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.
Allied servicemen married many women in other countries where they were stationed at the end of the war, including the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Italy, 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. An estimated 70,000 G.I. war brides left the United Kingdom, 50,000 from Japan, 15,500 from Australia, 14,000-20,000 from Germany, and 1,500 from New Zealand, between the years 1942 and 1952.
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. British women were attracted to American soldiers because they had relatively high incomes, and were perceived as friendly.
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. This led to widespread defiance of the law by American servicemen, as well as increased tolerance for interracial couples in the United States, and ultimately the repeal of the highly restrictive 1924 Immigration Act in 1952.
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.
War brides in World War II
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 on January 26, 1946, and arrived in the U.S. on February 4, 1946. 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. 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.
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. 75% of the marriages involved White American soldiers and Japanese brides. Marriages to Asian women initially faced legal obstacles due to pre-existing laws against interracial marriage. However, the determination of American servicemen to marry Japanese women resulted in widespread defiance of the law. 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. In 1947, the War Brides Act was amended to give citizenship to the children of American servicemen regardless of race or ethnicity. 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.
According to journalist Craft Young, a daughter of a Japanese war bride, an estimated 50,000 Japanese war brides migrated to the United States.
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. 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.
United Kingdom
Some war brides came from Australia to Britain aboard HMS Victorious following World War II. Roughly 70,000 war brides left Britain for America during the 1940s.
Australia
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.
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.
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. 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. Many of those war brides emigrated to Canada beginning in 1944 and peaking in 1946. 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: and .
The Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 has exhibits and collections dedicated to war brides. There is a National Historic Site marker located at Pier 21, as well.
Italy
During the campaign of 1943–1945, there were more than 10,000 marriages between Italian women and American soldiers.
From relationships between Italian women and African American soldiers, "mulattini" were born; many of those children were abandoned in orphanages, because interracial marriage was then not legal in many US states.
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). 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.
Vietnam
Some Japanese soldiers married Vietnamese women like Nguyễn Thị Xuân 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. 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. Japanese use of Malayan and Vietnamese women as comfort women was corroborated by testimonies. 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. 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.
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.
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.
Korean War
6,423 Korean women married U.S. military personnel as war brides during and immediately after the Korean War.
Vietnam War
8,040 Vietnamese women came to the U.S. as war brides between 1964 and 1975.
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. There have been several well-publicized cases of American soldiers marrying Iraqi women.
Notes
References
See also
War Brides Act
Eswyn Lyster (1923–2009), a British-born Canadian author best known for writing extensively on the Canadian war bride experience
War children
Brides of ISIL
GI Brides, a narrative non-fiction book about British war brides of World War II
War Brides, a 1916 silent film by Herbert Brenon and starring Alla Nazimova
I Was a Male War Bride, a screwball comedy film featuring Cary Grant as a male war bride
Roger Charlier (1921–2018), inspiration for the film
Japanese War Bride, a 1952 film by King Vidor featuring Shirley Yamaguchi and Don Taylor
Madame Butterfly, a 1904 opera by Giacomo Puccini about a Japanese child bride who is abandoned by her husband, a US Navy lieutenant, redone in 1989 as Miss Saigon
External links
"American War Bride Experience; Fact, Stories about American War Brides"; American War World II GI Brides. website
Luxembourg War Brides; "The Meeting of Anni Adams: The Butterfly of Luxembourg"; American War Brides. website
Australian War Brides website
Canadian War Brides of WW II website
Newfoundland & Labrador War Brides website
Canadian War Brides from Veterans' Affairs Canada website
CBC Digital Archives – Love and War: Canadian War Brides
Yankee boys, Kiwi girls history webpage
Marriages from Problems of the 2NZEF (eText of Official History of New Zealand in WW II)
New Zealand servicemen and their war brides, 1946 (photo)
Eswyn Lyster's Canadian War Bride page – the book "Most Excellent Citizens"
War brides of World War II reunion 2007
Canadian War Brides of the First World War website
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