O binário de antes e depois de um evento militar em particular é frequentemente enganoso quando se trata da experiência daqueles que o viveram. Para judeus e membros da Resistência, os dias e semanas após o Dia D foram o momento mais perigoso da ocupação.
Daniel Lee
 |
| Vol. 47 No. 6 · 3 de abril de 2025 |
Normandy: The Sailors' Story
por Nick Hewitt.
Yale, 433 pp., £ 12,99, março de 978 0 300 28109 5
D-Day, the Oral History: The Turning Point of World War Two by the People Who Were There
por Garrett M. Graff.
Monoray, 448 pp., £ 14,99, março de 978 1 80096 219 4
Rommel deveria passar seis dias longe da Normandia, onde estava estacionado desde o final de 1943, encarregado de reforçar o Muro do Atlântico contra uma possível invasão aliada da Europa Ocidental. O Muro do Atlântico era uma linha de fortificações costeiras de aço e concreto que se estendia da Noruega ao sudoeste da França. Na propaganda nazista, Goebbels se gabava da força dessas defesas, assegurando ao público alemão que seu exército destruiria qualquer ataque aliado. Rommel viu que a realidade era muito diferente. Embora as defesas marítimas fossem fortes no Pas de Calais, em outros lugares o Muro do Atlântico mal existia. Ele se convenceu de que uma vitória aliada estava nas cartas, a menos que o inimigo invasor fosse derrotado quando ainda vulnerável, na água e nas praias, nas primeiras 48 horas após o desembarque. Ele começou um programa de reconstrução das defesas, adicionando bunkers, minas, obstáculos subaquáticos para naufrágios de embarcações de desembarque e "espargos de Rommel" - postes altos projetados para rasgar em pedaços qualquer aeronave que tentasse pousar. O aço usado nesses esquemas poderia ter construído 160 Torres Eiffel.
Um dos elementos finais de sua estratégia era solicitar divisões Panzer extras de Hitler, que seriam movidas para perto da costa da Normandia. Hitler era notoriamente paranoico sobre a lealdade de seus generais seniores, que ele jogava uns contra os outros, e Rommel sabia que tal solicitação tinha que ser feita pessoalmente. Como ele observou em seu diário, "o problema mais urgente é conquistar o Führer por meio de uma conversa pessoal". Ele planejou encontrar Hitler em Berghof, nos Alpes da Baviera, e interrompeu sua viagem com uma visita à esposa e ao filho em sua nova casa em Herrlingen, uma pequena cidade perto de Ulm, onde eles receberam uma vila do estado nazista depois que seus 150 idosos residentes judeus foram deportados para os campos de extermínio. Mas Rommel não conseguiu chegar a Berghof. Nas primeiras horas de 6 de junho, as tropas aerotransportadas aliadas começaram a cair atrás das defesas da praia da Normandia. O Dia D havia começado e Rommel estava a seiscentos quilômetros de distância, colocando flores e um par de sapatos em sua sala de estar. Frau Rommel disse mais tarde que os sapatos não serviam.
O alto comando alemão sabia há meses que uma invasão aliada por mar era iminente. Eles também sabiam que um ataque precisava de bom tempo e mar calmo. Nenhuma tentativa havia sido feita no final de maio, quando recordes de calor foram quebrados no sul da Inglaterra, e as autoridades alemãs estavam confiantes de que também não haveria uma invasão no início de junho. Os meteorologistas alemães disseram ao alto comando que haveria chuva e ventos fortes no Canal da Mancha por três dias a partir de 4 de junho. O tempo estava tão ruim — as piores tempestades em vinte anos — que em 5 de junho a Luftwaffe e a Kriegsmarine cancelaram o reconhecimento e as patrulhas ao redor da Normandia.
