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Oversexed, Overpaid And Over Here

Wolves In Wolves' Clothing

The local Belfast girls were waiting for the new arrivals with open arms. The welcome was to be repeated over the next two years as a tidal wave of GIs landed to discover that while the climate might be damp and the sanitation primitive – 'honey buckets', as the GIs dubbed them, were still in use in some British Army camps – the native female population was not only friendly, but willing.

The reputation of the 'Yanks' was encouraged by wild press reports and letters from reactionary matrons like the one who expressed outrage that 'girls had been able to see films that only have the effect of arousing in them instincts that ought to be unknown to them for many years.'

It was not just the physical exuberance of the smartly turned-out American servicemen that provoked suspicion and hostility in the native male population. It was also a question of hard cash. British soldiers found themselves at a huge financial disadvantage when it came to competing to entertain their own womenfolk. Even a lowly American private with his $3000 (£750) average annual pay-cheque was a big spender by comparison with less than £100 pounds a year received by his British counterpart.

American servicemen deserved their reputation of being 'wolves in wolves' clothing' and were not always successful when it came to making passes. One ATS corporal recalled the evening she and two companions were trudging in pouring rain back to their barracks along a lonely road:

Along came a jeep with four Yanks in it. They stopped and offered us a ride. Although there were three of us, we just didn't trust them and turned the offer down. When I tell you that we had to walk the whole five miles back to camp, and preferred this to the lift, you will appreciate just how strongly we felt. I knew quite a few city girls who were loved and left – literally holding the baby.

The refusal of many predatory American soldiers to take 'No!' for an answer from a pretty girl led to frequent complaints of sexual molestation. According to Mrs Anne F., the mothers on a Birmingham housing estate near a US Army base protested that they had to use physical force to fend off the GIs. She soon developed her own technique of repulsing unwanted advances:

Almost every evening I, among others, would hear a knock on the front door and on opening it would find a GI who stated that a Greg So-and-So had sent him. When one flatly denied knowing his friend, he would calmly say, 'Come on, baby. I know your husband is away in the forces.' One would have to slam the door in their faces to keep them out. I remember one afternoon and evening the local camp was invaded by teenage girls and women from miles around. There were hundreds of them looking for Yanks. Next day the woods behind our estate were put 'out of bounds' to the GIs. But the things we found in our front gardens were unbelievable! Some of the women had a 'good time' with Americans, others just did their washing for them, while others completely ignored them. The pubs made a packet out of them and the kids went a bundle on them as they were very generous with chocolate and sweets.

For all their generosity, the GIs soon acquired a reputation for resorting to a frontal assault when it came to getting the 'cute piece of ass' they were always chasing. It was not unusual for 'Snowdrops', as the US military police were known from their distinctive white helmets, to be summoned to lift a siege at rural hostels which housed Land Girls. In London the first assault was more likely to be made by the freelance prostitutes known as 'Piccadilly Warriors'. These most brazen of wartime British 'tarts' swarmed around the entrance to the Rainbow Club that was opened for Americans in 1942 in the old Del Monico's on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue. The sign over the reception desk indicated 'New York – 3271 miles', but the club promised a taste of home with its lanterns, juke boxes, and pool-tables. 'Rainbow Corner' became a magnet not only for homesick GIs in the London blackout, but also for the regiments of streetwalkers whose opening gambit, 'Hello Yank, looking for a good time?' became a much parodied wartime joke.

Piccadilly was wartime London for American servicemen. Former Staff Sergeant Robert Arib recalled the standing joke in the Rainbow Club that it was 'suicide' for a GI to go out into the blacked-out streets without his buddy:

The girls were there – everywhere. They walked along Shaftesbury Avenue and past Rainbow Corner, pausing only when there was no policeman watching. Down at the Lyons Corner House on Coventry Street they came up to soldiers waiting in doorways and whispered the age-old questions. At the underground entrance they were thickest, and as the evening grew dark, they shone torches on their ankles as they walked and bumped into the soldiers murmuring, 'Hello Yank', 'Hello Soldier', 'Hello Dearie!' Around the dark estuaries of the Circus the more elegantly clad of them would stand quietly and wait – expensive and aloof. No privates or corporals for these haughty demoiselles. They had furs and silks to pay for.

The Trouble With Yanks

A popular British saying during that time about American GIs was "The trouble with the Yanks is they're overpaid, oversexed and over here." Sometimes the British added "overfed" and "overbearing." It was popularized by Tommy Trinder (1909-1989), a well-known and well-liked English comedian. His version of the line which, although he gave it wide circulation was probably coined by someone else, was "overpaid, overfed, oversexed and over here". There was a good humoured banter between the GIs that were stationed in Britain prior to and during WWII and the British citizenry. The GIs had a come-back - calling the Brits, "underpaid, undersexed and under Eisenhower".

Many locals resented the GIs, who were paid three to four times as much as their equivalents in the British forces. They also were envious of the goods and products the airmen bought in the PX and the presents they showered on young women. These items, such as chocolates, nylons and scented soaps, were either rationed or unobtainable on the British economy. The possibilities of culture clash were obvious.

The U.S. War Department set out to do what it could. It produced Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain 1942, some 7,000 words, recently reprinted by Oxford University's Bodleian Library in a pocket-sized edition with an introduction remarking that at the time of original publication, The Times of London compared the pamphlet with the works of Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who in their time also tried to interpret Britain for an American readership. Sixty-five years on, we read:

You will be Britain's guest.... Don't refer to the First World War by saying America came over and won it.... Don't play into Hitler's hands by mentioning war debts. You will naturally be interested in getting to know your opposite number, the British soldier, the 'Tommy' you have heard and read about. You can understand that two actions on your part will slow up this friendship - swiping his girl and not appreciating what his army has been up against. Yes, and rubbing it in that you are better paid than he is.

