War bride

War brides are women who married military personnel from other countries in times of war or during military occupations, a practice that occurred in great frequency during World War I and World War II.

For other uses, see War bride (disambiguation).
Australian Flying Officer reunites in Sydney with Canadian bride and daughter in 1945.

Allied servicemen married many women in other countries where they were stationed at the end of the war, including the United Kingdom, Japan,[1] France, Italy,[2] Greece, Luxembourg, the Philippines, China, and the Soviet Union. Similar marriages also occurred in Korea and Vietnam with the later wars in those countries involving U.S. troops and other anti-communist soldiers.

100,000 women from East Asia were married to American servicemen.[3] An estimated 70,000 G.I. war brides left the United Kingdom,[4][5] 50,000 from Japan, 15,500 from Australia,[6] 14,000-20,000 from Germany,[7] and 1,500 from New Zealand, between the years 1942 and 1952.[3]

There were various factors contributing to the intermarriages between foreign servicemen and native women. After World War II, many women in Japan came to admire the personal attributes and status of American soldiers, while there was also mutual attraction to Japanese women among American servicemen.[8][9] British women were attracted to American soldiers because they had relatively high incomes, and were perceived as friendly.[5]

Marriage to Asian war brides had a significant impact on United States immigration law, as well as the public perception of interracial couples. The massive migration of Asian wives to the United States was challenged by pre-existing laws against interracial marriage, however there was widespread public sympathy for such couples, due to the high reputation of Japanese immigrant brides in the United States.[10] This led to widespread defiance of the law by American servicemen, as well as increased tolerance for interracial couples in the United States,[11] and ultimately the repeal of the highly restrictive 1924 Immigration Act in 1952.[12]

Philippine–American War

After the Philippine–American War, some Filipina women married U.S. servicemen. Those Filipinas were already U.S. nationals and so when they immigrated to the U.S., their legal status was made significantly different from that of previous Asian immigrants to the U.S.[13]

War brides in World War II
A US serviceman and a British girl in Bournemouth, England, 1941.

United States

During and immediately after World War II, more than 60,000 U.S. servicemen married women overseas and they were promised that their wives and children would receive free passage to the U.S. The U.S. Army's Operation War Bride, which eventually transported an estimated 70,000 women and children, began in Britain in early 1946. The press dubbed it Operation Diaper Run. The first group of war brides (452 British women and their 173 children, and one bridegroom) left Southampton harbor on SS Argentina on January 26, 1946, and arrived in the U.S. on February 4, 1946.[14] According to British Post-War Migration, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service reported 37,553 war brides from the British Isles took advantage of the War Brides Act of 1945 to emigrate to the United States, along with 59 war bridegrooms.[15] Over the years, an estimated 300,000 foreign war brides moved to the United States following the passage of the War Brides Act and its subsequent amendments, of which 51,747 were Filipinas.[16]

Effect of Asian immigrant brides on United States immigration laws

Around 50,000 United States servicemen married Japanese wives at the end of World War 2 and during the occupation period.[1] 75% of the marriages involved White American soldiers and Japanese brides.[11] Marriages to Asian women initially faced legal obstacles due to pre-existing laws against interracial marriage.[11] However, the determination of American servicemen to marry Japanese women resulted in widespread defiance of the law.[11] The positive reception of Japanese war brides generated sympathy from the general public about the difficulties faced by interracial couples, and promoted increased tolerance for interracial couples.[10] In 1947, the War Brides Act was amended to give citizenship to the children of American servicemen regardless of race or ethnicity.[17] Ultimately the effort to normalize interracial marriages to Japanese women lead to the passage of the McGarran-Walter act, which repealed the Immigration Act of 1924, thereby loosening restrictions on immigration and citizenship requirements for non-Northwestern European immigrants.[12]

According to journalist Craft Young, a daughter of a Japanese war bride, an estimated 50,000 Japanese war brides migrated to the United States.[1]

Australia

Robyn Arrowsmith, a historian who spent nine years researching Australia's war brides, said that between 12,000 and 15,000 Australian women had married visiting U.S. servicemen and moved to the U.S. with their husbands.[18] Significantly, an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 Newfoundland women married American servicemen during the time of Ernest Harmon Air Force Base's existence (1941–1966), in which tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen arrived to defend the island and North America from Nazi Germany during World War II and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. So many of those war brides settled in the U.S. that in 1966, the Newfoundland government created a tourism campaign specifically tailored to provide opportunities for them and their families to reunite.[19]

United Kingdom
The Scots who emigrated as war brides were celebrated in Bud Neill's Lobey Dosser series by the G.I. Bride character (with her baby Ned), forever trying to hitchhike from the fictional Calton Creek in Arizona back to Partick in Scotland. The statue was erected in Partick station in 2011.[20]

Some war brides came from Australia to Britain aboard HMS Victorious following World War II.[21] Roughly 70,000 war brides left Britain for America during the 1940s.[4]

Australia
English war brides who arrived in Brisbane in October 1945

In 1945 and 1946 several bride trains were run in Australia to transport war brides and their children traveling to or from ships.

