In France, a family reckons with World War II Allies' legacy of rape and murder

PLABENNEC, France — As the world commemorated the 80th anniversary this year of the D-Day landings at Normandy and the liberation of Europe from the Nazis, one French family finally began to come to terms with the personal tragedy that befell them during the summer of 1944.

After D-Day, U.S. troops fanned out across Normandy and the neighboring western region of Brittany to capture and secure large ports, like Cherbourg and Brest. One family's encounter with a soldier that summer would alter its destiny.

On a recent day this summer, 66-year-old Michelle Salaün walks across a field in Brittany to the house where her mother grew up.

"This is the place, the farm, where my grandfather has been killed and my mother raped, the 20th of August, 1944, at the end of the war, by an American soldier," Salaün says.

Her grandfather, 47-year-old Eugène Tournellec, was shot as he tried to protect his 17-year-old daughter, Catherine, from the soldier, who showed up at their farmhouse late one night. Tournellec left behind a widow and six children. His daughter survived, but was left with a terrible secret and a wound that never healed.

"This was a secret for all the family — my three sisters and my two brothers — nobody knew," Salaün says.

Sexual violence committed by U.S. soldiers in the wake of D-Day has long been a taboo subject on both sides of the Atlantic. But as historians and victims' descendents have delved into the cases over time, the accounts have challenged some of Allied forces' heroic legacy, while also revealing official racial discrimination of the time.

"There really was a problem with rape"

Mary Louise Roberts, professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, was one of the first scholars to consult French as well as U.S. archives for her 2013 book, What Soldiers Do.

"Towards the end of the summer of 1944 there really was a problem with rape," she says. "And the United States Army, at the highest levels of SHAEF, was concerned about it." SHAEF was the acronym for the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, commanded by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Roberts says in some ways the problems were created by the U.S. Army. To motivate soldiers it portrayed French women as highly sexualized. As an example she cites infantry newspaper Stars and Stripes, which often showed pictures of GIs embracing French women.

"U.S. soldiers arrived with images of France and French women as hypersexualized," Roberts says. "And they saw themselves as knights in shining armor, awaiting the open arms of French women."

The Army decided it would be a "Black problem"

In October 1944, one French newspaper in the Normandy town of Cherbourg reported that rapes and murders were instilling fear in families across the countryside.

Roberts says there's no way to know how many rapes there were. She estimates it's in the hundreds, based on her research, the more than 150 convicted soldiers, and other accounts of rape where no arrest was made or that she believes went unreported. She says the scale of sexual assault was significant enough that the U.S. military saw the need to shore up trust of its occupying forces in France.

Roberts says she read notes from an Army command meeting in the late summer of 1944, where they discussed issues of crime. She says they decided to hold Black soldiers responsible — even if they weren't.

"So they decided it would be a Black problem rather than an American problem," Roberts says. "They could blame African Americans based on the belief that they were hypersexual and violent and thus exonerate white American soldiers from accusations of rape."

Quick military trials were set up. Of the 152 U.S. soldiers tried for rape, 139 were Black, even though Black soldiers made up just 10% of the fighting force. And 25 out of the 29 soldiers publicly executed were Black.

"[French] mayors were actually asked to put out a notice to civilians to come and watch African American soldiers being hanged for rape," she says. "Clearly the Army wanted to impress on ordinary Normans that this was a situation which the U.S. Army had under control."

In addition to prevailing racism of the time, Roberts believes that logistical factors were likely at play in the military's decision.

White soldiers involved in fighting units moved quickly from one spot to the next, making it harder to prosecute their service members suspected of a crime, she explains. Black soldiers' segregated units, responsible for logistics, largely stayed in places longer. That meant a Black soldier could be blamed for a rape committed by white soldier who had long moved on.

Roberts' book won several awards and was well received by the U.S. Army, which gave her an appointment as a visiting professor at West Point in 2020. But it also earned her hate mail.

"In the public imagination World War II is seen as 'the good war' — especially the Normandy invasion," says Roberts. "So when my book came out it put pressure on that narrative." Roberts admits the topic is sensitive and complicated.

