Hattip to Don the Kiwi for reminding me of this anniversary. Seventy years ago on June 12, 1942 the Marines landed in New Zealand. They were the vanguard of some 20,000 Marines who would train in New Zealand before going on to hellish battlefields throughout the Pacific, including Tarawa featured in the above video. In the memoirs of the Pacific War that I have read, US troops stationed in New Zealand and Australia viewed their time there as paradise and the Aussies and the Kiwis as some of the friendliest and most hospitable people on the planet. Some US servicemen settled in both nations after the war, and some 15,000 Aussie and 1500 Kiwi women went to America as war brides.
The Kiwis still remember the Yanks as indicated by this blog post here. In the folly, waste and horror of war it is always good to remember kindness and friendship in such conflicts, traits shown on both sides by the Kiwis and the Corps seventy years ago.
Donald R. McClarey
Paul Zummo
“Fraternization” had slightly less respectable aspects. After the city of Naples had freed itself through the ferocious fighting of the Four Days (28 Sept – 2 Oct 1943), it found itself pretty much near starvation, while full of comparatively well-paid American and allied troops. I’m sure you can see what happened. There was not much violence of any sort – except for a Moroccan unit that made itself notorious across Italy – but plenty of what one might call commercial exchange. The daughters of middle-class families, clean, elegant, polite and pretty, were very popular with servicemen. Also, they had no colour prejudice – before the war, Italian colonists in Ethiopia had infuriated Mussolini by associating happily with local girls – and I have the impression that black American servicemen were delighted with the opportunity to buy the “services” of these segnorine. The whole matter was terribly painful to the girls and their families, and as the situation improved they did their best to pretend it never happened; but they were not allowed to. These well-brought-up young ladies did not have the “professional habits” which allow regular prostitutes to avoid pregnancies, and when the inevitable baby boom happened, many of the children turned out to be of an unexpected colour. I don’t think anything much happened – people just wanted to get the whole thing over with, and Naples is a seaport and has always been full of people of every sort anyway – but, this still being Naples, they wrote a song about it.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXMPryOrMhs&w=420&h=315%5D
Quite a few Italian women came back to the States as war brides. I knew a few growing up in Paris, Illinois which is a small town of only 10,000. This comment from an Italian war bride touches upon your comment:
“GM: How did others handle your marriage in Italy? CS: I don’t know if it was resentment because you marry an American. But also during the war we had many of the girls, you know, that were going with the soldiers just to get some food. Really, [we] didn’t have too much [food] over there during the war. So many of the girls would get acquainted with the soldiers just to get some food from them. And they thought that maybe I was doing the same thing, that I was giving myself to the soldier for food. So they started to call me bad names. One day, this was after we got married, my husband and I were going to church, and somebody passed by with a bicycle. They call[ed] me a bad name, and my husband heard, and he knew what that meant, already, you know, being there. So he turned and he ran after this person and he pushed him down and before you know, he was in a big fight. That was a bad thing. I started crying, and, you know, that was a bad thing.
Another time [it] happened during the time he was gone or we went to a movie or something like that and that happened over there [and] in the United States. My husband was engaged with a girl over here, and maybe there was some bad feeling about it. I don’t know. But all in all, it was ok.”
http://www.immigrantjourneys.com/stories/slawson_italy.html