Aimee Dupre had always chosen to not mention the American soldiers ‘ murder of her family following the June 1944 flights in Normandy.
But, after 80 times since the violent attack, she finally decided to come to words her knowledge.
In the months following D-Day, nearly one million troops from the United States, Britain, Canada, and France made their way to the French coast as part of a campaign that saw the close of Nazi Germany’s rule over Europe.
Aimee was 19, living in Montours, a town in Brittany, and happy to see the “liberators ‘ arrive, while was everyone around her.
However, her delight disappeared. Two American troops, commonly known as GIs, came to the mother’s land on the night of August 10.
” They were drunken and they wanted a woman,” Aimee, then 99, told AFP, producing a notice that her mother, even called Aimee, wrote” so nothing is forgotten’.
In her neat handwriting, Aimee Helaudais Honore accurately described the events that day. Her daughter Aimee approached her father with their guns, leaving holes in his hat, and the soldiers veered off in a terrifying direction.
To defend her child, she agreed to leave the house with the GIs, she wrote. They raped me four days in a row before taking me to a niche.
Aimee’s words broke as she read from the text. ” Oh mother, how you suffered, and me also, I think about this every day”, she said.
” My mother sacrificed herself to defend me”, she said. We waited, unsure whether she would survive the day of rape or whether they would murder her.
The events of that night were not isolated. 152 warriors were arraigned for raping French women in October 1944, following the victory of the Battle of Normandy.
According to American historian Mary Louise Roberts, one of only a few people to study what she called” a taboo” of World War II, hundreds or even thousands of rapes committed between 1944 and the GIs ‘ departure in 1946 went unreported.
” Some people decided to remain passive,” she said”. There was the shame, while usually with rape.”
She mentioned that it was especially difficult for them to express their thoughts because of the major difference in their experience versus the common joy over the National victory.
” Easily to find,”
Roberts even attributes the army’s management, who, according to her, had promised men” a country with women that were “easy to find” to boost their desire to battle.
Numerous images from the US Army news Stars and Stripes showed European women kissing triumphant Americans.
” How’s What We’re Fighting For, “read a title on September 9, 1944, alongside a portrait of cheering Flemish people and the comment:” The French are nuts about the Yankees.”
The motivation of intercourse” was to encourage British soldiers’, Roberts said.
According to her,” Intercourse, and I mean trafficking and rape, were a way for Americans to assert their dominance over France, dominating European people because they could not defend their country and their ladies from the Germans,” she continued.
In Plabennec, near Brest on the northernmost tip of Britanny, Jeanne Pengam, miss Tournellec, remembers” as if it was yesterday ‘ how her girl Catherine was raped and their parents murdered by a GI.
My older sister was raped by the dark American, the black American. My dad shot my father dying while standing in his way. The man managed to break down the door and enter the house, “89- yr- ancient Jeanne told AFP.
She contacted a local American military at the age of nine to get their attention.
” I told them he was European, but I was bad. They soon recognized that he was an American when they examined the shots the following morning, she said.
Her sister Catherine kept the awful key” that poisoned her entire life ‘ until immediately before her death, said one of her sons, Jeannine Plassard.
” Lying on her medical bed she told me”, I was raped during the battle, during the Emancipation,”” Plassard told AFP.
Asked whether she actually told anything, her family replied:” Show person? It was the Emancipation, everybody was glad, I was not going to talk about something like this, that would have been cruel”, she said.
In his 1976 novel” OK Joe!”, which includes the GIs ‘ rape trials in military judges, Louis Guilloux described his experience working as a speaker for US troops following the flights.
According to Philippe Baron, the book’s filmmaker,” the people who were sentenced to death were about entirely black.”
” Terrible key”
Those found criminal, including the criminals of Aimee Helaudais Honore and Catherine Tournellec, were hanged officially in French settlements.
” Behind the stigma surrounding rapes by the conquerors, there was the terrible secret of a secessionist American military,” said Baron.
” Once a black man was brought to trial, he had almost no possibility of conviction, “he said.
This, said Roberts, allowed the military order to protect the reputation of light Americans by” scapegoating some African- National soldiers’.
She claimed that 25 of the 29 convicted of rape in 1944 and 1945 were black GIs.
It became simpler to accuse black people of rape because of racial stereotypes about sexuality. White soldiers were more difficult to locate because they frequently made up mobile units as opposed to their black counterparts, who were primarily stationed in one place.
Because he never rested near the rape scene, a French woman who had alleged rape against a white American soldier could easily get away with it. The following morning, he had disappeared.
Roberts claimed that the police would have to regularly check on her after her book” What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France” came out in 2013.
People disliked my book because they did n’t want to lose this notion of the good GI, she claimed. Even if it means that we must continue to lie.
( With inputs from agencies )
