Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (18 page)

consulate immediately filed a protest, and a week later Allied Supreme Headquarters issued a short formal reply. It had "no comment" on the Normandy charge, except for the rather disin genuous remark that there were "no Negro combat troops in the Normandy campaign. The only Negroes used there were service troops."* But as for Stuttgart, the Allied command had "no

*
Segregated black troops may not have played a combat role in the Nor mandy invasion, but they provided most of the manpower for the major supply route that operated out of the Normandy beachhead, the famous Red Ball Express.

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knowledge" of that event whatsoever; in fact, Stuttgart did not even have a subway.

It
would be nice to leave the Stuttgart subway incident right

there, as a jokey figment of the racist imagination of one of the South's leading anti-integrationists. But one month later, the German police chief of Stuttgart, one Karl Weber, issued his own report. Stuttgart did not have a subway, but it did have a central station for streetcars and trains and it did have a famous big tunnel for auto traffic, the Wagenburg. The soldiers who occupied Stutt gart that April had not been Senegalese, they had been Moroccan. According to the German report, local police had managed to verify 1,198 rape cases-"women whose ages ranged from 14 to 74." Most of the women in the verified cases "were attacked in their homes by turbaned Moroccans who broke down the doors in loot ing forays. Four women were killed and four others committed suicide af ter being raped. In one case, a husband killed his wife who had been attacked, and then committed suicide."
.

How much rape did American soldiers commit in World War II? Certainly they did not share the unenviable reputation of the Germans, the Russians or the Moroccans. American Gl's viewed themselves, and were viewed by the local populace, as liberators in much of the European territory they fought for and occupied. In the time-honored tradition of the conquering hero, liberators are often presented with the bodies of women, from a female sense of "just reward" or adventure, but more realistically and more typi cally, out of urgent economic need. Writing of the desperate con ditions that existed in Rome af ter the Italian capitulation, a pair of historians said succinctly, "Italian women would perform any ser vice for a can of food."

"You should have seen the streams of women," an old woman from Palermo told the sociologist Danilo Dolci. "Business boomed when the Yanks-the whites and the blacks-were here. . . . The American troops set up their camps in the parks. Husbands brought their wives to them, and took the money. As soon as one man came out, another went in; they waited in line.
01
rait. God
foe.
Uon
doIIar.
The park keepers provided the mattresses so that the Yanks would be comfortable."

Free enterprise, the murky line that divides wartime rape from wartime prostitution, cannot be cleanly delineated. When the SS policemen told the Jewish girlthat they would "get her next time

and pay her five zlotys," they were trying to turn an act of rape into an act of whoring in which the victim shared responsibility. Simi larly, when the Japanese commander told his men in the field that to avoid any problems of rape, "either pay them money or kill them/' he was utilizing the same principle. German and Japanese military brothels, into which conquered women were forcibly placed, were considered examples of Axis war crimes at the Nurem berg and Tokyo tribunals, but the American military never rounded up women for purposes of prostitution during World War II, as far as I know. The lure of the dollar to starving women in war torn, liberated countries was coercion enough.

But the difference between prostitution and rape in war is real, for there are always those men who choose, or prefer, to rape.

"Rape has nothing to do with the availability of willing women or prostitutes," a member of the U.S. Army Court of Military Review told me in Washington. "Wherever there are

soldiers, there are prostitutes in a war."

"Then what makes men rape in war?" I asked rhetorically.

"I don't know," he answered. My reluctant conversation part ner was a retired colonel who preferred that I not use his name.

I had gone to Washington to see what figures might be available on the number of U.S. Army courts-martial for rape in World War

1. Not that the lump sum of men brought to trial and conviction by the military would be an accurate reflection of the actual num ber of rapes committed by our armies-far from it-but a set of statistics would at least be a beginning, and might offer some sort of perspective, especially since I doubted that these statistics had ever before seen the light of day.
   

1. I
   

   The office of the Judge Advocate General complied with my request to the best of its ability. It was able to give me the number of convictions stemming from general courts-martial for rape from January,
   1942,
   to June,
   1947,
   broken down by six-month periods.
   

   j '
   

    
   

   I
   These Army figures include Air Force convictions ( informa
   

   

   

   tion from the Navy and the Marine Corps was not available for World War II ) . They were culled from the ledgers of general courts-martial since rape is a capital offense under military juris prudence. As in civilian law, cases of rape have a way of getting knocked down to lesser charges before trial. The military may try its rapists on lesser charges, such as assault with intent to commit rape, sodomy, assault with intent to commit sodomy, carnal knowl—
   

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   77
   

   I
   U.S.
   ARMY GENERAL COURTS-MARTIAL FOR RAPE, WORLD WAR
   II
   

   

1. I
   

   Convictions
   

   Jan.-June,
   1942
   i
   

   July-Dec.,
   1942
   io
   

   Jan.-June,
   1943
   .
   25
   

   July-Dec.,
   1943 43
   

   Jan.-June,
   1944 52
   

   July-Dec.,
   1944 82
   

   Jan.-June,
   1945
   6o
   

   

   

   July-Dec.,
   1945 247
   

   Jan.-June,
   1946 355
   

   July-Dec.,
   1946 50
   

   Jan.-June,
   1947 46
   

   Total
   971
   

   edge ( the equivalent of statutory rape, involving
   a
   minor ) ' or under
   .
   a utilitarian catchall known as lewd, lascivious and indecent acts. Sodomy, for example, carries a maximum sentence of ten years.
   

   The Army Judiciary could give me no statistics on the number of convictions for these lesser charges, nor could it give me the number of reported rapes, arrests, and rape cases brought to trial, to compare with the number of convictions.
   If
   the records available for Vitnam ( see pages
   98-99)
   may be used as a gauge, the number of military convictions for rape is approximately
   60
   percent of the number of cases tried, slightly higher than the civilian conviction rate.
   

   To the detriment of history, the Army Judiciary could shed no light on the median sentence given to those Cl's convicted of rape,
   

   , .
   nor could it give me a theater-by-theater breakdown.
   It
   did have available the information that out of the
   971
   rape convictions,
   52
   soldiers were executed. An additional
   i
   8 men ( not included among the
   971)
   were executed af ter a combined conviction for rape and murder. ( The. military has executed no one for a capital offense since
   1962.)
   ·
   ·
   

   One obvious fact emerges from the record of the Army's World War II convictions for rape. More than two-thirds of the convictions took place not during the war itself but during the occupation. This, I was assured by the Clerk of the Court, was not the result of a backlog of courts-martial. "In the Second World War," he told me, "courts-martial were held right in the locus. A
   

   man was tried shortly af ter the offense; there was no delay. In those days the theater commander could take affirming action without a Washington review."
   

   It
   was the Clerk of the Court's opinion that the geometric progression of convictions from 1942 into 1946 represented not only an increase in troop strength-by 1945 the United States had mobilized twelve million persons, overall, as compared to two mil lion in 1941-but demonstrated a fact of war. In his words, "There
   1
   is more rape during an occupation because soldiers have more time on their hands during an occupation."
   

   This observation, coming from a retired Army colonel who has spent the last twenty years reviewing courts-martial, must carry a certain amount of weight. However, one can speculate that a pre ponderant number of courts-martial took place during the occupa tion because the military judges also had more time on their hands during the occupation.
   It
   seems logical to assume that during a time of heavy fighting a military tribunal would be reluctant to convene over a case of rape involving an enemy woman, if indeed the woman or a member of her family had been able to step forward, find the proper authority, and make the complaint. Dur ing the years of occupation, when some semblance of cooperation between the military and the local civilian authority would be established, a case of rape would stand a better chance of being processed to justice.