Sons of Cain

by Peter Vronsky

  It all harked back to the gynocidal dungeons of the Great Witch Hunt of 1450 to 1650 at its most sadistic fantastic.

  Norm Eastman, one of the cover artists for those magazines in the 1950s, recalled in 2003, “I often wondered why they stuck with the torture themes so much. That must have been where they were heavy with sales. I really was kind of ashamed of painting them, though I am not sure they did any harm. It did seem like a weird thing to do.”10

  Women in these blatantly misogynistic publications were portrayed in only two biblically paraphilic ways: either as captives bound and forced into sex against their will or as sexually aggressive, bare-shouldered women with a cigarette dangling from their lips, subject to punishment or death for their evil-minded sexuality. In this paraphilic world of the “sweats” women were either a sacred Madonna defiled or a profligate whore punished; there were no other options available.

  These magazines were not squirreled away behind counters or in adult bookstores or limited to some subculture; they were as mainstream as apple pie. Some had monthly circulations of over two million copies at their height and were openly sold everywhere: on newsstands; in grocery stores, candy stores, supermarkets; on drugstore magazine racks, right next to Time, Life, National Geographic, Popular Mechanics and Ladies’ Home Journal.11 They would be found lying around anywhere and everywhere men and their sons gathered, in workshops, barbershops, auto shop waiting rooms, mail rooms, locker rooms and factory lunchrooms. At their peak, there were over a hundred monthly adventure and true-detective magazine titles, available to all ages.

  All this in a country where it is still taboo to show even a glimpse of a bare female breast or buttock on television.

  In a colorless world, where photographs, movies and television were mostly black-and-white, I remember in the late 1950s and the early 1960s going to the local supermarket with my mom and waiting for her by the magazine and comic book racks, facing row after row of these magazines with their candy-colored covers of bound women in distress, offered up for the taking. “GIRLS PRICED TO SELL,” as one headline advertised.

  I was five or six years old and had no notion of sex, but I remember that those images stirred some kind of powerful primordial male reptilian euphoria. I recognize it today as entirely a sexual stirring for dominance and possession of my prim and bossy older-sister humans, from babysitters and nurses to female store clerks and teachers towering over me, under whose supervision and authority I constantly found myself as a male child. These magazine images of prostrate females drew me into a fantasy world in which women were tipped over into a so-powerless and so-vulnerably-disheveled state.

  I was one of those lucky kids who were given no reason to be hurt, traumatized or angry, and was encouraged and raised to be independent and autonomous as an adolescent by both the men and women in my young life. I was fortunate and had a trauma-free childhood with no episodes of abuse. But I can only imagine now, if some severe abuse, humiliation or trauma had been fused with that powerful, primitive, reptilian sensation I describe, what might have happened and to what dark place I potentially could have taken those impulses stirred by this constant imagery had I been angry at women, or desperately craved control, revenge or even redemption, or as John William Money described sexual paraphilia, if I needed my “tragedy or trauma turned into triumph.”

  Why were our Greatest Generation and their sons feeding on this sadistically depraved popular literature after the war? Why did this illustrated literature even exist? What happened to our fathers and grandfathers in that war? What dark secrets were encoded in this literature, secrets that they came back with from the Last Good War but could not openly talk about?

  It was only fifty years later, in the early 2000s, as most of the war generation started to pass away, that we began gathering the courage to ask those unaskable questions about what it meant for them to fight a primitive war to utterly exterminate an enemy. We did not like the answers coming back to us on several fronts.

  “TSUNAMI OF LUST”: AMERICAN GIS AND RAPE IN EUROPE DURING WORLD WAR II

  What I will describe here is so taboo a topic, even today, that I feel I need to preface it with this disclaimer: this is not about what most of our fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers did as GIs fighting in World War II; this is about what they witnessed a minority of GIs doing, and how they had to live with the memories without being able to talk about them with anybody.

  Since the beginning of history rape has consistently been a characteristic of warfare and conquest. As Lt. Col. Dave Grossman writes in his magistral book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society:

  The linkage between sex and killing becomes unpleasantly apparent when we enter the realm of warfare. Many societies have long recognized the existence of this twisted region in which battle, like sex, is a milestone in adolescent masculinity. Yet the sexual aspects of killing continue beyond the region in which both are thought to be rites of manhood and into the area in which killing becomes like sex and sex like killing.12

  This relationship between sex and killing in war is reflected by frequent rape, which in itself is fueled less by sexual lust as by aggression in a time and place where nothing is more valued and demanded of a soldier than a capacity for lethal aggression of the most primitive kind.

  While in the modern age wartime rape became punishable under various military codes of conduct and criminal laws of certain countries, it was not explicitly outlawed in international conventions governing war crimes, laws and customs of war until 1996 and not until 2008 declared by the United Nations as being a war crime constituting an act of genocide.13

  During World War II we accused the Nazis and Japanese of wanton rape, and after the war we blamed our Russian former allies for any rapes perpetrated by “our side” in Germany. The democratic Western Allies—USA, Britain, Canada and France—were portrayed as chivalrous liberators handing out chocolate bars and chewing gum. The enemy raped, but we seduced with gifts of nylon stockings and brought home blushing war brides. It was all very romantic, the myth.

