He'd hang the wet negatives on tree branches to dry and then carry them with him. At night, he'd develop rolls of film, mixing chemicals in helmets borrowed from fellow soldiers. Images taken shortly after the conclusion of the First World War, between the end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919, show the horrible facial injuries suffered by several soldiers. In addition to fighting on the front lines during the Battle of Normandy and the ensuing Allied advance, Vaccaro photographed what he was seeing. He also brought along his personal camera: A relatively compact Argus C3 he'd purchased secondhand for $47.50 and had become fond of using as a high-school student in New York. By June 1944, days after the first wave of 156,000 Allied troops descended on the beaches of Normandy, Vaccaro landed on Omaha Beach, where he saw row after row of dead soldiers in the sand. So Vaccaro, the orphaned son of Italian immigrants, became a private first class in the 83rd Infantry Division. But under Uncle Sam's rules, the 20-year-old draftee was too young for that branch. Michelantonio "Tony" Vaccaro wanted to serve his country with a camera during World War II, so he tried to join the US Army Signal Corps. After the Liberation, a witness would later recall, a mob came for her, stripping and shearing her, dragging her through town as her teenage daughter cowered behind.Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. Their entire conversation took place at the window - he never even entered her house. One day she was working at home next to an open window when a German soldier strolled up and began talking to her. Some had only the briefest contact with their occupiers, as was the case of a funeral wreath maker in Toulouse. Some were the targets of personal revenge, framed and falsely accused. Some of the women had, indeed, slept with Nazi soldiers. The result is my novel, The Lost Vintage, which features a character accused of horizontal collaboration. ![]() As I learned more about these women, their stories and images haunted me, compelling me to write about them. In the 74 years since the D-Day landings, the barbarity of the épuration sauvage - its violence against women - has often been overlooked. It begins with a terrible event, then women get blamed, then aggressively attacked and finally the assault is forgotten. The suspicion and punishment of women after World War II is part of a cycle of repression and sexism that began long before D-Day and continues to be seen today, in the conversation around the #MeToo movement. At least 20,000 French women are known to have been shorn during the wild purge that occurred in waves between 1944 to 1945 - and the historian Anthony Beevor believes the true figure may be higher. Instead, I was surprised to discover that, for thousands of women, the Liberation marked the beginning of a different nightmare. Marines prepare themselves after receiving orders to cross the Iraqi border at Camp Shoup, in northern Kuwait. ![]() When I first started researching a novel about France during the Second World War, I was expecting to find horrors that took place during the dark years of the Nazi Occupation. The start of the Iraq War 20 years later in photos. Instead, it zeroed in on women accused of consorting with the enemy. About 6,000 people were killed during the épuration sauvage - but the intense, cruel, public ferocity of the movement focused not on serious collaborationist crime. Although some were loyal resistance members, others had themselves dabbled in collaborationist activity and were anxious to cleanse their records before the mob turned on them, too. Just as the punished were almost always women, their punishers were usually men, who acted with no legal mandate or court-given authority. ![]() In the chaos of the fighting, with mustard gas drifting overhead and the roar of gunfire all around, many soldiers reported having lost their way entirely. One photograph from the era shows a woman standing in a village as two men forcibly restrain her wrists a third man grabs a hank of her blonde hair, his scissors poised to hack it away. World War I photos of the Somme battlefield, the site of one of the bloodiest engagements in human history, show a twisting warren of trenches that turn every few yards.
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