“They were drunk and they needed a wife. » Aimée was silent for a long time. For exactly eight decades. Now 99 years old, she believes it is time to say everything. Above all, to say how the joy of the Allied troops landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944 turned into a nightmare, a few weeks later, for an entire family on a Breton farm.
On the evening of August 10, two GIs – the nickname given to American soldiers – entered the family farm, modestly summarizes Aimée, who keeps a letter written to her by her mother in an old piece of furniture “so as not to forget anything”. In careful writing, the farmer first recounts how the soldiers shot her husband, the bullets piercing his beret, then moved menacingly towards her daughter. “I went out to protect her and they took me to the fields. They raped me four times each, in turns,” she recalls.
“Mom sacrificed herself to protect me,” Aimée recounts today in a broken voice. While they raped her, we waited in the night not knowing if she would come back alive or if they would shoot her. »
In Plabennec, not far from Brest (Finistère), Jeanne Tournellec, 95, also remembers “as if it were yesterday” the rape of her older sister, Catherine, and the murder of her father by a GI “The American black, he wanted to rape my big sister. My father intervened and the soldier shot him dead. The man managed to destroy the door and enter the house,” she says, surrounded by her nieces.
Official figures “largely underestimated”
In October 1944, at the end of the decisive Battle of Normandy, American military authorities tried 152 soldiers for the rape of French women. A “largely underestimated” number, says Mary Louise Roberts, one of the rare historians to have looked into this “great taboo of the Second World War”. “Many women preferred to remain silent: in addition to the shame linked to the rape, the atmosphere was one of joy, of celebration of the liberators,” she explains.
To motivate the GIs to fight so far from home, “the army promised them a France populated by easy women”, underlines the American specialist. The newspaper Stars and Stripes, published by the American armed forces and read avidly by the thousands of soldiers deployed in Europe, is full of photos of French women embracing the liberators. “French women are crazy about Yankees, […] this is what we are fighting for,” headlined the newspaper on September 9, 1944.
“The prospect of sex motivated American soldiers to fight. And it was, particularly through prostitution and rape, a way of dominating France, dominating French men who had been incapable of protecting their country and their women against the Germans,” explains Mary Louise Roberts. She estimates that “hundreds, if not thousands, of other rapes by American soldiers went unreported between 1944 and the departure of the GIs in April 1946.”
Black soldiers chosen as scapegoats
In his book OK Joe!, published in 1976, the writer Louis Guilloux talks about his experience as a translator within the American troops after the D-Day landings. He is notably assigned to the trials for rape of GIs by American military tribunals and notes that “those sentenced to death are almost all black”, underlines Philippe Baron, author of an eponymous documentary on this novel, and of the work The dark side of the Liberation.
These GIs will then be hanged in the public squares of French villages, as was the case for the rapists of Aimée Helaudais and Catherine Tournellec.
“It’s a complicated story,” emphasizes Philippe Baron. “Behind the taboo of rape by liberators, there is the shameful secret of a segregationist American army, […] sometimes aided by racist local authorities. » For Mary Louise Roberts, when the military command realizes that “the situation is out of control”, it “chooses to make black soldiers the scapegoats in order to transform rape into a “black crime” […] to absolutely maintain the reputation of white Americans.”
The image of the “brave and honest American GI”
The statistics are “staggering”: between 1944 and 1945, out of 29 soldiers sentenced to death for rape, 25 were black GIs, hanged by “an executioner who came expressly from Texas”. “In reality, black GIs were often assigned to logistics units, permanently stationed in the same place, therefore with more contact with the local population, including women,” underlines the historian. “The white soldiers were in mobile units. They could rape a French woman in the evening and leave in the morning, without ever being arrested. And if this was the case, the victim’s testimony was most often called into question,” notes the historian.
“No one wants to lose this American hero who makes us proud: the brave and honest American GI, protector of women,” she analyzes. “Even if it means perpetuating the lie. »