Poor Mojo's Newswire

This isn’t the “greatest generation” as it has come to be depicted in popular histories. But in “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War II France,” the historian Mary Louise Roberts draws on French archives, American military records, wartime propaganda and other sources to advance a provocative argument: The liberation of France was “sold” to soldiers not as a battle for freedom but as an erotic adventure among oversexed Frenchwomen, stirring up a “tsunami of male lust” that a battered and mistrustful population often saw as a second assault on its sovereignty and dignity. “I could not believe what I was reading,” Ms. Roberts, a professor of French history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, recalled of the moment she came across the citizen complaints in an obscure archive in Le Havre. “I took out my little camera and began photographing the pages. I did not go to the bathroom for eight hours.” . . . Sex was certainly on the liberators’ minds. The book cites military propaganda and press accounts depicting France as “a tremendous brothel inhabited by 40 million hedonists,” as Life magazine put it. (Sample sentences from a French phrase guide in the newspaper Stars and Stripes: “You are very pretty” and “Are your parents at home?”) On the ground, however, the grateful kisses captured by photojournalists gave way to something less picturesque. In the National Archives in College Park, Md., Ms. Roberts found evidence — including one blurry, curling snapshot — supporting long-circulating colorful anecdotes about the Blue and Gray Corral, a brothel set up near the village of St. Renan in September 1944 by Maj. Gen. Charles H. Gerhardt, commander of the infantry division that landed at Omaha Beach, partly to counter a wave of rape accusations against G.I.’s. (It was shut down after a mere five hours.) . . . “White soldiers got a pass because of their combat status,” said William I. Hitchcock, author of “The Bitter Road to Freedom” (2008), a history of the liberation of Western Europe from the perspective of often traumatized local civilians. “The Army wasn’t interested in prosecuting a battle-scarred sergeant.” . . .

Poet Maya Angelou may already have a dizzying list of accomplishments but there is none more surprising to be revealed as her stint as a streetcar conductor in San Francisco. In an interview with Oprah, Angelou was just 16 years old and still in high school when she decided to pursue the position. The uniforms caught her eye and she soon went to apply for a job. Though many women worked as streetcar conductors, at the time none of them were women of color. Angelou was denied an application, but that didn’t stop her from soldiering on. With her mother Vivian Baxter’s encouragement and suggestion, Angelou says she sat in SF’s transit office every day for two weeks. She would arrive earlier than the secretaries and wouldn’t leave until after they had gone for the day. “They laughed at me, they pushed out their lips and used some negative racial things,” but she persisted. It was that determination that got Angelou the job, she says. Baxter acted as a strong support system once Angelou got the job, waking her up at 4 AM every day of work with a bath already drawn.