Aimee Dupre
After the June 1944 invasion of Normandy, Aimee Dupre’s mother was raped by two American soldiers, but she had never spoken out about it. But eighty years after the horrific attack, she thought it was time to make her voice heard.
In the weeks following D-Day, nearly one million men from the US, UK, Canada, and France touched down on the Normandy coast in an operation that would signal the end of Nazi Germany’s hegemony over Europe.
Aimee, 19, was thrilled, along with everyone else in her immediate vicinity, to see the “liberators” come. She lived in the Brittany village of Montours.
But soon her happiness vanished. The family’s farm was visited by two US soldiers, sometimes known as GIs, on the evening of August 10.
Aimee was 19, living in Montours, a village in Brittany, and delighted to see the “liberators” arrive, as was everybody around her.
But then her joy evaporated. On the evening of August 10, two US soldiers — often called GIs — arrived at the family’s farm.
Aimee, who is now 99 years old, told AFP, “They were drunk and they wanted a woman,” pulling up a letter her mother, Aimee, also penned, “so nothing is forgotten.”
Aimee Helaudais Honore wrote neatly as she recounted the happenings of that evening. How her husband had holes in his cap from the troops’ gunfire, and how her daughter Aimee had been menacingly approached by them.
She said that she had consented to leave the house with the GIs in order to safeguard her daughter. “They took me to a field and took turns raping me, four times each.”
As Aimee read aloud from the letter, her voice broke. “Oh mother, how you suffered, and me too, I think about this every day,” she replied.
“My mother sacrificed herself to protect me,” she stated. “While they raped her in the night, we waited, not knowing whether she would come back alive or whether they would shoot her dead.”
That night’s occurrences weren’t unique. Following the victory in the Normandy campaign, US military officials tried 152 troops for the rape of French women in October 1944.
As one of the few historians to study what she called “a taboo” of World War II, American historian Mary Louise Roberts claimed that in reality, hundreds or perhaps thousands of rapes occurred between 1944 and the GIs’ departure in 1946.
“Many women decided to remain silent,” she stated. “There was the shame, as often with rape.”
She claimed that it was particularly difficult to speak up because of the sharp contrast between their experience and the widespread happiness over the American win.
‘Easy to get’-Roberts also holds the army leadership accountable, claiming that they promised soldiers a nation full of “easy to get” women in order to increase their will to fight.
Images of French women kissing triumphant Americans abound in the US Army journal Stars & Stripes.
September 9, 1944, featured a headline that said, “Here’s What We’re Fighting For,” with an image of happy French women and the words, “The French are nuts about the Yanks.”
