Remaking the Conquering Heroes

The American occupation of Germany has long fascinated students of postwar German history. Scholars agree that American influence played a major role in the Federal Republic of Germany's political and cultural rehabilitation after 1945. John Willoughby's goal in his short book (151 pages of text) is to show that the impact on the Americans was no less significant. Willoughby argues that the domestication of American troops, from undisciplined, sexually predatory “conquerors” to semipermanent residents, living with their families in large settlements and participating in a range of tourist and social activities, helped change American attitudes toward armies of occupation and the use of their forces to extend American influence overseas. In connecting the grass-roots experience of soldiers with strategic and foreign policy decision making, Willoughby aims to trace “the social and institutional origins of the postwar world” by encouraging “the social historian and the student of American studies to enter the fields of diplomatic and military history.” The strengths of the book lie in his relating of issues that have heretofore received little common attention. For example, he links the question of army desegregation with the occupation. African Americans made up a disproportionate segment of the army during the first postwar years (upwards of 15 percent), thanks to rotation schedules that favored white soldiers (who, because of discriminatory policies against African Americans, were most likely to have seen combat) and to restrictions on where African Americans could be sent. This led some officers to demand the total recall of African Americans from Europe, breeding tension within the Pentagon and the army command in Germany that would eventually force the army to confront its racial problem directly. Similarly, “fraternization” between American soldiers and German women forced the army to pursue policies that would stabilize the lives of American soldiers. Such policies led to an opening of military tourism and the encouragement of family unification in Germany, creating the more domesticated army that both satisfied the concerns of the Germans and reconciled Americans to “the idea that the world required their military presence.” Even if one challenges the causal connection between domestication of the soldiers and American foreign policy, Willoughby's analysis suggests that there are indeed places where the study of social questions can help readers understand the forces behind policy change

Desegregation · Economic history · Geopolitics · German · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Vietnam War · White (mutation · European history and politics · History · Law