The Wartime Battlefield of Sex
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Modern American History (2021), 4, 209–212 doi:10.1017/mah.2021.8 TAKE THREE: The Color Line The Wartime Battlefield of Sex Ruth Lawlor When American forces broke through German resistance in the spring of 1945, U.S. Army commanders began to worry about rising reports of sexual violence. “Since the entry into Germany by the Seventh Army the number of cases of rape have increased greatly,” General Alexander Patch reported. “The situation is one in which it is believed emergency action is required.”1 Omar Bradley, commander of the largest group of armies on the continent, warned General Dwight D. Eisenhower that “certain conditions of looting, pillaging, wanton destruc- tion, rape and other crimes” were widespread.2 By the time of his writing, in April 1945, some 500 reports of rape per week were flooding into the Judge Advocate General’s office.3 An after-action report would later confirm these concerns: “We were members of a conquer- ing army and we came as conquerors. The rates of reported rapes sprang skyward.” This report acknowledged that many more rapes occurred than were reflected in general court-martial records, which listed 552 trials for Germany as a whole until the end of the war. The Judge Advocate said that not more than 25 percent of reported cases ever made it to trial.4 The sit- uation was “ripe for violent sex crimes,” the report concluded, and “the avalanche came.”5 The history of Allied sexual violence in Nazi Germany is a troubled one. Numerous histo- rians have documented the extensive sexual assaults that German women suffered at war’s end; in popular memory, this history is associated above all with the Soviet “Rape of Berlin,” though French and American troops were also regularly accused of gendered violence.6 After Germany’s defeat in 1945, such stories of sexual violation would be transformed into a mythol- ogy of national violation that was effectively racialized and put toward neo-fascist ends.7 This prospect was immediately discernible to black soldiers and journalists on the ground in Germany in the spring of 1945, who saw how the U.S. Army’s commitment to Jim Crow seg- regation—including prohibitions on sex and fraternization across the color line—aligned with The author would like to thank Brooke Blower, David Fitzgerald, Emma Teitelman, and the anonymous review- ers for their valuable feedback on this essay. 1Lieutenant General Alexander M. Patch, “Memo to Commanding General, European Theater of Operations: Death Sentences for Rape,” Apr. 5, 1945, AG Active Records Branch, file 250, vol I (Discipline), box 1595, entry UD 372, RG 498, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD [hereafter NARA]. 2Omar Bradley, “Misbehavior of Allied Troops,” May 7, 1945, box 83, entry 198, RG 331, NARA. 3Perry Biddiscombe, “Dangerous Liaisons: The Anti-Fraternization Movement in the U.S. Occupation Zones of Germany and Austria, 1945–1948,” Journal of Social History 34, no. 3 (Spring 2001): 611–47, here 635. 4History Branch Office of the Judge Advocate General with the United States Forces European Theater, July 18, 1942–November 1, 1945, vol. II. (St. Cloud, France, 1945), 354 [hereafter History of the JAGO vol. II]. 5History Branch Office of the Judge Advocate General with the United States Forces European Theater, July 18, 1942–November 1, 1945, vol. I. (St. Cloud, France, 1945), 243 [hereafter History of the JAGO vol. I]. 6Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 69–140; Miriam Gebhardt, Crimes Unspoken: The Rape of German Women at the End of the Second World War, trans. Nick Somers (Cambridge, UK, 2017); J. Robert Lilly, Taken by Force: Rape and American GIs in Europe during World War II (New York, 2007); John Willoughby, “The Sexual Behaviour of American GIs during the Early Years of the Occupation of Germany,” The Journal of Military History 62, no. 1 (Jan. 1998): 155–74. 7Atina Grossmann, “A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers,” October 72 (Spring 1995): 42–63. © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 29 Sep 2021 at 12:23:44, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. 210 Ruth Lawlor pre-existing German fears of black men to create a situation in which African American GIs could be disproportionately tried for and convicted of rape, even when their sexual encounters were consensual.8 This was, after all, how the sexual color line had worked stateside, in the American South, where 80 percent of black GIs trained, as well as in Britain and France, where African American soldiers made up about 10 percent of total U.S. troop strength. White American commanders worried incessantly about sexual encounters between black men and white women as African American demands for civil rights grew louder. Children born from interracial relationships, they feared, would undermine white supremacy and the black/white racial ordering of the United