Uma invasão só poderia ocorrer quando uma noite de luar e uma maré baixa coincidissem. Essas condições seriam atendidas em 5 e 6 de junho, e Eisenhower, comandante supremo das forças aliadas, fez planos para invadir em 5 de junho. Mas depois de receber um relatório meteorológico de uma fonte improvável na manhã de 3 de junho, ele pensou novamente. Maureen Flavin era uma assistente de correio de 21 anos na costa oeste da Irlanda, cujo trabalho também envolvia registrar leituras meteorológicas de hora em hora. Junto com a tripulação de um navio estacionado na costa, Flavin foi a primeira a avistar a tempestade que se aproximava. Ela enviou seu relatório ao Irish Met Service em Dublin, que o compartilhou com os Aliados em Londres. No dia seguinte, a equipe de meteorologistas James Martin Stagg identificou uma pausa na tempestade em 6 de junho, uma estreita janela de oportunidade sobre o Canal que permitiria o início dos desembarques.* Os meteorologistas alemães, sem qualquer acesso às estações meteorológicas do Atlântico, não sabiam que a mudança estava chegando. Eisenhower atrasou a operação em 24 horas; alguns comboios partiram com ventos fortes em 5 de junho, prontos para tirar vantagem.
Em 4 de junho, quando Rommel partiu para a Alemanha, dezenas de outros oficiais alemães seniores também deixaram seus postos. O general Friedrich Dollmann, o comandante do Sétimo Exército diretamente encarregado de defender a Normandia, havia organizado um Kriegspiel (exercício de jogo de guerra) de dois dias para todos os comandantes divisionais e regimentais a cem milhas de distância em Rennes, a fim de testar as respostas a um desembarque aliado. Enquanto os comandantes se preparavam para cenários imaginários usando grandes mapas, os Aliados começaram a atacar.
Nas primeiras horas de 6 de junho, os alemães não conseguiram avaliar a magnitude da invasão. Hitler e alguns de seus principais generais sempre acreditaram que haveria dois desembarques, um de mentira e um real: qualquer ataque aéreo à Normandia seria uma distração da invasão "real", que eles estavam convencidos de que aconteceria no Pas de Calais - o alvo óbvio, já que era muito perto da Grã-Bretanha e os invasores precisavam tomar um porto importante. Na verdade, os Aliados fizeram esforços extraordinários para encorajar essa interpretação errônea. A Operação Fortitude de Eisenhower usou exércitos falsos e embarcações de desembarque falsas para dar aos aviões de reconhecimento alemães a impressão de um acúmulo de tropas e material perto de Folkestone e Dover. Transmissões de rádio e canais diplomáticos foram usados para vazar informações falsas para os alemães por meio de embaixadas em países neutros.
O engano funcionou. A resposta inicial da Alemanha foi lenta e incerta. Hitler decidiu não enviar o Décimo Quinto Exército, sua força de combate mais valiosa, e esperar pela invasão "real". Ele deu a ordem de movimento apenas em julho. Seu fracasso em atacar os Aliados quando eles estavam mais fracos provou ser custoso. Como Omar Bradley, comandante do Primeiro Exército dos EUA, disse mais tarde: "Se Hitler tivesse lançado essas forças contra nós nos primeiros dias ou na primeira semana, ele poderia muito bem ter nos dominado."
No evento, pouco antes do amanhecer, bombardeiros e navios de guerra aliados começaram um bombardeio intensivo de cinco praias ao longo de um trecho de oitenta quilômetros da costa da Normandia. As praias-alvo receberam os nomes de código Utah e Omaha para os americanos, Gold e Sword para os britânicos e Juno para os canadenses. A partir das 6h30, o momento designado para o ataque, ou "Hora H", as tropas aliadas começaram a aparecer da névoa do Canal, para participar da maior invasão anfíbia de todos os tempos.
No evento, pouco antes do amanhecer, bombardeiros e navios de guerra aliados começaram um bombardeio intensivo de cinco praias ao longo de um trecho de oitenta quilômetros da costa da Normandia. As praias-alvo receberam os nomes de código Utah e Omaha para os americanos, Gold e Sword para os britânicos e Juno para os canadenses. A partir das 6h30, o momento designado para o ataque, ou "Hora H", as tropas aliadas começaram a aparecer da névoa do Canal, para participar da maior invasão anfíbia de todos os tempos.
A maioria das histórias orais do Dia D se concentrou nos soldados que invadiram as praias, começando com as tropas desembarcando das embarcações de desembarque. A história do transporte de tropas e armas pelo Canal foi mais ou menos uma nota de rodapé. Mas, como Nick Hewitt relata, os marinheiros aliados não eram facilitadores passivos, transportando tropas pelo mar: eles desempenharam um papel crucial para garantir o sucesso da operação. Os marinheiros privados de sono — muitos receberam Benzedrina para mantê-los acordados — varreram em busca de minas, protegeram os flancos da invasão de ataques e bombardearam alvos costeiros. Marinheiros e engenheiros de combate desembarcaram ao lado de milhares de tropas de assalto enjoadas e exaustas para limpar obstáculos na praia.
