Introduction
On August 14, 1945, American troops stationed across
the Pacific Rim – in Manila, Chunking, Okinawa, and elsewhere – huddled around
shortwave radios as President Harry Truman announced the surrender of Japan and
the end of a brutal and merciless island-hopping campaign. Soldiers and sailors
celebrated by firing bullets, flak, and bright, orange tracers in the air. Some
careened through the streets in jeeps, wild with euphoria that they no longer
faced the deadly prospect of invading the Japanese mainland. Others formed
conga lines and jubilantly sang ‘Don’t Fence Me In.’
The impromptu fireworks, joyriding, and celebrations, however, quickly turned
violent. In one Pacific ‘liberty port,’ where troops took furloughs and leave,
some ten thousand uniformed men poured into the downtown streets. The city
crackled with a near-constant barrage of firecrackers like a ‘battery of
machineguns.’ Local civilians and police watched from their now stranded cars
and sidewalk corners. Already out of booze, troops hurled bottles and bricks through
store display windows, stealing alcohol, jewelry, and more. Seeing the ‘looting,
smashing crowd’ of sailors, one reporter wrote: ‘You couldn’t stop it if you tried,
not short of tear gas and firehoses.’ Drunken rioters overturned cars, set them
ablaze, or transformed them into battering rams to crash through more shop
fronts. Some climbed atop their vehicles and reenacted the flag raising on Iwo
Jima. Soon, the men were fighting each other: one marine savagely beast an army
private with his bare fists, leaving him to die on the sidewalk. GIs also
brawled with civilians in streets strewn with paper and shattered glass as
long-standing tensions between the occupiers and occupied boiled over. Soldiers
and sailors also cornered women, tearing their dresses, kissing them forcibly,
and sometimes beating the men who were escorting them. GIs, one woman recalled
‘were pulling girls’ pants off and sailing them down the street.’ Men were
‘kissing and practically raping, everybody. At least six rapes did occur. ‘You put
young girls with them and add liquor, and that’s what happens,’ a police officer
later asserted. Rather than ordering Shore Patrol to break up the riots and assaults,
the rear admiral in command merely ‘requested’ that the sailors go back to their
ships.
The chaos (in Bay City*) lasted through two more nights. Hospital workers
struggled to cope with the enormous number of injuries and cases of alcohol
poisoning. When the police failed to investigate the numerous instances of rape,
one incredulous health director asked: ‘What do they think we examined at the
hospital last night -ghosts?’ Finally, after authorities decided that the many
brawls and assaults ‘appeared to be getting out of hand,’ a combination of MPs
and local police formed a phalanx and slowly cleared the streets.
Three days of ‘peace riots’ had brought at least eleven
deaths, over a thousand injuries, and tens of thousands of dollars in property
damage. In the following months. City and military officials launched an investigation,
but no one was charged or court -martialed. The grant jury supposedly scrutinizing
the riots held that ‘when large numbers of young men realize that they are
freed from war they are prone to celebrate overzealously.’ The Army’s
intelligence summary admitted that the conduct of personnel ‘was generally
riotous’ and that ‘women were assaulted’ but dismissed the situation as a ‘temporary
emergency.’ When asked about the riot and the unremitting criminality, the mayor
‘gazed off into space’ and responded merely that the police and the navy did a
good job when they took over.’
This was San Francisco at the outbreak of peace. New York, Boston, Los Angeles,
and Washington DC, also endured drunkenness, sexual assault and riots during
V-J Day celebrations. Yet this moment was not an aberration. Troop crime
plagued American cities throughout the war, and civilians- especially women
-lived with many of the same dangers and fears felt by the residents of
occupied cities overseas. Women’s groups, businesses, politicians, and police
struggled to come to terms with servicemens impact on their cities, protesting
and fighting the military to regain local control of policing, regulation of businesses,
curfews, and other municipal issues. While white troops proved stubbornly
immune to effective oversight by civilian authorities and sometimes even
military ones, African American and other nonwhite troops were harassed by
police, subjected to hate crimes, and tormented by military authorities, who
were often white supremacists.
