A 2006 essay for The Erotic Review about a mini-sexual revolution on the Home Front

1942 — How America Liberated Britain

“There is a generation of grey-haired grandmothers out there who know something we don’t: that sexual liberation began in the 1940s and has been flourishing ever since.” Christopher Hudson

Earlier this year [2006], Hudson wrote an article for The Sunday Times suggesting that before the first pill, before Kinsey’s first report, before the baby boom first twinkled in Western eyes, the 1.5m American GIs posted to Britain, the so-called ‘friendly invasion’, were the catalyst of perhaps the most significant moral development of modern times: the sexual revolution.

It is certainly true that these American ‘invaders’ had a friendlier effect than their current counterparts in the Middle East. They were defined not by destruction, but by creation: of the 5.3 million British infants delivered between 1939 and 1945, over a third were illegitimate. The proverbial math is not difficult to work out. In fact, for obvious reasons, this is a conservative figure. And it is not the only evidence which supports Hudson’s theory. As one girl recalled, ‘Our own servicemen were set aside for the Americans, who appeared more glamorous in every way.’ The battle for hearts, minds and pantyhose was a resounding victory.

This is now a matter of public record. The recent declassification of a cache of documents from the National Archives in Kew revealed the astonishing scale of the phenomenon and the corresponding horror at Whitehall. By 1943, cases of VD among US GIs in Britain tripled to 60 per 1,000 — six times the level of home-based troops. John Costello records, Love, Sex and War: Changing Values, 1939–45 (William Collins, London, 1985) that the number of adultery petitions filed after 1942 rose by a hundred per cent each year above the 1939–42 average. 1945 saw an unprecedented eightfold jump in the number of husbands suing for divorce on the grounds of adultery. Two out of every three petitions were being filed by men, whereas female petitions had been in the majority until 1940. The poor British tommy had experienced the first of many examples of that peculiarly American habit: friendly-fire.

This is not to be blamed on anyone in particular. That American troops busied themselves knocking-up desperately vulnerable girls all over London may not look great. Less shock and awe, more shockingly awful. It doubtless caused considerable upheaval, grief and bitterness. So common was it for a British serviceman overseas to receive a message asking for separation that a new term was invented: the ‘Dear John letter’ was almost as dreaded as a V2 bomb. But let’s remind ourselves of the circumstances. The terrible periods of absence. The proximity of death. The inherent attractions of the untried, the unfamiliar. Like the first glimpse of contraband after rationing.

To the Brits, Americans carried associations with the sexiest industry in the world: Hollywood. Casablanca, itself a story about what Freud called ‘wartime aphrodisia’, was released in 1942. The GIs were resplendent in uniform, with slicked-back hair. They tugged rakishly on Lucky Strikes and carried more money in wages than a British serviceman could dream of. The GIs response to the famous British tag (‘overpaid, oversexed and over here’) was that the Brits were conversely ‘underpaid, undersexed and under Eisenhower’. The alpha male retort: wittier, more aggressive, and sadly for the beleaguered British troops, true. An emergency Home Office study commissioned that year put it as follows:

“To girls brought up on the cinema, who copied the dress, hairstyles, and manners of Hollywood stars, the sudden influx of Americans, speaking like the films, who actually lived in the magic country and who had plenty of money, at once went to the girl’s heads. The American attitude to women, their proneness to spoil a girl, to build up, exaggerate, talk big, and to act with generosity and flamboyance, helped to make them the most attractive boyfriends. In addition, they ‘picked-up’ girls easily, and even a comparatively plain and unattractive girl stood a chance.”

Whilst the Brits picked their way through north-African minefields, the Americans picked their way through the ‘Piccadilly Warriors’ or ‘match girls’, so-called because, waiting in the dark, they would attract the attention of drunken GIs on Piccadilly Circus by striking a match to illuminate her nylon-stocking-clad ankles. For £3 (a huge sum in 1942) they would provide sex standing against a darkened wall (colloquially a ‘wall job’ or a ‘knee trembler’). The myth of the time was that standing would reduce the chance of conception. Under a martial bill entitled Paragraph 11, servicewomen who got pregnant were demobbed and could not re-enlist. This became a codeword for illicit fumblings, so that any British girl could shout “Paragraph 11!” outside a GI billet and forthwith any willing American soldier would oblige. Such were the wartime mores of 1942, a full two decades before the sexual revolution. In Mayfair, where the officers relaxed, affairs were conducted with a little more discretion, but the result was similar. As the joke ran, “Heard about the new utility knickers? One Yank and they’re off.”