A preparação da força de invasão, uma armada de mais de sete mil embarcações navais, incluindo quatro mil embarcações de desembarque e mil e duzentos navios de guerra, havia começado anos antes. Desde o início de 1942, os planejadores estavam preparando uma operação que só poderia ocorrer depois que tropas e equipamentos americanos suficientes cruzassem o Atlântico e os homens ganhassem experiência em combate. Se quisessem desembarcar um exército com segurança e mantê-lo abastecido, havia muito para os marinheiros aprenderem, incluindo a geografia, geologia e gradientes das praias da Normandia. Era vital descobrir se as praias seriam adequadas para veículos e equipamentos pesados. A Marinha Real foi encarregada de colocar pequenos grupos de pesquisa em terra, conhecidos como Grupos de Pilotagem de Operações Combinadas, para coletar amostras geológicas. Durante os primeiros meses de 1944, o COPP inspecionou muitas áreas das praias alvos sob o nariz do inimigo, coletando amostras à noite e armazenando-as dentro de preservativos antes de nadar de volta para seus pequenos barcos.
Em 5 de junho, Eisenhower escreveu uma mensagem para ser entregue se os desembarques falhassem. Problemas surgiram logo após a meia-noite. Centenas de paraquedistas pousaram muito longe de suas zonas de lançamento designadas e foram mortos por atiradores alemães, ou se encontraram em pântanos que Rommel havia inundado para que os invasores se afogassem sob o peso de seus equipamentos. Muitos bombardeiros erraram seus alvos e não conseguiram derrubar as posições alemãs. Confusão, clima desafiador e comunicação instável atormentaram as fases iniciais da invasão terrestre. Fortes correntes fizeram com que muitas unidades marítimas perdessem seus pontos de desembarque. A maré alta reduziu o tamanho de algumas praias e dezenas de tanques afundaram após serem liberados de suas rampas. Para aumentar a miséria, os Aliados sofreram pesadas baixas quando as forças alemãs atiraram em barcos de desembarque e praias. A maior carnificina foi na praia de Omaha fortemente defendida. O fogo inimigo foi tão intenso que Bradley começou a considerar abandonar a operação. Conforme as horas passavam, no entanto, os Aliados começaram a atingir seus objetivos. Houve mais de dez mil baixas, mas isso foi menos do que o previsto. Quando o sol se pôs, os Aliados ganharam uma posição na Europa Ocidental Ocupada: as defesas de praia alemãs foram neutralizadas e quase 160.000 tropas estavam em terra.
Em 5 de junho, Eisenhower escreveu uma mensagem para ser entregue se os desembarques falhassem. Problemas surgiram logo após a meia-noite. Centenas de paraquedistas pousaram muito longe de suas zonas de lançamento designadas e foram mortos por atiradores alemães, ou se encontraram em pântanos que Rommel havia inundado para que os invasores se afogassem sob o peso de seus equipamentos. Muitos bombardeiros erraram seus alvos e não conseguiram derrubar as posições alemãs. Confusão, clima desafiador e comunicação instável atormentaram as fases iniciais da invasão terrestre. Fortes correntes fizeram com que muitas unidades marítimas perdessem seus pontos de desembarque. A maré alta reduziu o tamanho de algumas praias e dezenas de tanques afundaram após serem liberados de suas rampas. Para aumentar a miséria, os Aliados sofreram pesadas baixas quando as forças alemãs atiraram em barcos de desembarque e praias. A maior carnificina foi na praia de Omaha fortemente defendida. O fogo inimigo foi tão intenso que Bradley começou a considerar abandonar a operação. Conforme as horas passavam, no entanto, os Aliados começaram a atingir seus objetivos. Houve mais de dez mil baixas, mas isso foi menos do que o previsto. Quando o sol se pôs, os Aliados ganharam uma posição na Europa Ocidental Ocupada: as defesas de praia alemãs foram neutralizadas e quase 160.000 tropas estavam em terra.
