How did American soldiers react to European castles during WW2?

It's worth mentioning that one of the big surprises for GI's was not Europe's wealth, but its poverty. This was particularly striking in Normandy, which formed the first, and for many Americans, most important impression of life in Europe. It didn't help that Normandy had been bombed extensively. Allied bombs and naval shells had reduced much of the coast to ruins, and three thousand Normans died in the first three days of the landings, roughly equal to the number of Allied soldiers killed in action during that period. But what shocked Americans more were the living conditions accepted as normal in rural, rustic Normandy.

Americans were not impressed by Norman buildings. "You really should see some of these places these people over here have as homes," wrote Charles Taylor home to his wife. "Most of them are made of mud or cement, rock with shale roofs or straw thatched roofs." Other GIs had a similar impression that Norman housing was troglodytic, like Jan Giles, who felt that "the buildings, what's left of them, look like they'd been here since time began."

And that went for castles in Normandy, too, which US troops found old in a distinctly unpleasant way. Stars and Stripes commented that "life in an old chateau in France sounds romantic but the American soldiers who have tried it say they prefer a cottage on Kalamzoo." The article went on to say that you had to be "either a wizard or a lizard" to enjoy staying in "these old hundred-room moss collectors" where "History - with a capital 'H' - crawled out of the woodwork at you." It went on: "The sanitation system would interest the Society of Antiquarian Plumbers." And as for the aristocrat who owned the castle, he was a "seedy old character with a stained yellow mustache, smoking a cigarette by some rose bushes."

In addition to their dislike for old huts and castles, American troops found rural French ways of life out-of-date, at best. "They were years behind us in their farming, some even used oxen," wrote one GI. A Red Cross nurse found women's life similarly "behind the times - the women still wash clothes in little streams and pound the garments with stones; the cows and pigs and chickens still live in the same building as the family." The absence of indoor or outdoor plumbing befuddled Americans more than anything else, as did Norman attitudes towards privacy. "People who build pissoirs in the open on the streets are people I don't even pretend to understand," penned the horrified Giles.

In general, these experiences led Americans to stereotype not just the Normans, but the French in general as "dirty" and "primitive." GIs came to believe that French men were pigs and French women were "easy," beliefs that never relented even after the US army advanced beyond Normandy into more urban, up-to-date areas. As the historian Mary Louise Roberts concludes these prejudices came to characterize US-French relations during the liberation, with Americans viewing France as an archaic and immoral society that needed to be managed by the modern and upright US.

Of course, that only answers your question about castles in regards to Normandy, but I hope it gives a sense of the power relations that led US troops in Europe to be less than impressed with the people and places that they liberated. For British troops the differences were less striking, but many of them also felt that experiences abroad, especially in Italy, confirmed that they had it much better at home (and therefore were better) than most Europeans.

Sources:

Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013).

Alan Allport, Browned Off and Bloody-Minded: The British Soldier Goes to War 1939-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).