The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe by William I. Hitchcock

least 1,500 men; most of them are North African soldiers. If the general relations between the civilians and the soldiers are correct, and even sometimes cordial, the same can- not be said of the relations between the population and the North African troops.” Such incidents included the following transgressions, according to one report in mid-April: a melee between a woman “of loose morals” and a Moroccan soldier resulted in the knife stabbing of a civilian onlooker; North African soldiers bran- dished firearms in public to rob locals of wine, leading to scuffles and injuries among civilians and soldiers; in Caen, a North African, described as “un soldat in- digène,” stabbed a passerby in the neck with a razor after being refused a cigarette; gendarmes stopped
    and searched two North African soldiers because they “looked suspicious” and found they were carrying two English bayonets under their uniforms. Another report depicted a full-fledged conflict between French police and North African soldiers, triggered by an incident in a bar. Two North African soldiers felt they were not served quickly enough and slapped the daughter of the proprietor in the face; the mother and father in- tervened but at this moment one of the soldiers drew a knife and pursued the daughter into the bakery next door. While the baker was fending off the soldier, an of- ficer of the gendarmerie arrived and helped the baker overpower and disarm the soldier. As the two soldiers were being arrested, however, a truck bearing a dozen North African soldiers arrived, and these men used force to free their comrades. The police called rein- forcements but could not prevail upon the soldiers to surrender the two soldiers; so the police followed the truckload of soldiers back to their base. There, after a serious scuffle that led to injuries to the police, the men were overwhelmed and arrested, with the aid of other soldiers at the base. Clearly, public disorder involving African-American and North African troops occurred in Calvados. Yet it also appears that French police were far more likely to report incidents involving soldiers of color than incidents involving white British or Ameri- can soldiers. French police, it seems, saw armed black
    and Arab men, even if wearing American or French military uniforms, as threats to their efforts to restore “order” to Normandy—an order in which nonwhite people did not figure. 59

    The French police may have emphasized the racial dimension of public disorder to establish a point of solidarity with the purveyors of American military jus- tice. Indeed, one of the reasons why French and Allied relations at the top levels of official authority were so “correct and cordial” was their shared racial preju- dices, especially when dealing with allegations against black troops. The records of the Army’s Judge Advocate General show plainly that while less than 10 percent of American troops in the entire European Theater of Op- erations (ETO) were African-American, 22 percent of all criminal offenses brought before the courts were at- tributed to black soldiers. 60 More telling, 42 percent of all offenses involving sexual assault were attributed to black soldiers, and in France 77 percent of the soldiers charged with rape were African-American. 61 Further- more, black men accused of sexual assault received far harsher punishment than whites. Of the 151 soldiers in the ETO who were actually condemned to death by courts-martial for the offense of rape, 65 percent were black. Still more astonishing: of the 151 capital sen- tences for rape, only 29 were actually carried out—but
    of those, 25 soldiers were black, while a mere 4 were white. Put another way, 87 percent of the U.S. soldiers hanged on the charge of raping women in the ETO were black. All these numbers, and others relating to other crimes, can be summed up fairly simply by stating that of the 70 men the U.S. Army hanged for crimes in Eu- rope, 55 were