D-DAY The Oral History de Garrett Graff reúne trechos de relatos de mais de seiscentas pessoas — entrevistadas principalmente na década de 1980 — que viveram a invasão. Alguns dos mais marcantes são daqueles que não portavam armas. O livro lança luz sobre o funcionamento do exército segregado dos EUA: os negros americanos eram amplamente confinados a funções de serviço e suprimento, e até mesmo os suprimentos de plasma sanguíneo levados para a Normandia — 800.000 litros — eram separados de acordo com a raça do doador. Apesar de ferido, o sargento Waverly B. Woodson Jr, um médico do 320º Batalhão de Balões de Barragem, a única unidade de soldados afro-americanos a pousar em Omaha, trabalhou sob fogo continuamente por trinta horas, tratando mais de duzentos feridos. O comandante de Woodson o recomendou para o maior prêmio militar do país por bravura, a Medalha de Honra, mas ele recebeu apenas a Estrela de Bronze. Nenhum dos 1,5 milhão de negros americanos que serviram na Segunda Guerra Mundial recebeu uma das 443 Medalhas de Honra concedidas na época.
Many Allied soldiers were surprised to discover that some of their adversaries were not German. The German army in Normandy included Hilfswillige (willing helpers) or Hiwi, Soviet deserters from the Red Army and men who had been taken captive. Some German troops were seasoned veterans of the Eastern Front or the North Africa campaign, but others were young and inexperienced recruits. D-Day was the first time that Private Franz Rachmann had handled a machine gun outside of training: ‘I shoot, I shoot! For each American I see fall, there came ten hundred other ones!’ In the days after the invasion some German soldiers massacred captured Allied troops, but Graff doesn’t fall into the trap of portraying SS men solely as sadists. Thirty-year-old Hubert Meyer, a senior general staff officer with the Twelfth SS Panzer Division, had organised a visit to Normandy for his wife, Irmgard, for the night of 5 June: ‘It was totally illegal, but I hadn’t had any leave for ages.’ After news of the invasion was announced at 5 a.m. on the 6th, Meyer arranged for his wife to slip away without anyone seeing.
Neither Hewitt nor Graff’s account strays very far from the fighting. The operational story of Normandy is mostly familiar, but over the past few decades a number of historians have combined the study of tactics, strategy and weapons with an examination of the social and cultural contexts of military masculinity. For many men, sex and sexual fantasies – both heterosexual and homosexual – served as a means of coping with the strains of war. Yet Hewitt’s book, which claims to convey ‘only ... a flavour of the huge range of experiences which made up D-Day for sailors’, contains more references to wardroom etiquette and napkin-folding than to sex and sexuality. Graff’s collection suffers from a similar shortcoming: the idea that sex might have been on soldiers’ minds is implied to be far-fetched, and the only reference to Allied soldiers having sex is sexless: Rifleman Patrick Devlin recalled that he was ‘asked to take three condoms. We had never been given these before. I was [Roman Catholic] and refused them.’
To leave out sex and sexual violence from an account of D-Day is to ignore a great deal. US troops stationed in Britain had a huge number of sexual encounters with local women, and sometimes men. On D-Day, as ten thousand sailors of the Royal Canadian Navy took part in the attack on Juno beach, 19-year-old Raymond Paul Lindstrom, a Canadian sailor, was convicted in Derry in Northern Ireland of ‘gross indecency’, after an encounter with a US army officer in the city’s Melville Hotel. More than 6.5 million men and women served in the British armed forces and, as Emma Vickers suggests in Queen and Country: Same-Sex Desire in the British Armed Forces, 1939-45, it’s possible that as many as 1.1 million experienced some form of same-sex intimacy.
Both Hewitt and Graff portray the victors as beyond reproach. Many soldiers, airmen and sailors conducted themselves well, but the Allied invasion was not a ‘gentlemanly war’. Research into soldier-civilian relations has redrawn the image of the gallant GI, self-disciplined, chivalrous and sexually well-behaved. Sexual interactions were usually consensual: women were attracted to the well-mannered, well-dressed GIs, who brought with them new dance steps and novel ways of being courteous. But many women became victims of sexual assault: as the well-known grumble went, GIs were ‘overfed, overpaid, oversexed, over here’. American servicemen’s searches for sexual encounters often involved propositioning women in the street or in air-raid shelters. As one woman wrote in October 1943, ‘it’s not safe for us to be out unless we go together. I’d hate to be out in Derry alone after dusk, believe me. These Yanks are positive fiends for women and should all be in homes (mental ones).’