In 1948, Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell announced that no Japanese war brides would be allowed to settle in Australia, stating "it would be the grossest act of public indecency to permit any Japanese of either sex to pollute Australia" while relatives of deceased Australian soldiers were alive.[22]

About 650 Japanese war brides migrated to Australia after the ban was lifted in 1952 when the San Francisco Peace Treaty came into force. They had married Australian soldiers involved in the occupation of Japan.[23]

Canada

In Canada, 47,783 British war brides arrived accompanied by some 21,950 children. From 1939, most Canadian soldiers were stationed in Britain, and as such, about 90% of all war brides arriving in Canada were British. Three thousand war brides came from the Netherlands, Belgium, Newfoundland, France, Italy, Ireland, and Scotland.[24] The first marriage between a Canadian serviceman and a British bride was registered at Farnborough Church in the Aldershot area in December 1939, just 43 days after the first Canadian soldiers arrived.[24] Many of those war brides emigrated to Canada beginning in 1944 and peaking in 1946.[25] A special Canadian agency, the Canadian Wives' Bureau was set up by the Canadian Department of Defence to arrange transport and assist war brides in the transition to Canadian life. The majority of Canadian war brides landed at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, most commonly on the following troop and hospital ships: Queen Mary, Lady Nelson, Letitia, Mauretania, Scythia and SS Île de France.[26]

The Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 has exhibits and collections dedicated to war brides.[27] There is a National Historic Site marker located at Pier 21, as well.[28]

Italy

During the campaign of 1943–1945, there were more than 10,000 marriages between Italian women and American soldiers.[2][29]

From relationships between Italian women and African American soldiers, "mulattini" were born; many of those children were abandoned in orphanages,[2] because interracial marriage was then not legal in many US states.[30][31]

Japan

Several thousand Japanese who were sent as colonizers to Manchukuo and Inner Mongolia were left behind in China. Most of the Japanese left behind in China were women, most of whom married Chinese men and became known as "stranded war wives" (zanryu fujin).[32][33] Because they had children fathered by Chinese men, the Japanese women were not allowed to bring their Chinese families back with them to Japan and so most of them stayed. Japanese law allowed only children fathered by Japanese fathers to become Japanese citizens. It was not until 1972 that Sino-Japanese diplomacy was restored, which allowed those survivors the opportunity to visit or emigrate to Japan. Even then, they faced difficulties; many had been missing so long that they had been declared dead at home.[32]

Vietnam

Some Japanese soldiers married Vietnamese women like Nguyễn Thị Xuân[34] and Nguyễn Thị Thu and fathered multiple children with the Vietnamese women who remained behind in Vietnam, and the Japanese soldiers themselves returned to Japan in 1955. The official Vietnamese historical narrative view them as children of rape and prostitution.[35][36] The Japanese forced Vietnamese women to become comfort women and along with Burmese, Indonesian, Thai and Filipina women, and they made up a notable portion of Asian comfort women in general.[37] Japanese use of Malayan and Vietnamese women as comfort women was corroborated by testimonies.[38][39][40][41][42][43][44] There were comfort women stations in areas that make up present-day Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, and South Korea.[45][46] A Korean comfort woman named Kim Ch'un-hui stayed behind in Vietnam and died there when she was 44 in 1963, owning a dairy farm, cafe, U.S. cash, and diamonds worth 200,000 U.S. dollars.[47]

A number of Japanese soldiers stayed behind immediately after the war to stay with their war brides, but in 1954 they were ordered to return to Japan by the Vietnamese government and were "encouraged" to abandon their wives and children.[48]

The now abandoned Vietnamese war brides who had mothered children would be forced to raise them by themselves and often faced harsh criticism for having relations with members of an enemy army that had occupied Vietnam.[48]

Korean War

6,423 Korean women married U.S. military personnel as war brides during and immediately after the Korean War.[49]

Vietnam War

8,040 Vietnamese women came to the U.S. as war brides between 1964 and 1975.[50]