This book recovers the history of American liberty
ports – cities in the continental United States that were profoundly affected
by military mobilization because they were the destinations for millions of
sailors and soldiers. The most important hubs for troops – cities like New
York, Boston, Norfolk, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles – saw the relationships
and conflicts that developed between servicemen, civilians and the authorities
charged with policing them. Recovering this history overturns the idea that the
home front was a protected place, unscathed by the violence embroiling the rest
of the globe. Indeed, soldiers effectively occupied many US cities. Sixteen
million Americans served in the military, passing through towns near training
camps, cities along transit lines, and ports of embarkation. During the war,
over three million servicemen moved through New York City alone. Before the spring
of 1944, when preparations for D-Day accelerated, 65-75 percent of all soldiers
were stationed domestically. Twenty-five percent of the army never left the country
at all. Liberty ports became international zones of trade and entertainment
where GIs sought alcohol, sex, and other excitements. And these were not simply
American spaces. The presence of Commonwealth, French, Dutch, and Chinese servicemen
made it much harder for municipal and military officials to police nightlife
and crime. Taking this unexamined history into account gives us a new, unsettling
picture of the home front and World War II itself.
GI stories focus on the drama of combat, culminating in places like Pearl
Harbor, Bataan, Anzio, Normandy, and Iwo Jima. Popular histories, memoirs, and
films follow a common arc: young, naïve, slightly scared teenagers, farmers,
and factory workers join the army and leave home for exotic and dangerous
locales where they soon endure their first harrowing experiences of combat,
quickly form bonds across ethnic and geographical lines, and eventually become
a cohesive unit of hardened, resourceful veterans. That arc mirrors that of the
one often told about the nation as a whole: a young, emerging America stumbles
at first but soon rises to overcome its prewar isolation and offered
liberation, leadership, and democracy around the globe. This ‘good war’ story
necessarily focuses on troops outside the United States who liberate and
rebuild a world broken by the horrors of fascism and imperialism – our boys in
uniform become a new light for an old world in need of an American Century.
These combat stories are popular and for good reason.
Anyone who has read a memoir like Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed
understands that the suffering servicemen faced was real. Those who fought and
those who died deserve to be remembered. But the combat soldier’s story can
reveal only so much. Estimates vary as to how many troops actually saw combat –
perhaps as few as 10 percent – but less than half were ever in a combat zone. In the European Theater of Operations, for
example, combat troops made up only 19 percent of the total forces deployed in
April 1945. This small tooth-to-nail ratio meant that far more soldiers spent
the war working on logistics and transportation or in a vast bureaucracy that
managed huge swaths of new property, paychecks, and the health care of
millions.
But all the soldiers a dealt with the daily privations and annoyances of a
regimented life. While only a few stormed a beach or flanked along a hedgerow,
many exercised the privilege of the uniform while taking leave. Carousing in
bars, cornering and chasing women, and beating up the guy not in uniform
quickly emerged as a compelling marker of what it meant to be a soldier.
Indeed. Servicemen derided civilian life as a way to accept and lionize their
status as military men.
GI carousing from Australia, China, and Okinawa to Britain, France, and Germany
was enormously disruptive. Rape, assault, petty crime, and casual violence
became all too common hallmarks of American liberations and occupations. In
Commonwealth nations the phrase over-paid, oversexed and over here
served as a shorthand description of GIs. In 1942, for example, the growing
contingent of American personnel in Brisbane erupted into conflicts with
Australian troops over women and increasingly scarce goods like cigarettes.
‘The Australians had grievances and they had very sold reasons to be
aggrieved,’ recalled one officer. ‘The Yanks had everything – the girls, the
canteens and all the rest of it- our blokes
were completely ostracized in their own city.’ Tensions eventually blew up in
November with the two-day Battle of Brisbane, in which the city’s blackout
restrictions had to be lifted just to restore order. In Sydney, women stepped
out into the darkened streets wielding ‘hatpins, bag needles, spike files,
penknives, cayenne peppers, scissors, or weighed torches’ as they watched for
‘any brown-our Casanova who makes a nuisance of himself.’ In Britain, Americans
cause similar disturbances from London’s Piccadilly Circus - where Yanks raced
to find the women called ‘Piccadilly Commandos’ for some ‘vicious debauchery’ –
to smaller coastal towns like Weymouth and Portland used as staging grounds for
the D-Day invasion. Across the Channel in France, troops arrived as liberators
and armed tourists but also as persistent threats to local women and civilians.
