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Taken by Force: Rape and American GIs in Europe during World War II. By J. Robert Lilly. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ISBN 978-0-230-50647-3. Tables. Graphs. Notes. References. Indexes. Pp. xxxi, 235. $45.00.
In Taken by Force, sociologist Robert Lilly penetrates the "ugly underbelly of the U.S. Army's behavior in Europe" (p. xxii) in a detailed study of the rapes its soldiers committed in Britain, France, and Germany. Fabrice Virgili's "Preface to the French Edition" and Dr. Peter Schrijvers's "Foreword" also make for valuable reading, as they first broach the importance of a gendered approach to war, the atrocity of the crime of rape, then the context of rabid American racism in which the crimes occurred and were judged, and ultimately the "code of silence" (p. xxx) about rape that reigns in GIs'...