Sex and the Soldier: the Real Truth

Marriage, yes... Rape, not so much.

Courtesy: factsanddetails.com

(PORTLAND, OR) - Sex and the Soldier is the title of my own book on this subject and it is included in my own memoir, Gen Patton's Dogface Soldier. In part, the book Love, Sex and War by John Costello, was the source of the information in many of own books, but I was also not only at the front as a Combat Infantryman, I also ended up as a medical statistician, public health branch, military government, part of General Eisenhower's Headquarters. I KNOW the medical facts of this, I wrote them.

Recently, May 21 2013, there was an article about WWII related to sex scandals in our current military. The author, Mary Louise Roberts, Professor of French History at the Univ. of Wisconsin, wrote about her findings and several other related books. She got most of her facts wrong as I will relate. In the book review titled, "What Soldiers Do," Jennifer Schuessler makes some terrible errors I will try to reveal. She got most of her information from an obscure archive from LeHavre, France, about sexual behavior of American troops in France.

I was in the combat infantry and went through LeHavre on my way to Germany. Almost all cities and towns of any size had brothels. The Mayor of LeHavre asked the Americans to move their brothel outside of town.

As I said, I went through LaHevre, but located on the coast and all the way up to the front lines where the infantry was, we had rear echelon transportation companies, service companies, and port battalions, who unloaded the ships. Almost none of the above got even within artillery range of German guns.

There were extremely small numbers of sexual assaults up where I was dodging artillery and rifle fire. About 300,000, or 70 % of those killed, were my fellow Dogface Infantrymen. Most of us never even saw a woman but we got killed and 700,000 were wounded.

The rear echelon troops had no battle fears, but they did have access to lots of booze and females, which reminds me, a soldier could BUY a female for a candy bar. If they were caught by the wrong person in the act, the woman could always cry rape and sometimes it did occur.

American soldiers arrived in Britain in 1942 and the British girls went amorously crazy. About 100,000 of them married G.I.'s. At the same time, British girls called Piccadilly Circus Commandos, were very aggressive and nearby Hyde Park in London, was wall to wall lovers at night. Almost 200,00 war brides came from Europe, most from France. There were 20,000 German war brides. While this was going on, the venereal disease rates were skyrocketing into hundreds of thousands of cases from the guys in the rear areas. They forgot to wear their rubbers. No such problem in the front battle lines.

Most people, including the author of the book, "What Soldiers Do, seem to think that all Army troops are the same. This is not true. Out of maybe 2,000,000 infantry, only 10% were combat fighters. The rest were robbing our duffel bags left behind of anything of value.

I said above that I ended up as a medical statistician, for Germany and Austria, in Eisenhower's Headquarters. The venereal disease rate among combat soldiers was near zero. For the rear echelon SOB's it was high during the fighting but after the war it skyrocketed. As an interesting side-note, the military police in the U.S. had the highest venereal disease rate!

One author, Robert Lilly, estimates that Americans raped 14,000 European women, another source says 181 cases in France, and 552 in Germany. There was a lot of sexual activity going on and surveys indicated that 3 of 4 G.I.'s had sexual experiences in Europe and Asia. The Russians were accused of raping no less than 1 million women, including 100 to 200,000 in Berlin.

For us real soldiers, every town or city we went through had wall to wall willing women (Paris had about 200,000 prostitutes). There were probably more rapes by American soldiers in the United States at the time.

IT'S TOO BAD AUTHOR ROBERTS GOT SO MUCH MISINFORMATION - I HOPE MY EXPERIENCES WILL HELP CLARIFY THE TRUE SITUATION OF SEX AND THE SOLDIER.

Got a question or comment for Dr. Leveque?
Email him: Newsroom@Salem-News.com

More information on the history of Dr. Leveque can be found in his book, General Patton's Dogface Soldier of WWII about his own experiences "from a foxhole".
Order the book by mail by following this link: Dogface Soldier

If you are a World War II history buff, you don't want to miss it.

Watch for more streaming video question and answer segments about medical marijuana with Bonnie King and Dr. Phil Leveque.

Click on this link for other articles and video segments about PTSD and medical marijuana on Salem-News.com:
Dr. Leveque INTERVIEWS & ARTICLES