  But then in the early 2000s, Northern Kentucky University’s criminal sociologist J. Robert Lilly looked closely at the statistics of wartime rapes committed by American GIs serving in Britain, France and Germany. To everyone’s horror, Lilly reported that American “liberators” raped fourteen thousand to seventeen thousand women between 1942 and 1945 in those three European countries alone.14

  Some 16.5 million men (or 12 percent of the total US population), mostly in their twenties, were mobilized into the military, deployed in Europe or the Pacific or on wartime duty at home. About 990 thousand young American men were thrown into combat, including some 100 thousand convicted felons who were inducted directly into the military from prisons.15

  To get some sense of the scale of the number of alleged rapes, consider there were about 1.5 million US troops in Europe in the four-year period in question. Back home in the US, where most American males had remained, about 4,700 rapes a year were being reported.16 In 2014, the US had a male population of about 150 million, 100 times the number of GIs deployed in Europe during the war; there were 84,041 reported rapes.17 (Approximately 15 percent of the 2014 statistic were male victims.)18 The World War II GI rape rate in Europe, prorated over the four years 1942 to 1945 and adjusted per capita to the current population of the US (14,000–17,000 x 100 / 4) would be equivalent today to 350 thousand to 425 thousand reported rapes a year in the United States! It was an unusually high rate.

  No American publisher at first wanted to take on Robert Lilly’s controversial book. It was the height of the Iraq war effort, but beyond that, negative revelations about the conduct of our “greatest generation” in the “last good war” were not something we collectively wanted to hear.19 Robert Lilly’s book was first published only in France and Italy, where the Europeans gleefully reveled in the accusations. It was finally quietly published by Macm
illan in the United States in 2007 as Taken by Force: Rape and American GIs in Europe.

  In April 2006, in the meantime, the British Home Office declassified wartime crime statistics which revealed that American GIs in Britain between 1942 and 1945 were convicted in 26 murders, 31 manslaughters, 22 attempted murders and more than 400 sexual offenses, including 126 rapes.20 British newspapers ran headlines like “Wartime GIs went on rampage of rape and murder.”21

  Then University of Wisconsin–Madison history professor Mary Louise Roberts looked into rapes perpetrated by American GIs liberating France and published her results in 2013 in What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France.22 American troops raped so many women in France that French authorities begged the American military to set up brothels, but the United States prudishly refused. (One brothel was established, in September 1944, by Major General Charles H. Gerhardt, commander of an infantry division that landed at Omaha Beach, but it was closed after only five hours in deference to sentiments back home.)

  Roberts argues that American troops were steeped in “rape culture” even before they arrived in France, pointing out that military recruiting propaganda and press accounts depicted going to war as an “exotic erotic adventure.” Life magazine’s Joe Weston reported from France that “the general opinion all down the line was that France was a tremendous brothel inhabited by 40 million hedonists who spent all their time eating, drinking and making love and in general having a hell of a good time.”23 In the meantime, the French phrase guide in the GI newspaper Stars and Stripes focused on handy “dating” phrases like “You are very pretty” and “Are your parents at home?”24

  Frenchwomen were branded “sign language girls” because of rumors that they could be seduced by a simple series of hand gestures. An ironic joke circulating among the French in Normandy after D-day went: “With the Germans, the men had to camouflage themselves, but when the Americans arrived, we had to hide the women.” As Roberts concluded, “Sexual fantasies about France did indeed motivate GIs to get off the boat and fight but such fantasies also unleashed a veritable tsunami of lust.”25

  J. Robert Lilly and Mary Louise Roberts point out other ways in which overseas rape statistics reflected American society back home. African-American soldiers were most likely to be charged and most severely punished for rape: of 29 US soldiers sentenced to death for rapes of Frenchwomen, 25 were African-Americans.26 American GIs executed for crimes during the war were reported to their families as having “died due to willful misconduct” and were buried in “Plot E” in Oise-Aisne American Cemetery in France. According to Duke University historian Alice Kaplan, in Plot E there are 96 markers, of which 80 belong to African-Americans.27

  From there it got worse. Historian Miriam Gebhardt, using German church records relating to illegitimate births, claimed in her book Crimes Unspoken that the Allies raped 860 thousand women in their conquest of Germany in 1945. The majority of rapes were typically ascribed to the Russians in the east, but Gebhardt attributed 190 thousand of the rapes to American GIs in Germany (and 45 thousand to British soldiers and 50 thousand to French troops).28 Her book was published by Random House in Germany as When the Soldiers Came in 2015 and in the US in 2017.29

