Reopening the European Office and New Leadership for a Renewed Mission, 1944–1948

This chapter discusses the closing of World War II and the new work the ABMC was directed to accomplish. Existing memorials needed to be restored, and hundreds of thousands of American soldiers needed to be buried in new overseas cemeteries or sent home. A major concern of the ABMC was finance. Many of the local ABMC workers in Europe had continued working, as best they could, during the war and were severely underpaid. There was initially little to no money for employees and the restoration of the monuments and cemeteries. General Robert M. Littlejohn, chief quartermaster for the European Theater of Operations, contributed $100,000 a year of army funds to the ABMC in Belgium and France. An entire new unit was created in the army in order to assist in any way necessary. This chapter also addresses the deaths of General Pershing and the agency’s first consulting architect, Paul Philippe Cret, and introduces their respective successors, George C. Marshall and John Harbeson.

The European Theater of Operations

Chapter Four follows the architects of the air war as they were shipped overseas to gain combat experience. General Hap Arnold knew that his most trusted subordinates would need combat missions on their records if they were going to be leaders in a post-war Air Force. Kuter was deployed overseas in October 1942 to take command of the First Bombardment Wing. When General Kuter assumed command he found four understrength groups of B-17's (Flying Fortresses) operating separately. He succeeded in welding the individual squadrons and groups into a coordinated fighting force. Despite his desire to stay and lead the wing, Kuter’s reputation proceeded him and he was forced to depart England only a few weeks after taking command of the wing.

Evident Bias in Thomas J. Kehoe and E. James Kehoe, “Crimes Committed by U.S. Soldiers in Europe, 1945–1946”

The horrifying record of rape by Soviet troops in postwar Germany has long been a matter of record. What is new is the argument that the behavior of American GIs in the European Theater of Operations was little better than that of the Russians. Inspired by a new study alleging that some 190,000 German girls and women were raped by U.S. servicemen, the Kehoes maintain that official military statistics from 1945-46 confirm such high levels of sexual predation. It can now be said with confidence, they assert, that “U.S. soldiers raped and assaulted civilians with frightening abandon.” Yet this generalization and others like it are not supported by the authors’ own data, which instead repeatedly display low rape figures. The Kehoes’ reliance on theorizing to overcome this deficiency is clearly unconvincing.

Crimes Committed by U.S. Soldiers in Europe, 1945–1946

Accounts from victims and observers, including new research in the U.S. National Archives and the Bavarian National Archives, suggest that American soldiers committed crimes against persons—especially rape and various forms of assault—and against property in Europe after World War II more often than statistics about charges and prosecutions at the time indicated. More importantly, previously unexamined statistical summaries of crimes committed by American troops, as recorded by the U.S. Provost Marshal, provide unprecedented quantitative information about these crimes in the European Theater of Operations (eto) during the first postwar year, May 1945 to June 1946. The absolute number of crimes decreased as the number of troops declined, but the rate of crime (number per 10,000 troops) increased during the same period.