For decades after the Second World War, very little public or historical attention was paid to cases of rape and murder committed by the Western Allies. Stories focused chiefly on the sexual assaults carried out by Soviet troops during the liberation of Berlin. But recent work has shown that British and Canadian troops also raped and assaulted women as their armies advanced through France, the Low Countries and into Nazi Germany. The US army, as Mary Louise Roberts argued in What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War Two France, ‘appeared to be out of control’. More than four hundred sexual offences by GIs in the UK, including 126 rapes, were documented, though the sociologist J. Robert Lilly has argued that only 5 per cent of rapes were reported: he estimates that between 1942 and 1945 US military personnel raped almost 2500 women in Britain, more than 3600 in France and more than 11,000 in Germany. Anti-Black racism meant that African American soldiers were convicted and executed in disproportionate numbers.
Many GIs arrived in France expecting to have lots of sex: American war coverage portrayed French women as hypersexual. The army newspaper Stars and Stripes suggested that they would offer sexual favours out of gratitude. The paper printed helpful French phrases: ‘I am not married’ and ‘Are your parents at home?’ GIs were also in a position to buy sex. Countless women and girls, some as young as twelve, traded sex for soap, cigarettes and Hershey’s chocolate bars. With the market for paid sex also growing quickly, brothels became overwhelmed. In Le Havre, American soldiers had sex in public places – parks, alleyways and graveyards. Three US soldiers terrorised a town on the Cotentin Peninsula early in August 1944, raping local women. In Saint-Lô, a Normandy prefect reported that ‘the liberators have turned into looters, rapists and killers.’
As many as 19,890 French civilians were killed by Allied bombing during the invasion. The images of Allied soldiers being welcomed as liberators and given flowers, wine and Calvados told only part of the story. For many, the costs borne on D-Day and the weeks that followed were worse than those of four years of Nazi occupation. French civilians reported disruptive and criminal behaviour by Allied soldiers: excessive drinking, theft, black-market profiteering, reckless driving. In early 1945, Life magazine reported that 2500 GIs had deserted and turned to crime in Paris.
D-Day didn’t change everything. The Allies had gained only a narrow foothold in Normandy, and Germany remained dominant across the rest of Western Europe. From his hiding place in an apartment in Occupied Paris, the journalist Léon Werth wrote in his diary the day after the invasion:
They’re in Le Havre and Caen – so near. And for us, everything is just as it was. No more than if they had landed on some Pacific island ... it is only a mental object. Nothing palpable connects it to us yet. We’re trying to find perceptible evidence for it, the way you hold out your hand before a storm to feel the first raindrops.
The anticipation of liberation could become a matter of life and death. On the night of 6 June, a group of volunteers from Capestang and Montady, near Béziers, set off in two lorries to join the Maquis, stopping at a boulangerie to gather supplies. At a turn in the road, they encountered a vehicle carrying German soldiers. Five of the volunteers were shot on the spot, the rest were arrested and shot the next afternoon. The binary of before and after a particular military event is often misleading when it comes to the experience of those who lived through it. For Jews and members of the Resistance, the days and weeks after D-Day were the most dangerous time of the occupation. News of the landings offered hope to Europe’s Jews that the days of intense persecution, mass round-ups and deportation to unknown destinations in the East would soon end. A week before her fifteenth birthday, after hearing about the D-Day attacks, Anne Frank wrote in her diary that ‘hope is revived within us; it gives us fresh courage, and makes us strong again.’ But as spring turned to summer, it became clear that the Allied landings wouldn’t stop the hunt for Jews in Western Europe. On the contrary, it intensified. Collaborators in France used the landings as an opportunity to take revenge. Between June and August 1944, the French Milice hunted down and arrested Jews. On 29 June at Rillieux-la-Pape, near Lyon, Paul Touvier, head of Milice intelligence for the region, picked seven men to be executed in reprisal for the assassination by the Resistance of Vichy’s minister for propaganda, Philippe Henriot. All were Jews. Before they were shot, one of the men sang ‘E lucevan le stelle’, the death aria from Puccini’s Tosca.
