Scholars in both the US and Germany have studied the American occupation of Germany extensively. Until recently, however, much of that work focused on the emerging Cold War rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union to explain the rapid shift from an occupation intended to punish the Germans to one that increasingly included West Germans as partners and allies. While not dismissing the importance of the Cold War struggle in shaping US foreign policy, John Willoughby suggests that a more comprehensive understanding of how American power was projected during the Cold War is only possible if attention is shifted from the policy makers in Washington to the players on the ground. By exploring how the American military government dealt with the chaotic social and economic conditions within Germany, the widespread disciplinary problems of American GIs, and the pervasive racism within the military, Willoughby makes a compelling argument that US foreign policy and the “institutions of occupation” were transformed by the “more mundane problems of social control and organizational capability” (3). The American objectives in Germany changed, not because of the Cold War, but because financial pressures, personnel shortages, and economic disarray forced military authorities to hand over power to the Germans much sooner than envisioned by Washington. While Willoughby—by his own admission—does not provide new material to the professional historian of the era, his book nonetheless offers a fresh interpretation that draws on social and cultural history while also paying attention to race and gender.

One of the biggest challenges facing the American military in the closing months of the war, and for two years after cessation of hostilities, was not a restless and resentful German population but the lawless behavior and insubordination of American troops. American occupation soldiers attacked German civilians, “requisitioned” their cameras, and used hand grenades to go “fishing” in local ponds (28). Soldiers also looted American military supplies to make a fast buck, and the GIs' monthly cigarette and liquor rations fuelled the thriving black market. As Willoughby shows, in July 1945, American soldiers stationed in Berlin were paid one million dollars, but sent home four million (21). Military discipline also suffered because American officers and enlisted men, despite a strict non-fraternization order, fraternized extensively with German women. Many GIs fell in love, but plenty others took advantage of the utter misery in Germany's bombed-out cities to trade food and protection for sex and domestic services. This unflattering view of America's occupation of Germany is largely forgotten in popular memory, but in the immediate postwar years, American newspapers regularly informed the reading public that the GIs' behavior undermined the American mission in Germany. Billy Wilder's 1947 comedy, A Foreign Affair (surprisingly not mentioned by Willoughby), brought the pervasiveness of the problem to a larger US audience when it showed a United States congressional delegation arriving in the ruins of Berlin to investigate the “moral malaria” infecting American occupation troops. The military commander awaiting the delegation informed his troops that Washington assumed that the military occupation was “one great picnic” and that soldiers were “swinging in hammocks with blond Fräuleins, swapping cigarettes for castles on the Rhine and soaking their feet in sparkling Moselle.” He implored his soldiers to be on their best behavior while also assuring them that the army was not a “boy scout camp” and that “you can't pin sergeant stripes on an archangel.”

As Willoughby shows, turning the army into a boy-scout camp was exactly what needed be done if the US hoped to establish a working relationship with its German “collaborators” (74). A fearsome and all-white constabulary force was to reign in the disciplinary problems of the GIs, while an extensive benefits program was created to offer the soldiers movies, libraries, travel, and educational opportunities. Wives and children were allowed to join their husbands in Germany, “Little Americas” were created to separate the soldiers from the German population, and by December 1946, German women were allowed to marry American soldiers and join the American “military family.” This domestication of the “Conquering Heroes,” Willoughby argues, made possible the reassertion of German male authority in gender relations, which was a crucial precondition for the easy acceptance of the American military buildup in Germany in the 1950s. At the same time, the newly “domesticated” army reconciled American public opinion to the extensive military base system that projected US power during the Cold War.

Integrating African Americans into the Cold War military family proved much more daunting given the military's entrenched segregationist views, and Willoughby mercilessly reveals the occupation authorities' racism. While not ignoring the impact of the Korean War in shifting segregationist attitudes within the military, Willoughby also credits the “quiet efforts” of military commanders in Germany after 1947. The rigorous military training and education set in place by the military to better control all of its troops also significantly improved the morale and performance of African American GIs, convincing many a commander that “racial differences in behavior were not immutable” (133). Thus, when integration finally came during the Korean War, Willoughby argues, the American military in Germany was well prepared to implement it.

Scholars of the American military and America's postwar empire will be grateful for Willoughby's thoughtful and novel reading of the occupation years. However, for scholars interested in German history and German-American relations, Willoughby's heavy reliance on secondary sources and his refusal to engage with the rich scholarship of the last two decades will come as a disappointment. Willoughby, an economic historian by training, is the first to acknowledge that he could have consulted more archives and more current historical contributions, but he was convinced that he had the “story right” (xi). Much of the story is right, but not all of Willoughby's conclusions are on target. Making African American GIs part of the “military family” was hardly the easy process described by Willoughby. When integration finally came between 1952 and 1954 it happened largely because the Soviets and East Germans were making the continuing segregation of the American military a battle cry in their Cold War propaganda. Without enormous pressure from the State Department, military commanders in Germany would have stuck to their belief that integration could only come in another one hundred years. The inclusion of German women into the Cold War military family—a crucial component in normalizing German-American relations according to Willoughby—was also not as unproblematic as he suggests. Although the marriage ban was lifted in December 1946, GIs were only allowed to marry German women four months before their end of duty in Germany. This policy was in place until November 1954 and was to ensure that German women could not become members of the American “military family.” Furthermore, despite extensive leisure and educational programs, the GIs hardly became the boy-scout army officials had hoped for. Because the military did not pay travel and housing expenses for military personnel below the rank of E-5, the “domestication” of the military was not as thorough as described by Willoughby. A large proportion of GIs in Germany were young, single and lower ranking grunts and throughout the 1950s, cycles of GI misbehavior troubled the German-American alliance. Rising discontent over the Vietnam War and black GIs' frustrations with the slow pace of the Civil Rights movement in the US brought another wave of GI violence in the 1960s and 1970s.

With this slim volume of just 151 pages, Willoughby makes a convincing argument that the “experience of the occupation army shaped US policy toward Germany and thus changed the parameters of the Cold War” (xi). Anyone interested in how the “disarray” and “venality” (5) of the first two years of the occupation were turned into the celebration of the American century during the Eisenhower years will be well advised to read it.