Iraq War

War brides from wars subsequent to Vietnam became less common due to differences in religion and culture, shorter durations of wars, direct orders, and a change in immigration laws. As of 2006, about 1,500 visa requests had been made by US military personnel for Iraqi spouses and fiancées.[51] There have been several well-publicized cases of American soldiers marrying Iraqi women.[52][53]

Notes
  1. Lucy Alexander (October 5, 2014). "Daughters tell stories of 'war brides' despised back home and in the U.S." The Japan Times.
  2. Francesco Conversano; Nené Grignaffini. "Italiani: spose di guerra. Storie d'amore e di emigrazione della seconda guerra mondiale". RAI Storia (in Italian).
  3. "America in WWII magazine: War brides, france, england, russia, weddings, marriages, GIs". Archived from the original on 2008-01-05. Retrieved 2015-05-27.
  4. "British war brides faced own battles during 1940s". Los Angeles Times. 20 October 2014. Retrieved 9 April 2019.
  5. Lyons, J. (2013). America in the British Imagination: 1945 to the Present. EBL-Schweitzer. Palgrave Macmillan US. p. 52. ISBN 978-1-137-37680-0. Retrieved 2023-09-27.
  6. Mitchell, Peter (2007-04-26). "Aussie brides reunite". The Daily Telegraph (Sydney). Archived from the original on December 25, 2007. Retrieved 2008-04-06.
  7. "The Atlantic Times :: Archive". Archived from the original on 25 December 2014. Retrieved 2 February 2015.
  8. Lubin, Alex (July 2009). Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954. Univ. Press of Mississippi. p. 117. ISBN 978-1-60473-247-4.
  9. "From Hiroko to Susie: The untold stories of Japanese war brides". Washington Post. 2016-09-22. Retrieved 2023-09-27.
  10. Kovner, S. (2012). Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Stanford University Press. p. 66. ISBN 978-0-8047-8346-0. Retrieved 2023-09-27.
  11. Zeiger, S. (2010). Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century. NYU Press. p. 182. ISBN 978-0-8147-9725-9. Retrieved 2023-09-27.
  12. Simpson, C.C. (2002). An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture, 1945–1960. New Americanists. Duke University Press. p. 165. ISBN 978-0-8223-8083-2. Retrieved 2023-09-27.
  13. Uma Anand Segal (2002). A Framework for Immigration: Asians in the United States. Columbia University Press. p. 146. ISBN 978-0-231-12082-1.
  14. Miller, Donald L. (2006-10-10). Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany. Simon and Schuster. pp. 518, 519. ISBN 9780743298322.
  15. Isaac, Julius (1954). British Post-War Migration. Cambridge University Press. p. 60.
  16. Michael Lim Ubac (July 2012). "Whatever happened to Filipino war brides in the US". Philippine Daily Inquirer.
  17. Zhao, X.; D, E.J.W.P.P. (2013). Asian Americans [3 volumes]: An Encyclopedia of Social, Cultural, Economic, and Political History [3 volumes]. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 1187. ISBN 978-1-59884-240-1. Retrieved 2023-09-27.
  18. Ellis, Scott (18 April 2010). "Here come the war brides: a love story 65 years on" – via The Sydney Morning Herald.
  19. "Marriage Between Americans and Newfoundlanders". Heritage.nf.ca.
  20. "Home at last! – Corporate Information – Strathclyde Partnership for Transport". SPT. 1 February 2011. Retrieved 20 March 2016.
  21. "Australian Brides In England". Britishpathe.com. Retrieved 14 July 2018.
  22. "Mr Calwell will not allow Japs 'to pollute Australia'". Hobart Mercury. 10 March 1948.
  23. James Jupp, The Australian people: an encyclopedia of the nation, its people and their origins, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p 523.
  24. "About the Canadian War Brides of WWII". Canadianwarbrides.com.
  25. Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: "British War Brides Arrive In Canada (1944)". YouTube.
  26. Raska, Jan. "Major Waves of Immigration through Pier 21: War Brides and Their Children". Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21. Archived from the original on 2016-07-13. Retrieved 2016-07-03.
  27. "War Brides | Pier 21". Pier21.ca. Retrieved 2016-04-02.
  28. "Pier 21 Museum". Pier 21. Retrieved 2008-05-13.
  29. Silvia Cassamagnaghi (26 February 2014). Operazione Spose di guerra: Storie d'amore e di emigrazione (in Italian). Milan: Feltrinelli. p. 319. ISBN 9788858817216.
  30. "1943–1946: spose di guerra, storie d'amore e migrazione". libereta.it. 2014-06-10. Archived from the original on 2016-10-10. Retrieved 2016-10-10.
