The Yanks came with chocolate and left with British brides
The joke in Britain 40 years ago was that only the thousands of stubby little barrage balloons, tugging at their cables above every spot that might offer a target to low-flying German planes, kept the island from sinking into the sea under the weight of men and machines massing for Dday. London was a kaleidoscope of uniforms: British, Commonwealth, French, Norwegian, Belgian, Czech, Dutch, Polish and, of course, American. So many U.S. officers worked around Grosvenor Square that G.I.s walking through the area kept their arms raised in semipermanent salute. In the southern counties, near the coast from which the armada would sail, military convoys clogged the crooked lanes of the countryside; entire fields disappeared under swarms of tanks and trucks and piles of ammunition and fuel.
Everybody was trying to figure out what to make of the roughly 1.5 million Americans who poured into England between July 1943 and Dday, introducing many Britons to such exotica as jitterbugging, Jeeps and even pitchers' mounds. When a mound was installed in Wembley Stadium for a baseball game between two U.S. service teams in early June 1944, the London Times informed puzzled readers that "its use adds to the speed of throw." Despite their far-reaching empire, many Britons, particularly in the smaller towns, had never seen a black man until the G.I.s arrived.
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.
Grouse though they did about the G.I.s being "overpaid, oversexed and over here," most Britons found the Americans to be warmhearted and valiant Allies. Thousands of English families opened their homes to American servicemen, who responded with equal generosity. Glen Brimblecombe of Ilsington in Devon recalls that as a child "I wanted a bicycle for Christmas. Very selfish, I know now, for Mum could not afford it. Mac, an American sailor from Stover Camp, whom I can still remember, appeared on Christmas morning with a brand-new Elswick bicycle."