German forces were stretched thin as the Allies advanced rapidly towards France’s northern and eastern borders. Even so, many Nazis allocated their dwindling resources to finding and deporting as many Jews as possible. The Germans were not going to surrender: there was still a long way to go. D-Day might have marked the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany, but this was of no consequence for the thousands who would not live to see the liberation. Born in the Drancy internment camp in Paris, Alain Blumberg was two weeks old when on 31 July 1944 he was put on a train to Auschwitz. On arrival he was kicked to death by an SS guard.
Many Allied soldiers were surprised to discover that some of their adversaries were not German. The German army in Normandy included Hilfswillige (willing helpers) or Hiwi, Soviet deserters from the Red Army and men who had been taken captive. Some German troops were seasoned veterans of the Eastern Front or the North Africa campaign, but others were young and inexperienced recruits. D-Day was the first time that Private Franz Rachmann had handled a machine gun outside of training: ‘I shoot, I shoot! For each American I see fall, there came ten hundred other ones!’ In the days after the invasion some German soldiers massacred captured Allied troops, but Graff doesn’t fall into the trap of portraying SS men solely as sadists. Thirty-year-old Hubert Meyer, a senior general staff officer with the Twelfth SS Panzer Division, had organised a visit to Normandy for his wife, Irmgard, for the night of 5 June: ‘It was totally illegal, but I hadn’t had any leave for ages.’ After news of the invasion was announced at 5 a.m. on the 6th, Meyer arranged for his wife to slip away without anyone seeing.
Neither Hewitt nor Graff’s account strays very far from the fighting. The operational story of Normandy is mostly familiar, but over the past few decades a number of historians have combined the study of tactics, strategy and weapons with an examination of the social and cultural contexts of military masculinity. For many men, sex and sexual fantasies – both heterosexual and homosexual – served as a means of coping with the strains of war. Yet Hewitt’s book, which claims to convey ‘only ... a flavour of the huge range of experiences which made up D-Day for sailors’, contains more references to wardroom etiquette and napkin-folding than to sex and sexuality. Graff’s collection suffers from a similar shortcoming: the idea that sex might have been on soldiers’ minds is implied to be far-fetched, and the only reference to Allied soldiers having sex is sexless: Rifleman Patrick Devlin recalled that he was ‘asked to take three condoms. We had never been given these before. I was [Roman Catholic] and refused them.’
To leave out sex and sexual violence from an account of D-Day is to ignore a great deal. US troops stationed in Britain had a huge number of sexual encounters with local women, and sometimes men. On D-Day, as ten thousand sailors of the Royal Canadian Navy took part in the attack on Juno beach, 19-year-old Raymond Paul Lindstrom, a Canadian sailor, was convicted in Derry in Northern Ireland of ‘gross indecency’, after an encounter with a US army officer in the city’s Melville Hotel. More than 6.5 million men and women served in the British armed forces and, as Emma Vickers suggests in Queen and Country: Same-Sex Desire in the British Armed Forces, 1939-45, it’s possible that as many as 1.1 million experienced some form of same-sex intimacy.
Both Hewitt and Graff portray the victors as beyond reproach. Many soldiers, airmen and sailors conducted themselves well, but the Allied invasion was not a ‘gentlemanly war’. Research into soldier-civilian relations has redrawn the image of the gallant GI, self-disciplined, chivalrous and sexually well-behaved. Sexual interactions were usually consensual: women were attracted to the well-mannered, well-dressed GIs, who brought with them new dance steps and novel ways of being courteous. But many women became victims of sexual assault: as the well-known grumble went, GIs were ‘overfed, overpaid, oversexed, over here’. American servicemen’s searches for sexual encounters often involved propositioning women in the street or in air-raid shelters. As one woman wrote in October 1943, ‘it’s not safe for us to be out unless we go together. I’d hate to be out in Derry alone after dusk, believe me. These Yanks are positive fiends for women and should all be in homes (mental ones).’
For decades after the Second World War, very little public or historical attention was paid to cases of rape and murder committed by the Western Allies. Stories focused chiefly on the sexual assaults carried out by Soviet troops during the liberation of Berlin. But recent work has shown that British and Canadian troops also raped and assaulted women as their armies advanced through France, the Low Countries and into Nazi Germany. The US army, as Mary Louise Roberts argued in What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War Two France, ‘appeared to be out of control’. More than four hundred sexual offences by GIs in the UK, including 126 rapes, were documented, though the sociologist J. Robert Lilly has argued that only 5 per cent of rapes were reported: he estimates that between 1942 and 1945 US military personnel raped almost 2500 women in Britain, more than 3600 in France and more than 11,000 in Germany. Anti-Black racism meant that African American soldiers were convicted and executed in disproportionate numbers.
