Susan L. Carruthers. The Good Occupation

In her lively and accessibly written study The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace, Susan L. Carruthers details the experiences of American occupiers in the wake of the Second World War, devoting sustained attention to both Germany and Japan. Carruthers aims to complicate what she discerns as a prevailing popular conception that those occupations were a complete success. The introduction poses the question of how, following World War II, “occupation [was] made good—as it occurred and in hindsight” (10, emphasis in the original). The book begins by describing the plans for occupation, including the school for military government that was established in Charlottesville, Virginia. The next two chapters treat the beginnings of occupation in Europe in 1943 and then in Asia in 1945. The succeeding chapters are organized by topic, embracing developments in both theaters. They examine sexual contacts between occupiers and occupied; the treatment of displaced persons; the challenges of demobilizing American troops and returning them home; the material side of things, including looting and the black market; and finally the move to bring American families to occupied Germany and Japan. The study, which is pitched to a popular audience, does not spend much time positioning its claims in the context of existing historiography. Specialists in the field will see much that is familiar in Carruthers’s discussions of subjects such as a thriving black market, the formulation and rapid abandonment of a fraternization ban, rising rates of sexually transmitted diseases, and the building of American enclaves abroad for military forces and their dependents.

Abandonment (legal) · Archaeology · Context (archaeology) · Economic history · Government (linguistics) · Historiography · Looting · Peacetime · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Thriving · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies