War Brides

British War Brides

U.S. troops began to arrive in the United Kingdom in 1942. While a welcome military presence, American troops faced some social resentment in Great Britain. A popular British saying of the time cast them as “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” (U.S. troops, in turn, dismissed British troops as “undersexed, underpaid, underfed, and under Eisenhower.”)

Still, the American mystique was powerful in that day. In a 2004 Orlando Sentinel article, Mary Weyrauch, a British war bride, recalled, “We thought Americans were always living it up…. In the movies we saw, it looked like all they did was go on holidays and drive around on Saturday night.” Pamela Winfield, author of two books on war brides—and a British war bride herself—said in a 1986 New York Times article, “They were different, and so polite…. And they were so hand some in their uniforms, which fit better than the British boys.”

The mystique was built on more than Hollywood and manners. U.S. troops were also far better off than their British counterparts—earning three times the income, and dining daily on the equivalent of nearly a week's worth of British wartime food rations. Even American soldiers, many of them children of the Depression, could be overwhelmed by the money and food provided by the War Department. This, combined with the notion of U.S. troops as valiant liberators, set the stage for thousands of budding romances. At the end of the war, the number of troops married abroad prompted Congress to pass the War Brides Act in December 1945, to expedite the entry of new brides to the United States.

Beginning in 1946, 70,000 British war brides set sail for the United States aboard U.S. naval ships and luxury ocean liners, such as the Queen Mary, which had been converted for military use. These 70,000 comprised the largest group of immigrants—male or female, from any single country—of the 1940s.

...