Early this year, I was reading the Band of Brothers book by Stephen Ambrose. In one of the later chapters, Ambrose was discussing the sentiment of the soldiers towards the people of Europe, and one of the interesting thing is nearly all of the soldiers preferred the German citizens to the French.
The passage in question reads:
I was wondering if anyone had more information or context regarding the French attitudes to the Americans. Was this a cultural thing? Was it a shame that they were so easily conquered by the Germans, a shame that manifested itself in resentment toward their liberators?
The passage in question reads:
The passage goes on to describe ways in which the Americans approved of the Germans, but what I'm really wondering more about is the French.Quote:
The standard story of how the American G.I. reacted to the foreign people he met during the course of WWII runs like this: He felt the Arabs were despicable, liars, thieves, dirty, awful, without a redeeming feature. The Italians were liars, thieves, dirty, wonderful, with many redeeming features, but never to be trusted. The rural French were sullen, slow, and ungrateful while the Parisians were rapacious, cunning, indifferent to whether thy were cheating Germans or Americans. The British People were brave, resourceful, quaint, reserved, dull. The dutch were, as noted, regarded as simply wonderful in every way (but the average G.I. was never in Holland, only the airborne).
The story ends up thus: wonder of wonders, the average G.I. found that the people he liked best, identified mot closely with, enjoyed being with, were the Germans. Clean, hard-working, disciplined, educated, middle-class in their tastes and lifestyles , the germans seemed to many American soldiers as just like us.
I was wondering if anyone had more information or context regarding the French attitudes to the Americans. Was this a cultural thing? Was it a shame that they were so easily conquered by the Germans, a shame that manifested itself in resentment toward their liberators?
