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What Soldiers Do
- Sex and the American GI in World War II France
- Narrated by: Nancy Peterson
- Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
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Publisher's summary
How do you convince men to charge across heavily mined beaches into deadly machine-gun fire? If you're the US Army in 1944, you dangle the lure of beautiful French women, waiting just on the other side of the wire, ready to reward their liberators in oh so many ways.
That's not the picture of the Greatest Generation that we've been given, but it's the one Mary Louise Roberts paints to devastating effect in What Soldiers Do. Drawing on an incredible range of sources, Roberts tells the fascinating and troubling story of how the US military command systematically spread - and then exploited - the myth of French women as sexually experienced and available. The resulting chaos horrified the war-weary and demoralized French population. The sexual predation, and the blithe response of the American military leadership, also caused serious friction between the two nations just as they were attempting to settle questions of long-term control over the liberated territories and the restoration of French sovereignty.
While never denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery of the soldiers who took part, What Soldiers Do reminds us that history is always more useful - and more interesting - when it is most honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished beauty of nostalgia to grapple with the real lives and real mistakes of the people who lived it.
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Savage Continent
- Europe in the Aftermath of World War II
- By: Keith Lowe
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 15 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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The end of the Second World War in Europe is one of the 20th century's most iconic moments. It is fondly remembered as a time when cheering crowds filled the streets, danced, drank and made love until the small hours. These images of victory and celebration are so strong in our minds that the period of anarchy and civil war that followed has been forgotten. Across Europe, landscapes had been ravaged, entire cities razed and more than thirty million people had been killed in the war.
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Better in print?
- By Rodney on 10-10-12
By: Keith Lowe
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Fracture
- Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938
- By: Philipp Blom
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 17 hrs
- Unabridged
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When the Great War ended in 1918, the West was broken. Religious faith, patriotism, and the belief in human progress had all been called into question by the mass carnage experienced by both sides. Shell-shocked and traumatized, the West faced a world it no longer recognized: The old order had collapsed, replaced by an age of machines. The world hurtled forward on gears and crankshafts, and terrifying new ideologies arose from the wreckage of past belief.
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Lots of good trivia information
- By Jean on 07-23-15
By: Philipp Blom
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War: How Conflict Shaped Us
- By: Margaret MacMillan
- Narrated by: Deepti Gupta
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Margaret MacMillan looks at the ways in which war has influenced human society and how, in turn, changes in political organization, technology, or ideologies have affected how and why we fight. War: How Conflict Shaped Us explores such much-debated and controversial questions as: When did war first start? Does human nature doom us to fight one another? Why has war been described as the most organized of all human activities? Why are warriors almost always men? Is war ever within our control?
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Horrible choice of narrator derails this book
- By Steve Winnett on 02-25-21
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War and Genocide
- A Concise History of the Holocaust
- By: Doris L. Bergen
- Narrated by: Collene Curran
- Length: 13 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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In examining one of the defining events of the twentieth century, Doris L. Bergen situates the Holocaust in its historical, political, social, cultural, and military contexts. Unlike many other treatments of the Holocaust, this revised, third edition discusses not only the persecution of the Jews, but also other segments of society victimized by the Nazis: Roma, homosexuals, Poles, Soviet POWs, the disabled, and other groups deemed undesirable.
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Agency - the capacity or state of exerting power
- By Angela on 03-22-17
By: Doris L. Bergen
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Ordinary Men
- Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
- By: Christopher R. Browning
- Narrated by: Kevin Gallagher
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions.
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could've done without the afterword...
- By Andrew lester on 06-07-20
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Crucible
- The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924
- By: Charles Emmerson
- Narrated by: Charles Emmerson
- Length: 25 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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In Petrograd, a fire is lit. The Tsar is packed off to Siberia. A rancorous Russian exile returns to proclaim a workers' revolution. In America, black soldiers who have served their country in Europe demand their rights at home. An Austrian war veteran trained by the German army to give rousing speeches against the Bolshevik peril begins to rail against the Jews. A solar eclipse turns a former patent clerk into a celebrity. An American reporter living the high life in Paris searches out a new literary style.
