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Liberation: the view from France1

2004; Routledge; Volume: 8; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1026021042000247054

1740-9306

Alice Kaplan,

Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes With many thanks to Cathy Davidson, Don Reid, Kristin Ross and Sara Appel for responding to earlier drafts of this essay. On the evolving historical understanding of our involvement in WW II, see Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). Dan Whitcomb, “L.A. Times Bans ‘Resistance Fighters’ in Iraq News,” November 6, 2003, Reuters News Service, quoted by Don Reid in “The Grandchildren of Godard and the Aubracs: Betrayal, Resistance, and the People without a Memory,” French Cultural Studies 15 (1): 76‐92. Some of the original usage is surprising. For example, during the German occupation of France, the Vichy government and the Nazi occupiers were using the word “terrorist” to describe members of the internal French resistance. Vichy sent its anti‐terrorist police, the milice, to destroy resistance groups throughout France. After the retreat of the Nazis in 1944, French citizens who had supported the resistance – the same people Vichy had targeted as terrorists – referred to themselves as “patriots”; Vichy supporters were traitors who needed to be purged. The Oxford English Dictionary defines liberation in the political sense as early as 1532, quoting Ellis's “Original Letters” on the “liberation off Italye”5. It lists among many subsequent examples of usage a September 18, 1945, sentence from the Baltimore Sun: “Liberation is only four months old” – the reference is to the victory in Europe on May 8, 1945 (VE Day). Leclerc's 2ème Division Blindée was one of three divisions in US General Leonard Gerow's Third Army Corps. It arrived in Paris during the night of August 24. The 4th US Infantry was also one of Gerow's divisions: it arrived in the center of Paris the morning of August 25. One can estimate that 15,000 soldiers of each nationality liberated Paris, but this doesn't account for the thousands of American troops to the east of the city, who made that liberation possible. Given the underlying issue of national credit, it is not surprising how difficult it is to find even approximate figures for how many French and how many American soldiers liberated Paris – even in military histories. On the French side, see Jean‐Pierre Azema, La France de Munich à la liberation (Paris: Seuil, 1979); on the American side, Russell Weigley, Eisenhower's Lieutenants (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981). I am grateful to Robert Paxton for his help clarifying this issue. Louis Guilloux, Carnets 1921‐1944 (Paris: Gallimard, 1978) 404 (entry for August 6, 1944). The Civil Affairs handbooks for each region of France are available at the BDIC, Nanterre and at the Imperial War Museum, London. See the discussion in Harry L. Coles, Civil Affairs: Soldiers Become Governors (Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, Dept. of the Army, 1964) 698. On the French side, see Charles‐Louis Foulon, Le Pouvoir en province à la libération (Paris : Fondation nationale des sciences politiques/Armand Colin, 1975); Francois Bédarida, “Les Alliés et le pouvoir,” in Les pouvoirs en France à la libération, dir. P. Buton‐J.M. Guillon (Paris: Bellin, 1994) 60‐76. On the American side, see Harry L. Coles, Civil Affairs: soldiers become governors; Merritt Y. Hughes, “Civil Affairs in France,” in Friedrich et. al., American Experiences in Military Government in WW II (NY: Rinehart and Co., 1948) Chapter VII, 148–68; see also the diary of a Civil Affairs Division officer in Normandy: Maj. Gen. John J. Maginnis, Military Government Journal: Normandy to Berlin ed. Robert A. Hart (Amerhurst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971). Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940‐1944 (New York: Knopf, 1975). Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2000). Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Is Paris Burning? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965). A movie version, a Franco‐American co‐production, was released in 1966, the year de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO and requested that all NATO bases be removed from French soil. It was a shaky year for Franco‐American friendship. Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l'Ouest, tome 109, no. 4, 2002, 203–215. Among important studies of the Liberation to have benefited from these documents: Luc Capdevila, Bretons au lendemain de l'Occupation (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1999); Fabrice Virgili, La France ‘virile’: Des femmes tondues à la liberation (Paris: Payot, 2000); Megan Koreman, The Expectation of Justice: France 1944‐1946 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). The classic American war novels set in 1944‐1945 don't have France as their settings. Catch 22 takes place in Italy; The Naked and the Dead in Japan; The Young Lions is stateside; Slaughterhouse Five involves an American POW in Dresden. Louis Guilloux, Salido, suivi de OK, Joe!, (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), translated with an introduction by Alice Kaplan as OK, Joe, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). A book based on this research, entitled The Interpreter: The Untold Story of Segregated Justice in Liberated France, is forthcoming from The Free Press. United States Army. Judge Advocate General's Department Board of Review, Holdings and Opinions, Board of Review, branch office of the Judge Advocate General, European Theater of Operations. Washington: Office of the Judge Advocate General, 1942‐1946. See also Robert Lilly's study of GI rape in the European Theater: La Face cachée des GI's : Les viols commis par des soldats américains en France, en Angleterre et en Allemagne pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Paris: Payot, 2003). I am grateful to Robert Lilly for his guidance in working with Court Martial documents. Pierre‐Yves Kerloch, “Louis Guilloux, romancier de la douleur,” Université de Bretagne occidentale, 2001, 246‐48, describes the manicheism of the fictional world depicted in OK, Joe. The Army statistics more than confirm, for the larger picture, the results Guilloux witnessed in the Court Martial at Morlaix. Seventy soldiers in the European Theater were condemned for murder and rape in the period 1944‐1946; 55 were African Americans serving in segregated service units. The statistics for rape are even more unbalanced. In France alone, of 181 rape convictions, 139 were given to African Americans – 79% in an army that was less than 10% black. In explaining these statistics, an army report from 1945 blamed alcohol abuse, the reputation of French women as loose, and undereducated Negro troops with low IQs. There was no speculation in the report that the humiliation of serving in a segregated army might have contributed to crime rates. See The General Board, United States Forces, European Theater. The Military Offender in the Theater of Operations, 20 November 1945. Study no. 84. Record Group 319, USFET Monographs. National Archives at College Park, MD. Archives départementales du Finistère, « Procès verbal constatant la mort du parachutiste français Morand, Francis. » August 22, 1944, Lesneven, 200W75. Record Group 407, Entry 427, WW II Operations Reports, VIII Corps. Judge Advocate Journal from 1 July 1944‐31 October 1944. One of the limits of doing research on US Courts Martial – despite the Freedom of Information act, which gives access to the full transcripts – is that you can't get a transcript unless you know the name of the defendant. You can't look up a case by place of trial, date, or even verdict This makes it impossible, for example, to study acquittals of white GIs accused of similar crimes. United States. vs. Capt. George Whittington, Jr., September 25‐26, 1944, Morlaix, Finistère, France. Courtesy U.S. Army Clerk of Courts, Alexandria, Virginia. Louis Guilloux is not the only one to have been intrigued by the Whittington case. Don Lewis, an officer in the VIII Corps Army who was friendly with Whittington's defense counsel, dreamed of writing a murder mystery based on the trial. After his retirement, he visited Lesneven and interviewed the barmaid, hotel owner, the head of the local resistance. His notes show that he made many starts at a novel, but never finished. Interview with Elenore Lewis McKetchnie, Winter Park, Florida, May 17, 2003. Roger Schank, letter to the author, February 28, 2003. Interviewed in Le Chagrin et la Pitié, dir. Marcel Ophuls.