And, in China, the Philippines, Okinawa, and Japan, servicemen thirsting for
sex and drink repeatedly threatened both local and international relations well
into the postwar era.
The American home front has long been portrayed as separate and shielded from
these overseas stories. Of course, historians have recognized the conflicts
that brewed back home: Japanese internment, race riots, and a wide variety of
labor disputes were the most visible signs of a turbulent age. Women took jobs
in the defense plants in unprecedented numbers, finding new levels of
independence and fulfillment but also harassment and hazardous conditions.
Popular images again and again depict wartime women as Rosie the Riveter, worried
wives and daughters, or doting lovers waiting for a sailor’s kiss or a letter
from abroad. But, in almost all these, the home front is separate from the war
front. Soldiers and sailors are absent from this landscape or make only brief
cameos in events like the Zoot Suit Riots.**
As the result, many people believe that Americans on
the home front uniquely avoided the effects of war and of conflicts between
civilians and the military. ‘The continental United States had escaped the
plague of war, and so it was easy enough for their heirs to believe that they
had been anointed by God, ‘mused Lewis H. Lapham in 1979. David M. Kennedy’s Freedom
from Fear similarly concluded: ‘Beyond the war’s dead and wounded and their
families, few Americans had been touched by the staggering sacrifices and
unspeakable anguish that the war had visited upon millions of other people
around the globe.’ Even leading military historians like Aaron O’Connell
believed that, ‘in World War II, civil-military friction was relatively low.’
But the stories of the liberty ports show that civil-military conflict was a
defining feature of the home front experience.
Even when the oft-poor behavior of American troops abroad has been recognized, it has been contrasted with an idealized secure home front. Mary Louise Robert’s gripping What Soldiers Do endorses the idea that it took exposure to a foreign country’s supposedly exotic traditions and loose morals -specifically France’s ‘primitive and oversexed’ culture – to make soldiers decide that pursuing and even forcing themselves on women was justified. In this conception: ‘The US military protected the ‘virtuous’ American women back home at the expense of the French prostitute.’ The home front is made safe as the people of Normandy face the unleashed urges of servicemen. The US military protected ‘American families,’ Roberts explains, ‘from the spectacle of GI promiscuity while leaving French families unable to escape it.’ But the truth is that folks back home were not safe from the revelry and violence that accompanied invasions and occupations. An American woman in Boston likely had little more legal recourse than the French woman in Le Havre.
Compared to firebombing, the Blitz, and the horrors
visited on the Eastern Front and China, what Americans experienced was mild.
But civilians in stateside ports, stopover cities, and boomtowns nevertheless
shared much with those living in war-touched cities abroad. Certainly it would
be safer for a civilian to be in New York than in Normandy during the invasion.
Yet V-J Day in liberty ports saw uncontrolled violence and sexual assaults like
those accompanying the breakout in the Norman bocage. And, while US cities were
often safer than overseas combat zones, American civilians lived with some of the
same dangers and risks experienced by civilians in London, Paris, and other
occupied cities. They may have not seen bombings or the worse violence, but
they did face uncontrolled and aggressive troops in their streets.
While some people are aware of the government and military’s obsessive campaign
against venereal disease – and the women who were treated inhumanely because of
it – most stories of women and troops on the home front centered on teary-eyed
goodbyes and love separated by an ocean. For many people, especially in coastal
cities, the military presence exerted a huge influence on everyday life.