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Splendid in all respects
- By Paul Custer on 02-11-20
By: Charles Emmerson
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Hitler's First Hundred Days
- When Germans Embraced the Third Reich
- By: Peter Fritzsche
- Narrated by: Jim Seybert
- Length: 14 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Amid the ravages of economic depression, Germans in the early 1930s were pulled to political extremes both left and right. Then, in the spring of 1933, Germany turned itself inside out, from a deeply divided republic into a one-party dictatorship. In Hitler's First Hundred Days, award-winning historian Peter Fritzsche offers a probing account of the pivotal moments when the majority of Germans seemed, all at once, to join the Nazis to construct the Third Reich.
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Whoa! This Is Too Tense To Be A Horror Novel!
- By Ted on 07-02-20
By: Peter Fritzsche
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"Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself"
- The Mass Suicide of Ordinary Germans in 1945
- By: Florian Huber
- Narrated by: Sam Peter Jackson
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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By the end of April 1945 in Germany, the Third Reich had fallen and invasion was underway. As the Red Army advanced, horrifying stories spread about the depravity of its soldiers. For many German people, there seemed to be nothing left but disgrace and despair. For tens of thousands of them, the only option was to choose death - for themselves and for their children.
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This book should be required reading for anyone that seeks to understand how ordinary people could be transformed into monsters.
- By Anonymous User on 05-08-20
By: Florian Huber
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When Paris Went Dark
- The City of Light under German Occupation, 1940-1944
- By: Ronald C. Rosbottom
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 14 hrs
- Unabridged
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On June 14, 1940, German tanks entered a silent and nearly deserted Paris. Eight days later, France accepted a humiliating defeat and foreign occupation. Subsequently, an eerie sense of normalcy settled over the City of Light. Many Parisians keenly adapted themselves to the situation - even allied themselves with their Nazi overlords. At the same time, amidst this darkening gloom of German ruthlessness, shortages, and curfews, a resistance arose.
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Good but not great
- By gaillardia on 08-21-14
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The Shining Path
- Love, Madness, and Revolution in the Andes
- By: Orin Starn, Miguel La Serna
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 12 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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On May 17, 1980, on the eve of Peru's presidential election, five masked men stormed a small town. They set election ballots ablaze and vanished, but not before planting a red hammer-and-sickle banner in the town square. The lone man arrested the next morning later swore allegiance to a group called Shining Path. Described by a US State Department cable as "cold-blooded and bestial", Shining Path orchestrated bombings, assassinations, and massacres across the cities, countryside, and jungles of Peru in a murderous campaign to seize power and impose a Communist government.
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Understanding my wife
- By Eugene on 06-10-22
By: Orin Starn, and others
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The Korean War
- A History
- By: Bruce Cumings
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
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In sobering detail, The Korean War chronicles a US home front agitated by Joseph McCarthy, where absolutist conformity discouraged open inquiry and citizen dissent. Cumings incisively ties our current foreign policy back to Korea: an America with hundreds of permanent military bases abroad, a large standing army, and a permanent national security state at home, the ultimate result of a judicious and limited policy of containment evolving into an ongoing and seemingly endless global crusade.
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A real eye-opener
- By Bookworm on 10-09-19
By: Bruce Cumings
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Do Not Disturb
- The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad
- By: Michela Wrong
- Narrated by: Michela Wrong
- Length: 18 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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We think we know the story of Africa’s Great Lakes region. Following the Rwandan genocide, an idealistic group of young rebels overthrew the brutal regime in Kigali, ushering in an era of peace and stability that made Rwanda the donor darling of the West, winning comparisons with Switzerland and Singapore. But the truth was considerably more sinister.
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What is true and what isn't?
- By Buretto on 11-30-21
By: Michela Wrong
What listeners say about What Soldiers Do
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Kathleen Savor
- 10-30-24
Lopsided stories
It could have been well done but her American bashing and French excuses making the telling ridiculous. She did exactly what she accuses Ambrose of doing in his books. The Allies needed her in the war room to tell them how it should have been done. Her double standards are absurd. No wonder she won a French book award. So confused at her extreme reasoning. Could not wait to be done with this book. The quote “At least the Germans let us keep our house”…:Good lord!!!!
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