Many GIs arrived in France expecting to have lots of sex: American war coverage portrayed French women as hypersexual. The army newspaper Stars and Stripes suggested that they would offer sexual favours out of gratitude. The paper printed helpful French phrases: ‘I am not married’ and ‘Are your parents at home?’ GIs were also in a position to buy sex. Countless women and girls, some as young as twelve, traded sex for soap, cigarettes and Hershey’s chocolate bars. With the market for paid sex also growing quickly, brothels became overwhelmed. In Le Havre, American soldiers had sex in public places – parks, alleyways and graveyards. Three US soldiers terrorised a town on the Cotentin Peninsula early in August 1944, raping local women. In Saint-Lô, a Normandy prefect reported that ‘the liberators have turned into looters, rapists and killers.’
As many as 19,890 French civilians were killed by Allied bombing during the invasion. The images of Allied soldiers being welcomed as liberators and given flowers, wine and Calvados told only part of the story. For many, the costs borne on D-Day and the weeks that followed were worse than those of four years of Nazi occupation. French civilians reported disruptive and criminal behaviour by Allied soldiers: excessive drinking, theft, black-market profiteering, reckless driving. In early 1945, Life magazine reported that 2500 GIs had deserted and turned to crime in Paris.
D-Day didn’t change everything. The Allies had gained only a narrow foothold in Normandy, and Germany remained dominant across the rest of Western Europe. From his hiding place in an apartment in Occupied Paris, the journalist Léon Werth wrote in his diary the day after the invasion:
They’re in Le Havre and Caen – so near. And for us, everything is just as it was. No more than if they had landed on some Pacific island ... it is only a mental object. Nothing palpable connects it to us yet. We’re trying to find perceptible evidence for it, the way you hold out your hand before a storm to feel the first raindrops.
The anticipation of liberation could become a matter of life and death. On the night of 6 June, a group of volunteers from Capestang and Montady, near Béziers, set off in two lorries to join the Maquis, stopping at a boulangerie to gather supplies. At a turn in the road, they encountered a vehicle carrying German soldiers. Five of the volunteers were shot on the spot, the rest were arrested and shot the next afternoon. The binary of before and after a particular military event is often misleading when it comes to the experience of those who lived through it. For Jews and members of the Resistance, the days and weeks after D-Day were the most dangerous time of the occupation. News of the landings offered hope to Europe’s Jews that the days of intense persecution, mass round-ups and deportation to unknown destinations in the East would soon end. A week before her fifteenth birthday, after hearing about the D-Day attacks, Anne Frank wrote in her diary that ‘hope is revived within us; it gives us fresh courage, and makes us strong again.’ But as spring turned to summer, it became clear that the Allied landings wouldn’t stop the hunt for Jews in Western Europe. On the contrary, it intensified. Collaborators in France used the landings as an opportunity to take revenge. Between June and August 1944, the French Milice hunted down and arrested Jews. On 29 June at Rillieux-la-Pape, near Lyon, Paul Touvier, head of Milice intelligence for the region, picked seven men to be executed in reprisal for the assassination by the Resistance of Vichy’s minister for propaganda, Philippe Henriot. All were Jews. Before they were shot, one of the men sang ‘E lucevan le stelle’, the death aria from Puccini’s Tosca.
German forces were stretched thin as the Allies advanced rapidly towards France’s northern and eastern borders. Even so, many Nazis allocated their dwindling resources to finding and deporting as many Jews as possible. The Germans were not going to surrender: there was still a long way to go. D-Day might have marked the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany, but this was of no consequence for the thousands who would not live to see the liberation. Born in the Drancy internment camp in Paris, Alain Blumberg was two weeks old when on 31 July 1944 he was put on a train to Auschwitz. On arrival he was kicked to death by an SS guard.
* Lawrence Hogben, um dos meteorologistas envolvidos nas previsões do Dia D, escreveu sobre a decisão no LRB de 26 de maio de 1994.
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