Stockings and Gum

War is no excuse for abandoning sex. That was the attitude of many folks during World War 2, especially the American boys based in the UK preparing for D-Day. And who can blame them? The 1.5 million guys who arrived between July 1943 and June 1944 knew they were training to take back Europe from the Nazis, and it wasn't likely to be fun.

Knowing you might be dead in a few months is a decent spur to taking advantage of the moment, I'd say.

The poor old Brits had been deprived of much since 1939. Relying on convoys of goods from North America, their food and fuel were rationed and luxuries were like gold - expensive and rare. So when the robust lads began arriving from Stateside in 1942, they were like people from another world.

Time Magazine described it thus:

The Americans, bursting into an England gone drab and gray and plagued with shortages of everything after four years of war, were nothing if not jaunty. Residents of Somerset still remember G.I.s tossing chocolate bars and gum out of passing trucks to goggle-eyed children. According to a popular gag, so much American chewing gum had been tossed in the fountains of London's Trafalgar Square that the pigeons there were laying rubber eggs.

"Hi ya, cutie" was the universal greeting called out to females from 15 to 50. "They took all the girls," mutters one British war veteran who on the whole liked the Americans. And indeed the walls outside American barracks were lined every night with panting couples twined in a last embrace before bed check. William D. Kendall, who represented the town of Grantham, complained in Parliament that "it is unfit for a woman to walk unescorted" there because of the "unconcealed immorality" of the G.I.s. Others of course had a different opinion; some 60,000 British women eventually became American war brides. [link]


Another view:

Conditions were harsh in Britain in the early 1940s and there was also an undercurrent of unease...especially amongst British men, who resented the attraction of GIs, with their ready supply of nylons and cigarettes, amongst British women. The artist Beryl Cook, who was a young woman at the time confirmed this in an interview to the BBC in the late 1970s. I can't find the transcript of the interview, but from memory it was words to the effect of, 'food was scarce, but we supplemented our income by a little impromptu whoring with the GIs - we all did it'. Many of these liaisons were love matches rather than merely commercial transactions though, as the thousands of marriages between US servicemen and British women (the GI brides) is evidence of. [link]

Hi ya, cutie. No wonder they were referred to as "Oversexed, overpaid and over here."

Try getting laid with a pair of stockings and a packet of Marlboro Lights today.