  31. Giorgio Boatti. "Italia 1945, that's amore. Le spose di guerra oltreoceano". Storiainrete.com. Archived from the original on 2018-08-29. Retrieved 2016-10-10.
  32. Journal, The Asia Pacific. "Left Behind: Japan's Wartime Defeat and the Stranded Women of Manchukuo – The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus". japanfocus.org.
  33. Mackerras 2003, p. 59.
  34. Tran Thi, Minh Ha (24 February 2017). "60 years after Japan army husband fled, Vietnam war bride clings to love". AFP.
  35. "Ben Valentine : Photographing the Forgotten Vietnamese Widows of Japanese WWII Soldiers". 2016-07-20.
  36. Valentine, Ben (July 19, 2016). "Photographing the Forgotten Vietnamese Widows of Japanese WWII Soldiers". Hyperallergic.
  37. Min, Pyong Gap (2021). Korean "Comfort Women": Military Brothels, Brutality, and the Redress Movement. Genocide, Political Violence, Human Rights. Rutgers University Press. ISBN 978-1978814981.
  38. Tanaka, Yuki (2003). Japan's Comfort Women. Routledge. p. 60. ISBN 1134650124.
  39. Lee, Morgan Pōmaika'i [@Mepaynl] (April 29, 2015). "Comfort women..." (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  40. Stetz, Margaret D.; Oh, Bonnie B. C. (12 February 2015). Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II (illustrated ed.). Routledge. p. 126. ISBN 978-1317466253.
  41. Quinones, C. Kenneth (2021). Imperial Japan's Allied Prisoners of War in the South Pacific: Surviving Paradise. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. p. 230. ISBN 978-1527575462.
  42. Min, Pyong Gap (2021). Korean "Comfort Women": Military Brothels, Brutality, and the Redress Movement. Genocide, Political Violence, Human Rights. Rutgers University Press. ISBN 978-1978814981.
  43. Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture. Asian America. Stanford University Press. 2005. p. 209. ISBN 0804751862.
  44. THOMA, PAMELA (2004). "Cultural Autobiography, Testimonial, and Asian American Transnational Feminist Coalition in the "Comfort Women of World War II" Conference". In Vo, Linda Trinh; Sciachitano, Marian (eds.). Asian American Women: The Frontiers Reader (illustrated, reprint ed.). U of Nebraska Press. p. 175. ISBN 0803296274.
  45. Yoon, Bang-Soon L. (2015). "CHAPTER 20 Sexualized Racism, Gender and Nationalism: The Case of Japan's Sexual Enslavement of Korean "Comfort Women"". In Kowner, Rotem; Demel, Walter (eds.). Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Interactions, Nationalism, Gender and Lineage. Brill's Series on Modern East Asia in a Global Historical Perspective (reprint ed.). BRILL. p. 464. ISBN 978-9004292932.
  46. Qiu, Peipei; Su, Zhiliang; Chen, Lifei (2014). Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves. Oxford oral history series (illustrated ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 215. ISBN 978-0199373895.
  47. Soh, C. Sarah (2020). The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan. Worlds of Desire: The Chicago Series on Sexuality, Gender, and Culture. University of Chicago Press. pp. 159, 279. ISBN 978-0226768045.
  48. Ian Harvey (6 March 2017). "Japan's Emperor and Empress Meet With Children Abandoned by Japanese Soldiers After WWII". War History Online (The place for military history news and views). Retrieved 6 September 2022.
  49. Eui-Young Yu and Earl H. Phillips, Korean women in transition: at home and abroad, Center for Korean-American and Korean Studies, California State University, Los Angeles, 1987, p185.
  50. Linda Trinh Võ and Marian Sciachitano, Asian American women: the Frontiers reader, University of Nebraska Press, 2004, p144.
  51. "In love AND WAR". Colorado Gazette. 2006-08-13.
  52. "Two US soldiers defy order, marry Iraqi women". Indian Express. 2003-08-28. Archived from the original on 2011-03-05. Retrieved 2011-02-03.
  53. "Few Battlefield Romances From Iraq". Newsweek. 2007-10-13. Archived from the original on January 19, 2011.

References
  • Lonnie D. Story (March 2004). The Meeting of Anni Adams: The Butterfly of Luxembourg. ISBN 1932124268.
  • Carol Fallows (2002). Love & War: stories of war brides from the Great War to Vietnam. ISBN 1863252673.
  • Keiko Tamura (2003). Michi's memories: the story of a Japanese war bride. ISBN 1740760018.

See also
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