Coming after the fear and austerity of the Blitz years, the invading Yanks were, as Hudson describes, irresistible:

“GIs had glamour and style; they were like a burst of colour in a black-and- white film. And they had money, plenty of it. At a time when a smallish slab of butter had to last British households a month, they dispensed presents with instant sex appeal: chocolates, nylon stockings, cigarettes, scented soap and luxury foods from their military stores. Above all, they dispensed themselves.”

Joan Wyndham, described by the Scotland on Sunday as ‘a latter-day Pepys in camiknickers,’ wrote that the erotic possibilities of hiding from bombs all night with drunken overseas servicemen made the whole war rather fun. The GIs didn’t mind either. Costello notes that one Jewish chaplain, puzzled to see so many of his men wearing their greatcoats in Birmingham in June, was shocked to discover that they were wrapped around girls during alfresco couplings in parks and side-streets: ‘There is absolutely no end to the vulgar business of soldiers making love — or should I say lust — in public places; many cases are reported of the immoral act of intercourse going on in view of the public.’ Chaplain Frith confided to his Washington superiors in 1942 that ‘the soldiers confessed to me, in a general way, that the reason they had thrown away all propriety was that they were away from home, where no-one knew them, and no-one seemed to interfere to prohibit their freedom of action.’ British bobbies could be relied upon to turn a blind eye to in the dark sanctuary of a convenient telephone box; US military police were more concerned with rowdy GIs. Such was the indifference that it was not unusual for London bombsites to be used as trysts. There were bigger threats to national morale.

Indeed, in spite of the emotional trauma inflicted on British men posted abroad, the inevitable rise in back-street terminations and the spike in VD, the true bedfellows of 1942, love and war, brought some societal benefits. For a generation whose sex education was delivered using diagrams of primroses, the new explosion of activity that came with the friendly invasion eroded oppressive Victorian taboos on discussing sex as much as it eroded morality. In any case, Americans were often surprised by British sexual equanimity. As one GI recalled of his mistress: ‘one day I caught her crying and she let me read the letter from her husband. In it he said he was having a good time with the opposite sex and she should do likewise.’ Britain was forced to accept for the first time responsibilities which the current welfare state is now preoccupied by: single mothers. Female financial independence had occurred almost overnight. The income of Navy Wrens, army servicewomen (the ATS) and RAF servicewomen (Waaf) was supplemented by money sent by sweethearts overseas. They were allowed to become almost predatory, precursors of modern independent women. Intriguingly, this lead to a further, quite unprecedented benefit - racial integration impossible in the States became a reality in the UK. Albeit usually behind the blackout curtains, black GIs were seduced by British women. Black regiments were the most active with ninety-six per cent of troops admitting to intercourse, compared to eighty-two per cent of white soldiers. A NAAFI counter lady explained, ‘Candidly, I’d rather serve a regiment of the dusky lads than a couple of whites.’ Innuendo aside, it seems she did not appreciate that the politeness of most black troops was the result of generations of subservience to the white population of the United States. However, ‘Some British women appear to find a peculiar fascination in associating with men of colour,’ noted a Home Office circular in 1943. Barbara Cartland wrote from her experience as a WAAF moral welfare adviser:

“It was the white women who ran after the black troops, not vice versa. Approximately one thousand five hundred coloured babies were born in Britain during the war, but I am prepared to bet that if the truth were known it would prove in nearly every case the woman’s fault. Women would queue outside the camps, they would not be turned away, they would come down from London by train, and they defeated the Military Police by sheer numbers”.

This would have been unconscionable in the US: Britain had inadvertently stolen a march on their allies in the battle for race relations. Of course, the history of racial integration in this country is complicated and is still being written. Of course, the professional and social emancipation of women was temporary. Many children were soon to be born into uncertain futures. But the intense passions roused by these exotic outsiders in 1942 gave the country a collective, illicit thrill it needed at a time when nothing was certain but the all-pervading, creeping fear of doom. The last ripples of this thrill still wash over us today.