Were American WWII GIs Dangerous Sex-Crazed Rapists Who The French Feared As Much As The Germans?

American WWII GIs Were Dangerous Sex-Crazed Rapists Who The French Feared As Much As The Germans, Explosive Book Claims -- Daily Mail

* Book 'debunks myth that the GI were manly and always behaved well'
* By 1944 women in Normandy 'filed complaints about rapes by US soldiers'
* Debauchery, lawlessness and institutional racism are chronicled in book
* Penned by Mary Roberts, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin
* Veterans Affairs rep says there is 'no way' to reprimand the U.S. soldiers
* Comes just after Sexual Assault Prevention Month in the U.S., where the military is under fire for string of high-profile assault cases
* Japanese politician also just claimed that American soldiers used their women as 'sex slaves' during WWII

A controversial new book about ordinary American soldiers fighting in France in WW2 claims that many civilians did not think them liberators but as sex-mad rapists, thieves and robbers.

'What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France,' by Mary Louise Roberts, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, shatters the myth nurtured by the western Allies that GIs were welcomed everywhere they went after four years of Nazi occupation.

Professor Roberts said that what the French got instead, when the first soldiers swarmed ashore at Omaha Beach in Normandy on D-Day, was 'a veritable tsunami of male lust' which the ordinary French citizen came to fear as much as their German oppressors.

The inflammatory account is likely to trigger outrage among U.S. veterans who saw many of their comrades die on the battlefields of France.

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My Comment: I know an American and a Canadian vet of the Normandy invasion and its aftermath, and when I mentioned to them Professor Mary Roberts' claims of soldier misconduct they were ... to put it bluntly .... not pleased with my phone call. Bottom line .... and my father mentioned the same thing when he told me of his experiences on the Eastern front .... the mass majority of soldiers were more concerned about not getting killed or crippled .... than spending their time with girls. As for those who wanted to spend some time with a girl .... they were usually the ones who got killed or crippled.

How Did Renaissance Masterpieces Survive The Carnage Of World War II?

(National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD)

How WWII Soldiers Saved Italy’s Art From the Nazis -- Noah Charney, Daily Beast

How did Renaissance masterpieces survive the carnage of World War II? Noah Charney on a team of U.S. soldiers who rescued the world’s greatest objects from being stolen or destroyed by the Nazis.

The Second World War altered the map of Europe, and redistributed art on an unprecedented scale. But few people know the astonishing extent of art looting during the war. Adolf Hitler and his deputy Hermann Göring raced one another to steal artworks. Goring “collected” a private gallery of thousands of stolen masterpieces, displayed in a hunting lodge outside of Berlin as an enormous shrine to his deceased wife, while Hitler ordered art stolen both for his personal enjoyment and to fill his planned “super museum,” a conversion of an entire city in Austria to contain every important artwork in the world. Hitler’s boyhood town of Linz would be leveled and rebuilt, with masterpieces like The Ghent Altarpiece and the Mona Lisa as centerpieces in this definitive collection. It would even feature a gallery of horrors, a wing dedicated to “degenerate” art that did not meet the Nazi standards of racial purity of artist and subject matter. This wing would show the world from which the Nazis had saved humanity. Taking a note from Napoleon, whose army featured the first dedicated art theft unit, the Nazi army established the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), assigned the task of collecting documents, archives, and art for the Nazi cause.

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My Comment: I guess parts of this movie are true .... albeit with a French twist.

70 Years Later It Is Revealed That MI6 Spent £200m Bribing Spaniards During The Second World War

Smiling German ldr. Adolf Hitler(R) shaking hands w. Spanish leader Generalissimo Francisco Franco(2L) during Hitler's only official meeeting w. Franco. Location: Hendaye, France. Date taken: October 23, 1940. Life Images

MI6 Spent £200m Bribing Spaniards In Second World War -- The Guardian

Newly released documents reveal secret services paid out fortune in bid to stop Franco joining war on Hitler's side

MI6 spent the present-day equivalent of more than $200m bribing senior Spanish military officers, ship owners and other agents to keep Spain out of the second world war, files released today disclose.

More and more money was delivered, mainly via a Swiss bank account in New York, as Sir Samuel Hoare, Britain's ambassador in Madrid, warned London that unless it was paid, there was a real and immediate danger of Spain abandoning its neutrality and of Franco joining forces with Nazi Germany.

In June 1940, Hoare was demanding an initial $1m. "I personally urge authority be granted without delay, and that if you have doubts, the prime minister be consulted," he told the Foreign Office in London. "Yes indeed," Churchill initialled on a copy of Hoare's deciphered telegram in red ink.

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My Comment: Money well spent .... invading Spain would have cost far more.