What Soldiers Do

Mary Louise Roberts is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin de Siecle France and Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Post-war France, 1918-1928.

"Roberts has amassed an enormous amount of detailed information and her... book provides a refreshing view of the price of liberation." (Literary Review) "In this vivid account of GIs in wartime France, Roberts documents how the Greatest Generation was sometimes as badly behaved beyond the battlefield as it was brave in combat. What Soldiers Do is not a conventional history. It deeply-and often colorfully-textures our understanding of the experiences of men at war, the contours of mid-twentieth-century sexual (and racial) mores, and the frequently ignorant and even lurid attitudes toward other peoples that attended America's ascent to global hegemony." (David M. Kennedy, author of Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War) "This clear-eyed examination of what randy American soldiers got up to in France from D-Day through 1946 strips away the sentimentality from the overworked, cliched portrayal of the Greatest Generation." (Publishers Weekly)"