  While these shocking numbers from a low of 14 thousand to a possible 190 thousand rapes are tenuous statistical projections—the higher numbers predicated on the notion that while peacetime rapes often go unreported, in wartime they are even less reported—even the lower numbers are deeply disturbing, especially as they represent rapes only in France, Britain and Germany. We do not have data from some of the other territories in which GIs fought, like North Africa, Italy, Belgium or the Pacific, which could significantly increase the number. Nor does it include, aside from the recent statistics from Britain, the noncombat zones to which Americans were sent around the world to serve. For example, in Australia in 1942 twenty-four-year-old US Army private Edward Joseph Leonski, the “Singing Strangler,” killed three women with melodic voices to “get at their voices.” Although he did not rape the victims, all three were found posed with their genitals exposed.30

  Since the ugliness of the Vietnam War, we have desperately clung to the comforting notion that at least World War II was an unambiguously “good war”; we cling to it today with that naïve, childlike, Sgt. Rock, Our Army at War comic book yearning. Historian David M. Kennedy wrote, in the New York Times, “Our culture has embalmed World War II as ‘the good war,’ and we don’t revisit the corpse very often . . .” What Soldiers Do is “a breath of fresh air,” providing less of an “aha” than, as he put it, an “of course.”31

  As the journalist and historian Mark Kurlansky observed in 2008 in the Los Angeles Times, “World War II was one of the biggest, most carefully plotted lies in modern history.”32

  None of this is meant to disparage the overwhelming majority of American GIs who served courageously and honorably during the war, and who fought within the generally recognized parameters of the laws and customs of “civilized” warfare as best they could, considering the brutality and suicidal fanaticism of the enemy they faced.

  The purpose of this digression here into World War II rape is to suggest that what we brought back home to the USA from the killing fields of Europe and the Pacific was a combat-amplified phenomenon of what had been incipiently unfolding in the repressed psychopathology and culture in America: the diabolus in cultura. Suddenly a million males, most of whom had been raised under the tenets of Western Judeo-Christian values but had rarely ventured beyond their hometowns, were catapulted thousands of miles overseas among strangers into a savagely primitive world of warfare stripped of the rules and inhibitions of civilization. It was a mini Stone Age war but with machine guns and flamethrowers, in which our soldiers were called upon to behave like our primitive ancestors in a reptilian state of killing for survival. Once that reptilian brain was suddenly freed from the bounds of civilization in the name of “military necessity,” all sorts of dark and primitive things were going to happen. War is not a Hollywood movie. It’s not even a sanitized documentary on the History Channel.

  I repeat, the vast majority of American GIs did not perpetrate rape, but many witnessed it and knew about it and were forced to remain mute about what they saw. If the low estimate of 14 thousand to 17 thousand rapes is attributed to the approximately 1.5 million US troops serving in Europe, that means that roughly 1 percent of GIs committed rape. The other 99 percent may have witnessed their fellow soldiers committing these crimes, or at the very least were likely aware of them—crimes perpetrated by their “band of brothers” whose lives depended upon one another—resulting in a burden of truth that many had to swallow to get through the war in one piece. That in itself would have been a conflicted, shameful and demoralizing situation to find oneself in and to bring back home to their wives, mothers, daughters and sons. It was not something they were able to talk about.

  American GIs in the Pacific and Necrophilic Fetish War Totems

  It wasn’t just wartime rape our soldiers might have witnessed or perpetrated. There was also primitive war-trophy harvesting of human heads and other body parts to contend with in another corner of the war—the one in the Pacific, where we were fighting a different enemy: the Japanese. The current leading authority on necrophilia, Dr. Anil Aggrawal, classifies such trophy taking as “Stage 5 fetishistic necrophilia” on his ten-stage scale of necrophilia33 (see chapter seven).

  As John Dower points out in his study of how World War II was waged in the Pacific, “War hates spawn war crimes.”34 We didn’t take a lot of Japanese prisoners in the Pacific, and not just because the Japanese fought to the death or detonated hidden hand grenades after feigning surrender or because it was difficult to contain them in remote jungle-island battlefields. The war in the Pacific was a species of racial war of vengeance. Japanese wounded were often killed; those few attempting to surrender were shot; prisoners were assembled on airfields and machine-
gunned and even sometimes thrown from air transports “while trying to escape.”35 The wanton killing of Japanese prisoners of war was of concern to the military high command, as it discouraged Japanese troops from surrendering. And of course, the even more brutal treatment that the Japanese meted out to American POWs from the beginning did not help the fate of Japanese prisoners in American hands.

  As Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, “That Devil Forrest,” who massacred surrendering African-American Union soldiers at Fort Pillow, famously said, “War means fighting, and fighting means killing.”

  And worse. In the Pacific, US troops frequently mutilated Japanese corpses, cutting off ears, pulling teeth and even shrinking heads, collecting skulls and other body parts to take home with them. This would have been unacceptable conduct against a fellow white Christian enemy, which was precisely what the Germans were, despite their Nazi pretensions to neo-paganism. But in our war against the Japanese, mutilation of the dead (and sometimes even the wounded) was so ubiquitous that an edition of Life magazine proudly featured a photo of a young American woman sitting at a table with a skull on it. The caption read: “Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Jap skull he sent her.”36 President Roosevelt was presented with a letter opener with a handle made from a Japanese soldier’s arm bone (which he ordered to be decently buried).37