French women speak out on rapes by US soldiers during WWII
Aimee Dupre had always kept silent about the rape of her mother by two American soldiers after the Normandy landings in June 1944. But 80 years after the brutal assault, she finally felt it was time to speak out. Nearly a million US, British, Canadian and French soldiers landed on the Normandy coast in the weeks after D-Day in an operation that was to herald the end of Nazi Germany’s grip on Europe. Aimee was 19, living in Montours, a village in Brittany, and delighted to see the “liberators” arrive, as was everybody around her. But then her joy evaporated. On the evening of August 10, two US soldiers — often called GIs — arrived at the family’s farm. “They were drunk and they wanted a woman,” Aimee, now 99, told AFP, producing a letter that her mother, also called Aimee, wrote “so nothing is forgotten”. In her neat handwriting, Aimee Helaudais Honore described the events of that night. How the soldiers fired their guns in the direction of her husband, ripping holes in his …
