John H. Morrow

Black Africans in World War II: The Soldiers’ Stories

This article discusses the often forgotten contributions of black African infantry to the French and British war efforts from Europe to Asia during the Second World War. It traces the relationship between black African soldiers and their imperial rulers as it evolved over the course of two global conflicts from 1914 to 1945. The article points out how racist preconceptions about the “inferior” abilities and intelligence of Africans paralleled white Americans’ prejudices against African-Americans and how the British and French attempted to systematically omit, diminish, or discredit the achievements of African soldiers.

The imperial framework

The Western Front became one of the defining images of the Great War. The problem of Western Front was that to make ground men had to leave the security of their trenches and attack an entrenched enemy across a strip of ground that soon became known with some accuracy as no-mans-land. What makes the Battle of Neuve Chapelle even more exceptional is that it was one of the first trench warfare encounters to take place on the Western Front. Two of the largest battles ever fought, Verdun and the Somme, were fought during 1916. Germany commander General von Falkenhay was the first to undertake an offensive in 1916. The Allied armies had now developed methods that could overcome the Germans whether they lurked behind strong defences or were in the open. The main factor in wearing down the German army was the Ludendorff offensives of 1918.

The air war

A peace treaty with Soviet Russia was signed in the Belorussian town of Brest-Litovsk on 918, but the treaty only confirmed what everybody had known since autumn 1917: that the central powers had won the war on the Eastern Front. After Germany and Austria-Hungary had lost the war they placed their hopes on the programme outlined by American President Woodrow Wilson. German general Erich Ludendorff shared the imperialist dreams of some of the military, political and economic elite, and wanted to exploit the collapse of the Russian-Empire and the power vacuum it created by expanding borders, promoting colonisation and securing German dominance in Eastern-Europe for the foreseeable future. Bulgaria was the first of the central powers to accept defeat. Ludendorff hoped that a democratic Germany would get better terms but he also wanted the democrats, especially the Social Democrats, to take the responsibility for the defeat.

Taken by Force: Rape and American GIs in Europe during World War II (review)

In Taken by Force, sociologist Robert Lilly penetrates the “ugly underbelly of the U.S. Army’s behavior in Europe” (p. xxii) in a detailed study of the rapes its soldiers committed in Britain, France, and Germany. Fabrice Virgili’s “Preface to the French Edition” and Dr. Peter Schrijvers’s “Foreword” also make for valuable reading, as they first broach the importance of a gendered approach to war, the atrocity of the crime of rape, then the context of rabid American racism in which the crimes occurred and were judged, and ultimately the “code of silence” (p. xxx) about rape that reigns in GIs’ accounts, histories, and film, except where Soviet soldiers in Germany and Japanese soldiers in China are concerned. Lilly’s book proceeds to use military records and trial transcripts to study American soldiers’ rapes of some 14,000 civilian women in western Europe. What emerges is the brutality, even bestiality of the crimes, especially when American soldiers reached Germany, and the disproportionate number of black GIs prosecuted and the relative harshness of their sentences compared to white soldiers. In regard to the latter issue, readers might further study Louis Guilloux’s memoir, OK, Joe (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and historian Alice Kaplan’s work, The Interpreter (Free Press, 2005), which vividly confirm Lilly’s dispassionate delineation and analysis from the more personal perspective of contemporary observers. Lilly painstakingly delineates patterns of rape, the rapists, the victims, and the consequences of rape for both. Social conditions in a defeated Germany were more conducive to rape than in a recently occupied France or in Britain, and the cases of rape in Germany escalated in number and brutality, while the army became more reluctant to charge its soldiers with rape in the land of the conquered enemy. Lilly also analyzes the process of military justice and the various assumptions that underlay the language of military lawyers and judges. This reader would have appreciated more elaboration about the general context of criminality in wartime societies to which he refers in Britain and comparative statistics, for example on the British army’s criminal record. Nevertheless, Lilly reminds us of the following essential points: that war inevitably brings with it crime, atrocity, and degeneration and thus wars would better be defined as “necessary” rather than “good”; that any cohort, or generation, however “great,” contains evildoers and criminals; and that the segregated society of the United States during World War II, and consequently its rigidly segregated army, suffered from a pervasive, rabid, and institutionalized racism that many prefer to ignore, just as they do the subject of rape in wartime. Robert Lilly’s short tome hence becomes a most valuable addition to the literature on World War II, for in examining the subject of rape by U.S. soldiers, a topic that most works on Americans at war avoid, he provides a necessary corrective to the often excessively heroic and exclusively masculine literature of that war in particular, and of war in general, to which so many American authors cling.

Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America's Civilizing Mission (review)

413 nologies to create new possibilities” (pp. 212, 226), left me wondering. True enough for picture phones and the internet, but what about the mature, large-scale transport, energy, production, and consumption systems we confront? Individual consumer agency seems scarcely enough to alter them. And what about “new possibilities” for the world’s poor? Nye rightly emphasizes that his difficult questions are not at all susceptible of easy answers and maintains that the best we can do, following Rainer Maria Rilke, is “live along some distant day into the answers” (pp. x, 226).