A documentary addresses a painful chapter

The 2023 French documentary Ok, Joe! also looks at the executions of Black soldiers in 1944 and 1945, the crimes they were accused of and the French families affected — including Michele Salaün and her siblings. Filmmaker Philippe Baron based his documentary on a book of the same name written by a French interpreter for the U.S. Army at the time, a young writer named Louis Guilloux.

"He spoke English and offered himself as an interpreter in the summer of 1944 and he finds himself at the heart of these investigations led by American officers," Baron says. "Guilloux goes with them to different places and attends the court-martials. He becomes an embedded witness to history."

Baron says it was difficult to criticize the liberating Army in the 1950s and '60s. But even when Guilloux did publish his work in 1976, it went largely unnoticed. It would take another 30 years before U.S. historians began delving into the crimes and racism of the Army in the wake of D-Day. Today Guilloux's book is considered an important historical document.

One family's painful silence

Behind a graveyard in the tiny Brittany village of Plabennec, Salaün and two sisters stand at the spot where 34-year-old Pvt. William Mack, a Black soldier from South Carolina, was hanged for the murder of their grandfather in February 1945. Mack was also charged with attempted rape, the Tournellec relatives say, although they are convinced Mack did rape their mother.

"At that time, people didn't talk about rape. It was too intimate. It could not be admitted," says sister Jeannine Plassard.

Mack, who was a cook for the U.S. Army segregated unit 578th Field Artillery Regiment (later Battalion), pleaded not guilty, though there are differing accounts of his defense.

The French relatives say the thought of their young mother, Catherine Tournellec, being brought to witness his hanging increases their sadness.

"Nobody here asked for him to be executed," says Plassard, 69. "The U.S. Army did it to show it was taking responsibility. But it was the liberation and everyone was happy and finally free. This was just our family's pain."

Nearby in the house of brother Jean-Pierre Salaün, the siblings talk around the dining room table and show me old family photos. They say the crime, and the silence around it, poisoned their mother's life and cast a dark shadow over their family.

But they don't blame the Americans. They say it's the fault of a conservative, rigid and religious French society.

"Why did we have to keep silent about the rape of our mother and the murder of our grandfather to live in peace?" Jean-Pierre Salaün, 72, asks.

Such was the shame that he only learned his grandfather's name when he was 15 — and asked to be told. No one ever spoke about him because that would have meant talking about what happened to their mother.

They all remember their mother crying at night. She cried all the time, says the youngest sister, 60-year-old Marie-Annick Gouez.

"I thought it was us kids who had done something to hurt her."

This is what galls Jean-Pierre the most. He takes down from the bookshelf a book about their tiny town during World War II. "There's not a word in here about our grandfather," he says. "They even talk about how many horses were killed. But not a word about our grandfather!"

Marie-Annick says D-Day anniversaries have always been hard.

"What could we say?" she asks. "They saved France and the world. Our pain was just a drop in the bucket. But what is tragic is that women are still paying the price in war. Look at Ukraine."

The siblings remember the children who weren't allowed to play with them. And how their mother didn't go with the other women after church to eat cakes at a cafe.

"I always wondered why people looked at her differently when she was so hardworking and discreet," says Marie-Annick.

Now it all makes sense.

What saved their mother, they say, was her beautiful voice. She sang Brittany's traditional folk songs at local festivals. It was a way to fit in. And perhaps a way to express her anguish.

They play a tape of a clear soprano voice singing in Breton, the language of the Brittany region.

At the end of life, she told her children the secret

In 2013, when she was on her deathbed, Catherine Tournellec Salaün told her children about the rape. One by one. Though by then, they say, they already knew.

Marie-Annick chokes up as she remembers her mother asking, "You believe me, don't you?"

The siblings say appearing in the documentary and finally talking together about what happened has been liberating.

And on the 80th anniversary of those events in August 1944, the siblings gathered at the grave of their grandfather, to honor him and their mother. The mayor was there, along with two French veterans carrying French flags.

Jean-Pierre read from a paper, choking back tears. "Our grandfather may not have died for France under enemy bullets.

"His field of honor was his home, where he tried to protect his children.

"Grandpa, we never knew you, but we are proud of you. You are our hero."