You'll all know that us Limeys reckonned the Yanks were "over paid, over sexed and over here" but what did the Americans think of the UK ?
Do any of our Americans members have relatives who served over here?
If so what did they say about good old Blighty?

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I had an Uncle who went to England and he did not like the beer or the idea of it being served warm. Over here it is served ice cold.

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Work Harder ! Millions on welfare are depending on you.

All the family I had the pleasure of talking with served in the PTO. One could talk about the Aussies, as he was on New Guinea. He spoke favorably of them there, but not in Australia itself, as ne never went there and met the citizenry.

Not answering your question as you asked it, Owen, I have read several first person accounts of GIs stationed in the Isles and all pretty much had favorable impressions of the land. Some had problems similar to what you would expected out of any large group of people anywhere. The one thing that sticks out from several of the men was the difficulty in making change.

Maybe some of the others can be more informative.

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Best Regards,
JW

Not relatives, obviously - but the 8th Air Force veterans I've met unanimously denounced the beer and the weather !

But, even allowing for the fact that may have been being polite, but I did get the impression that they were charmed by the local population, respected the fact that the UK had been fighting since 1939, and were quite shocked by the shortages of food and other essentials ( such as ice-cream ! ) being suffered by the civilians.

I don't know about other areas ( I believe that relations with the US Army were strained before D-Day in other parts of England ) but the 8th forged long-lasting links of friendship with East Anglia.

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"Stand by to pull me out of the seat if I get hit" - Guy Gibson

Last time I was in the Uk I talked to a nice old lady who said she remembered being charmed by the U.S. uniforms at the time. She felt sorry for the Tommies, as most Americans used their "exotic" attraction effect to which was to be added that they gave the girls food and stockings and all sort of things that was rare in England and that the poor Tommies could not afford. As a result there were quite a few tensions between them and each nationality had their own discos, pubs etc... The figure of English girls who maried Americans during or after the war was huge (I forget the exact amount). From an American point of view I remember this veteran telling me how "tiny" he thought England was compared to the huge priairies in the U.S. He also had a feeling of being at home with a "deja vu" impression.

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Discos in the '40s !? I think the correct terminology of the time was 'dance halls' ...

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"Stand by to pull me out of the seat if I get hit" - Guy Gibson

Oops, sorry Martin that was about 35 years too early...

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Read this in the " With Geronimo across Europe " by R. Edward O´Brien:

He mentions that number one song by the US servicemen in England was
" Roll me over Yankee soldier ". Don´t know how much it reflected the US soldiers and their ideas but then again...

Roll Me Over

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Some of my older relatives recall the 'yanks' that were stationed at the U.S. airbase at Burtonwood in Warrington, Cheshire during WW2.

The local kids would shout to the americans "got any gum chum?" and the servicemen would give them a stick of gum each.I'm told that the americans were well liked and were always polite with the local population.

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Regards
John

"It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see" - Winston Churchill

Wonder if anybody has statistics about about the number of weddings between Americans soldiers and English girls. I read about these many years ago, I think there were hundreds of thousands after the 1945 period and many women settled in the U.S. when the boys returned.

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There were a lot of War Brides to the US from other countries during and immediately after World War II. For soldiers from places like Canada - they were in Britain from 1939 to 1944 (some of course served with the British and American troops in North Africa (Operation Torch) and Italy so left Britain in 1942). A long time for opportunities for fraternization. Unlike the way too many of the Hollywood movies, television movies have portrayed them for effect - most of the women were decent girls who worked in offices and factories who met young men who were lonely & far from home and who also seemed rather exotic compared to the boy next door, and they fell in love. While not an American, my father from Western Canada, reaction to Britain was that he enjoyed the people, the opportunities to see places he had only read about, and would probably not have been totally adverse to staying in Britain for awhile after the war if my mother had not been willing to leave everything she had (family & middle class lifestyle) to come to Canada where he had no family & no income!

From: Facts: American War Brides Experience

War brides actually came from over fifty countries. Between 1944 and 1950, 150,000 to 200,000 continental European women married U.S. service men and 50,000 to 100,000 couples were married in the Far East.

During the war over 30,000 British War Brides alone were transported to the U.S.
Between 1944 and 1950, 150,000 to 100,000 couples were married in the Far East. The first marriage took place in 1942 in Great Britain and Australia and ended in 1952 with Japanese War Brides.


From a presentation I made on Canadian War Brides (my mother was one although she always hated the term):


Between 1942 and 1948:
Ø43,454 War Brides and their 20,997 children were brought to Canada from GB & Europe
ØMost were British

From Europe by end of 1946:
Ø1,886 Dutch, 649 Belgian, 100 French, 6 German, 7 Danish, and 26 Italian Dependents

Michelle

Oops - another site with lots of information both for Canada and other places is Canadian War Brides of World War Two, the authoritative website containing accurate reliable information on the history of the Canadian War Brides

Michelle