornwall erupted in gunfire. Labelled a ‘wild west’ mutiny by the tabloids, it became front page news in Great Britain and the USA. For Americans, it bolstered a fast-accelerating civil rights movement, while in the UK, it exposed unsettling truths about Anglo-American relations. With new archival research, journalist Kate Werran pieces together the shocking drama that authorities tried to hush up. Her narrative examines everything from the controversy of American segregation on British soil to the shocking event itself and the resulting court martial. Extracted from wartime cabinet documents, secret government surveys, opinion polls, diaries, letters and newspapers as well as testimony from those who remember it, this story offers a rare window into a little-known dark side of the ‘American Invasion.’

Author : J. Robert Lilly
Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 9780230506473
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.7X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Taken by Force written by J. Robert Lilly and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-07-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sociologist and criminologist Professor Bob Lilly makes unprecedented use of military records and trial transcripts to throw light on one of the overlooked consequences of the US Army's presence in Western Europe between 1942 and 1945: the rape of an estimated 14,000 civilian women in the United Kingdom, France and Germany. By focusing on a group of men - the 'greatest generation' - more commonly idolized in the Western historical imagination, the study makes an important and original contribution to our understanding of sexual violence in armed conflict. Taken by Force speaks as often as possible through the protagonists themselves and examines the differing social contexts prevailing in each country where the crimes were committed. Attention is also given to the racial dimension of this issue: the disproportionate number of black GIs prosecuted and the relative harshness of their sentences when convicted.

Author : Thomas W. Maulucci
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521851335
Total Pages : 379 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book GIs in Germany written by Thomas W. Maulucci and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-02 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These fifteen essays offer a comprehensive look at the role of American military forces in Germany since World War Two.

Author : Joseph E. Kaufmann
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780811704540
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The American GI in Europe World War II written by Joseph E. Kaufmann and published by . This book was released on with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Martha Bolton
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 149683268X
Total Pages : 329 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dear Bob written by Martha Bolton and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2021 Golden Scroll Awards for Memoir of the Year and Christian Market Book of the Year awarded by the Advanced Writers and Speakers Association FIRST PLACE WINNER IN THE MEMOIR CATEGORY OF THE 2022 SELAH AWARDS For five decades, comedian, actor, singer, dancer, and entertainer Bob Hope (1903–2003) traveled the world performing before American and Allied troops and putting on morale-boosting USO shows. Dear Bob . . . : Bob Hope’s Wartime Correspondence with the G.I.s of World War II tells the story of Hope’s remarkable service to the fighting men and women of World War II, collecting personal letters, postcards, packages, and more sent back and forth among Hope and the troops and their loved ones back home. Soldiers, nurses, wives, and parents shared their innermost thoughts, swapped jokes, and commiserated with the “G.I.s’ best friend” about war, sacrifice, lonely days, and worrisome, silent nights. The Entertainer of the Century performed for millions of soldiers in person, in films, and over the radio. He visited them in the hospitals and became not just a pal but their link to home. This unforgettable collection of letters and images, many of which remained in Hope’s personal files throughout his life and now reside at the Library of Congress, capture a personal side of both writer and recipient in a very special and often-emotional way. This volume heralds the voices of those servicemen and women whom Hope entertained and who, it is clear, delighted and inspired him.

Author : Michael Dale Doubler
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 376 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Closing with the Enemy written by Michael Dale Doubler and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study picks up where D-Day leaves off. From Normandy through the breakout in France to the German Army's last gasp in the Battle of the Bulge, Michael Doubler deals with the deadly business of war - closing with the enemy, fighting and winning battles, taking and holding territory. His study provides a reassessment of how American GIs accomplished these dangerous and costly tasks.