Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (17 page)

Bednarik's suggestion (he gives no source for
his
use of the leaflet ) that Ehrenburg was consciously trading off women's bodies against a I_Ilore fearful, wanton destruction by an avenging Red Army is an interesting extrapolation. He, too, like the German professors, needed to pin the blame on someone. Milovan Djilas, the renegade Yugoslav Communist turned fierce anti-Communist, also discusses Red Army rape in his overly emotional and not altogether trustworthy
Conversations with s
·
talin.
Djilas reports that according to complaints filed by the local populace, the Soviet Army committed
121
rapes and many rape-murders in his coun try-"figures that are hardly insignificant
if
it is borne in mind that the Red Army crossed only the northeastern corner of Yugoslavia." Djilas claims to have taken up the matter with Stalin himself.

"Djilas, Djilas!" he says the Russian dictator answered him. "Does Djilas, who is himself a writer, not know what human suffering and the human heart are? Can't he understand it
if
a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?"

Not all Russian soldiers were rapists, and individual instances of kindness toward women are sprinkled throughout the German accounts of Red Army atrocity. But there is no point, it seems to me, in trying to pin the blame for the Soviet troops' behavior on an Ehrenburg leaflet, a Stalin attitude of "boys will be boys" or, laughably, on certain national characteristics.
In
war or peace men do not need orders or permission or a particular national heritage to commit an act of rape. Soviet rape was especially ironi because the Russians themselves had made so much of the New Soviet Man—

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AGAINST OUR WILL

who in war turned out to be the old, familiar man. The misuse of ideology was not that the political commissars consciously traded off women's bodies against a worse destruction by their embittered men, but that whatever socialist ideology the Red Army men were expoed to in their indoctrination, sexual oppression of women was evidently not part of the course. The hard political truth is that the Red Army behaved no differently from any conquering army when it came to women's bodies or wristwatches in Germany and East ern Europe in i945.

A passage in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago reveals that

Russian writer's own ideological confusion. Stripped of his rank and thrown into a punishment cell for writing anti-Stalinist letters from the front he discovers that his three cellmates, "tankmen in soft black helmets; honest, openhearted soldiers," have been charged with breaking into a bathhouse and attempting to rape two German peasant women, whoin Solzhenitsyn takes it upon himself to characterize as "raunchy broads." To Solzhenitsyn, the ster!l, uncompromising judge of Communist ethics, this rape rap is a vindicative, deliberate miscarriage of justice, for one of the women, he believes, "was the property of the army Chief of Counterintelligence, no less."

Never pausing to contemplate the problem or the meaning of rape in war, or a workable system of deterrence and punishment, Solzhenitsyn plainly considers the offense in question no offense at all, attributable to overenthusiastic drunkenness. This he must do because his only concern is to demonstrate the horrors of a cow ardly police state, and so he tells us with casuistic logic,

Yes! For three weeks the war had been going on inside Ger many and all of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat dis-

•·
tinction. Had they been Polish girls or our own displaced Russian girls, they could have been chased naked around the garden and slapped on the behind-an amusement, no more. But just because this one was the "campaign wife" of the Chief of Counterintelli

i
gence, some deep-in-the-rear sergeant had viciously torn from three

i
front-line officers the shoulder boards awarded them by the front

• l
  headquarters . . .
  *
  

*
Solzhenitsyn is not the only Soviet dissident whose
politik
of anguish left him sublimely insensitive to the rights of women. When the physicist Valery

WAR
I
73

General George S. Patton, Jr., unintentionally gave us some insights into the nature of rape in his memoirs of World War II. During the North African campaign in Morocco in
1942,
Patton conducted a delicate discussion with an aide to the Sultan in which he advised that "in spite of my most diligent efforts, there would unquestionably be some raping" by American soldiers under his command. Patton's promise that the American miscreants would be hanged brought the response that this would "bring great joy to all Moroccans." A year later, when Patton was on hand for the invasion of Sicily, the very same Moroccans were on the giving, instead of the receiving, end, and Italian women had become the victims. It was all something of a joke to Patton.

One funny thing happened in connection with the Moroccan troops [he wrote in the same volume of memoirs].
A
Sicilian came to me and said he had a complaint to make about the conduct of the Moroccans, or Goums, as they are called. He said he well knew that all Goums were thieves, also that they were murderers, and

sometimes indulged in rape-these things he could understand and make allowances for, but when they came to his house, killed his rabbits, and then skinned them in the parlor, it was going too far.

A different view of rape in Italy was presented in the powerful De Sica movie Two Women. A mother ( played by Sophia Loren ) and her virgin daughter survive the war only to be gang-raped by celebrating Moroccan soldiers in a bombed-out church. The rape of the two women is the movie's ultimate ironic comment on the nature of war and survival. I once attended a lecture by the Holly wood screenwriter John Howard Lawson, one of the Hollywood Ten, who took violent exception to De Sica's casting of the soldier-

Chalidze came to this country, New York Times editor Harrison Salisbury tried to draw from him what he knew or thought about the movement for women's liberation. Bewildered by the question but eager to provide an in formative answer, Chalidze went into a rambling discourse on "the right of women to participate in polygamous marriage contracts" and the "right" of women to
be
abducted into marriage, which he linked up with the glorious heritage of the Caucasus and Central Asia and the principle of ethnic self determination: "For example, very often the ritual kidnapping of the bride was looked upon by Soviet authorities as forcible abduction. Soviet law, in this instance based on European law, violates national tradition and insults the national tradition of various people."
.

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AGAINST OUR WILL

rapists as Africans. As I recall, Lawson felt that this amounted to overt racism, and that by right the movie rapists should have been Germans, since everybody knows that the Germans were the vil lains of the war. Lawson's commentary is a pristine example of the old lef t mentality as regards rape; when their side does it, it's exquisite proof of the bestiality of the enemy; when our side does it, it's bad politics to bring it up. De Sica stuck with the truth.

Lawson's suspicion of racism was utterly unfounded as far as the movie Two Women is concerned, but in the curious case of the Stuttgart subway incident, racism, or a strong propensity to believe the worst of the dark-skinned peoples, seems to have been an operating factor.

In
June of 1945, during a filibuster against the Fair Employ ment Practices Act, the junior senator from Mississippi, James 0. Eastland, announced that he was privy to information from the highest military sources that "a good many Negro soldiers" had committed rape during the invasion of Normandy and af terward, and had to have their weapons taken from them. Out of 33 rape cases on the Normandy peninsula that came to the military's at tention, Eastland charged, 26 assaults were committed by blacks. As further proof that "all races have certain racial characteristics," Eastland informed his colleagues, "in the city of Stuttgart, when the French Army moved in, several thousand Christian German girls from good families were rounded up and placed in the subway, and for four or five days they were kept there and criminally assaulted by Senegalese soldiers from Africa.
It
was one of the most horrible occurrences of modern times. White soldiers would not

have been guilty of such a thing."

1

The NAACP, other civil-rights organizations and the French