Servicemen were neither absent nor peripheral but rather central figures who
dictated the often-discordant rhythms of the wartime city. From women taking a
route home that circumvented areas well trafficked by troops, business owners
struggling to keep brawls from destroying their establishments, to men avoiding
amusement zones for fear of being heckled or assaulted, civilians of all kinds
were forced to adjust their daily lives. Local political officials and
municipal figures likewise had to fight to retain control of their increasingly
militarized cities. Civil-military conflict grew, both in the halls of political
power and in train cars, bars, and streets of port cities.
WW II cemented the rapid amalgamation of federal power that had first taken hold
during WW I. Bursting with new agency, raking in more taxes, and making greater
demands on citizens, became a leviathan that demanded that civilian life turn
towards serving the needs of the state. With soothing intonations and the comforting
setting of fireside chats, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt6 consistently
promoted the idea that civilians ought to serve and support a widespread
militarization of American life. With this idea came an expansion of executive
authority, government bureaucracy, and military power.
Yet Americans did not experience this expansion solely through taxes,
propaganda, war bonds, and labor restrictions. Many also encountered it in the
form of sailors and soldiers commandeering the everyday places where they lived
their lives. Their streets, bars, parks, and trains regularly filled with such
‘friendly invasions, ‘as one writer put it in 1944. This visceral, embodied
military presence prompted bitter conflicts over who should control; public
space, who held jurisdiction over servicemen, and what sacrifices could be
tolerated in service of the war. As municipal authorities increasingly buckled
to army and navy leaders, women had to navigate the increasingly perilous
streets, alleyways, and train cars, attempting to sort the decent men from the
wolves. But the story of liberty ports also reveals the limits of that
ballooning military authority. The American GI often remained a recalcitrant
individual unwilling to abide the demands of civilian norms, military
discipline, or, indeed, even the law.
Nationwide, the papers filled with lurid stores of criminal activity
perpetrated by soldiers and sailors. The FBI reported crime spikes in 1941, 1942,
1945, and 1946. J Edgar Hoover also noted that rape and aggravated assault,
which increased, ‘have definitely emerged as wartime crimes.’ In major cities,
a 46 percent rise in aggravated assault and a 35 percent spike in rape compared
to prewar rates signaled a crisis for all levels of government. One of the key
points of this story. However, is that so many men were never arrested or even
stopped from committing assaults and harassing civilians. As is still the case today,
numerous rapes, fights and drunken crimes were never reported or pursued by
police. Some African Americans, Hispanic and other nonwhite men were tried and
convicted of crimes, but they were not the perpetrators. Nevertheless, the FBI
still counted these cases as wins on their ledger books. the data we have
ultimately fail to capture what occurred in wartime.
The sexual violence that occurred in liberty ports and
boomtowns throughout the war cannot be explained away as typical of the era.
Millions of men coursing through ports arrived not merely with the usual levels
of privilege but with the sense that the lives of civilians and women were fundamentally
less important than theirs. Their uniforms and the legal privileges that came
with them placed them above bystanders and municipal cops, encouraging more
hostile and riskier behavior. Putting young men into barracks and camps that
played up and rewarded belligerent, virile masculinity led to both sexual
obsession and misogyny. The specter of death and the political pressures placed
on women to provide romance and sex worsened a dangerous situation.
Worse of all, the sexual violence and rampant crime were not secret. Everyone
knew that troops coerced, assaulted, and raped women with shocking regularity.
Army leaders like General George C. Marshall, rear admirals, MPs, servicemen,
municipal officials, writers, journalists, political organizations, civilians,
and, most importantly, women in ports all knew the prevalence of harassment,
assault, rape, and other violent crimes committed by troops. Again and again, these
crimes went brazenly unpunished as military leaders made the welfare of civilians
one more casualty of the war. Neither perpetrators nor officials ever made much of an effort to cover anything
up because they knew they did not need to.
*https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SAN-FRANCISCO-The-dark-side-of-V-J-Day-The-2647870.php
** In June 1943, Los Angeles erupted into the worst race riots in the city to date. For 10 straight nights, American sailors armed with make-shift weapons cruised Mexican American neighborhoods in search of "zoot-suiters" — hip, young Mexican teens dressed in baggy pants and long-tailed coats.
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