Never criticize the King or Queen.... Britain's money is in pound, shilling, and pence.... all your arguments that the American decimal system is better won't convince them.... Britons are often more reserved.... it doesn't mean they are being haughty and unfriendly. The British have phrases and colloquialisms that may seem funny to you. You can make just as many boners in their eyes. Don't say `bloody' in mixed company, don't say `bum.'

Don't be a show off. Look, listen and learn before you start telling the British how much better we do things.... The British `Tommy' is apt to be specially touchy about the difference in his wages and yours.... Don't rub it in. Play fair with him.... Avoid swiping his girl.

The British don't know how to make a good cup of coffee. You don't know how to make a good cup of tea. It's an even swap.... We have so much in common-our language, laws, ideals of religious freedom.... Most people get used to the English climate eventually. ... If invited for a meal, go easy. It may be the family's rations for a whole week.

Many GIs, however, didn't heed this advice, wedding about 60,000 British women during the war years. "I heard there was some resentment, but I never saw it once," said Alfred Swaine, a former RAF personnel carrier driver. "I admired and loved them-the poor chaps. I remember my first look at them. A bobby shouted at me to pull my lorry over to the side of the road and stop. I soon found out why: a great convoy of big drab army lorries came snorting down the lane, like some great herd of ferocious rhinos, on the wrong side of the road. I thought, 'Thank God, the Yanks have come.' It was a thrill to catch a glimpse of our salvation."

Conditions were harsh in Britain in the early 1940s and there was also an undercurrent of unease that was conveyed by the phrase, 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. The line was also used in Australia, in much the same context.

Strangely, since there can't have been anyone over the age of ten in Britain at the end of the war who wasn't familiar with the phrase, it appears very seldom in print. It must have been recorded earlier, but the earliest reference found is in a US newspaper - The Morgantown Post, 1958, in an article by Holmes Alexander:

The British regarded us then as well-meaning but blundering intercessors whom they rather preferred to have on their island than the Jerries. We were, in the well-known phrase, 'overpaid, oversexed and over here', and we were in British eyes overdecorated, overstaffed, overmaintenanced and overbearing.

THERE WERE THREE DEADLY SERIOUS CRIMES A serviceman could commit, said the United States Army Air Corps commander Carl ("Tooey") Spaatz; "Murder, rape, and interference with Anglo-American relations. The first two might conceivably be pardoned, but the third one, never." Seemingly Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower agreed. When he learned that two different-nationality officers of his integrated staff had exchanged harsh words, he sent the American one home. "He only called me a son of a bitch, sir," the second party to the dispute told Eisenhower. "I am informed that he called you a British son of a bitch. That is quite different. My ruling stands."

On the subject of British-American relations, Eisenhower was, he said, a "fanatic." "Every American soldier coming to Britain," he remembered, "was almost certain to consider himself a privileged crusader, sent there to help Britain out of a hole. He would expect to be treated as such." The British view was that their country had held the fort against Hitler in the name of civilization's values while America was booming on the Empire's poured-out financial resources.

Now the Yanks had come, arriving to a place made by the war-pinched, straitened, anxious, grim and grimy, and dark and chilly for lack of fuel. Food was scarce. Clothing was unobtainable. King George VI ordered the painting of a line five inches from the bottom of Buckingham Palace bathtubs to show the level above which lukewarm water must not rise.

Time proved the generals' fears groundless. There was very little unpleasantness. With the passage of time nothing so evoked to the British the gone days and departed GIs as the playing of the golden oldies "Moonlight Serenade" and "Stardust," even as London hotels came to charge for a night what Tommy got for a year and the West End restaurants served Thai, Japanese, Greek, and Indian delicacies instead of the war's mushy Brussels sprouts and boiled potatoes-while back in their own country those who had read Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain 1942 turned gray and then white and now are passing on.

The friendly invasion of American forces was the first mass coming together of the ordinary American and the ordinary Briton. Before that time, the only people who could afford transatlantic travel were the well-to-do. "Both countrymen had preconceived ideas about each other, which were mostly based on what Hollywood produced," Freeman said. "Americans were brash, big talkers and ill-mannered. Brits were seen as reserved, aloof and cold. These generalizations proved to be exaggerations once friendships developed. Now, the bond between the two countries is as strong as ever, as witnessed by the [Persian] Gulf War. Britain and the United States are inseparable allies, and the bond of goodwill that was established during World War II has endured with undiminished strength."

: The American GI in World War II Britain. Starting in January, 1942, American soldiers, sailors, and airmen began arriving in Britain. By 1944, the Americans numbered 1.5 million. This book examines how the Americans and British coexisted as the Americans complained about everything in Britain and the British complained about the Americans.

- By Juliet Gardiner

Thanks for the Memories: Love, Sex, and World War II Thanks for the Memories vividly portrays the disruptive impact of World War II on relations between men and women, not only in the well documented arena of labor force participation but also in the realms of sex, love, and marriage. The wartime generation, known for its conservative embrace of traditional domesticity in the 1950s, did so after having broken all the rules. Jane Mersky Leder makes a persuasive case that the women's movement in the late 1960s was an aftershock of these seismic shifts whose story, until now, has not been told. - Sara M. Evans University of Minnesota author of Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America

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