States. For this reason, the army policed sexual crimes (including consensual acts across the color line deemed criminal by miscegenation laws in the United States or by military reg- ulations in the European Theater) far more aggressively than other crimes. The weight of that power landed disproportionately on black soldiers, who were widely blamed for episodes of rape, and not infrequently sentenced to death on little or no evidence. In France, the extent of racial scapegoating was especially staggering, as black GIs accounted for 77 percent of rape convictions, and army authorities, in unison with local French mayors, denounced what they called the “black terror on the Bocage.”9 Watching the same white supremacist dynamics endemic to the United States now playing out across the Atlantic, the NAACP com- plained that black soldiers were being “railroaded to prison,” while journalists involved in the Double V campaign described a process akin to legal lynching: as one correspondent for the Chicago Defender put it, “Death has become the penalty for crossing the color line.”10 But when the army entered Germany, the picture grew more complicated. As reports of rape increased, the claims were more clearly tied to combat troops on the tip of the spear, not the supporting units at the rear, where most African American troops had been shunted into menial jobs. In other words, army commanders were faced with substantive evidence that those responsible for this latest spate of violence were overwhelmingly white.11 Nonetheless, U.S. military officials at first tried to assign primary blame for sexual crimes in Germany to black soldiers. Many of the cases that occurred during the invasion, ventured one report, were caused “by negro troops in convoys en route back from the front.”12 Common racist assump- tions held by many white Americans and Europeans alike—that rape was something black men “couldn’thelp,” as one woman put it in a letter to the director of the NAACP—further enabled such scapegoating.13 As one German woman explained to a court-martial, “It was best not to resist [black soldiers]; otherwise we would be killed. Everybody talked about that.”14 8The most famous example of this problem in Europe was the Leroy Henry case, tried in Britain in 1944. See Mary Louise Roberts, “The Leroy Henry Case: Sexual Violence and Allied Relations in Great Britain, 1944,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 26, no. 3 (Sept. 2017): 402–23. German fears stemmed in part from memories and the surrounding mythology of the Black Horror on the Rhine, a campaign by German officials to discredit the French occupation of the Rhineland in the early 1920s by accusing colonial troops of sexual violence. See Iris Wigger, “‘Black Shame’—The Campaign against ‘Racial Degeneration’ and Female Degradation in Interwar Europe,” Race & Class 51, no. 3 (Jan. 1, 2010): 33–46. 9Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (Chicago, 2013), 239–54. 10“A Double Standard of Morals,” The Chicago Defender, Apr. 28, 1945, 12; Franklin H. Williams, “Memorandum to Walter White,” Feb. 28, 1947, file Soldier Trouble: 1946–47, box II B158, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Records, 1842–1999 [hereafter NAACP], Library of Congress, Washington DC [hereafter LOC]. 11History of the JAGO vol. I, 249. 12“Memorandum from Assistant Chief of Staff,” Apr. 2, 1945, box 43, entry 240R, RG 331, NARA. 13Ruthie Giles, “Letter to Walter White,” May 18, 1945, folder 5, box II B160, NAACP, LOC. 14“Dodson, George, Van Riper, Arthur, and Placide, Budwin Jr. Record of Trial by General Court Martial,” Nov. 1, 1945, CM 309482, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, MO [hereafter NPRC]; History of the JAGO vol. I, 246. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 29 Sep 2021 at 12:23:44, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. Modern American History 211 While sexual violence by black men was portrayed as something inherent and uncontrolla- ble, it was simultaneously rendered exceptional for white men, an aberration triggered by their exposure to war. This was the case for Clayton Austin, a white GI who perpetrated at least six assaults against three teenage girls in the midst of battle. The Staff Judge Advocate, the legal advisor for Austin’s division, condemned Austin’s “violent and lustful course of conduct” and referred him for psychiatric testing, concluding that he must have lost his mind. Even Austin’s victims appealed for clemency for him, stating their belief that “this incident would never have occurred had he not been intoxicated, the blame for which can be put on the war.”15 Watching these disparate narratives develop, the Chicago Defender decried such a “dou- ble standard of morals” by which white soldiers’ sexual violence was perceived as excusable and unremarkable, while black men’s purported sexual aggression was treated as a deeper injury that warranted the harshest punishment.