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 States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan,^[1] France, Italy,^[2] Greece, Germany, Poland, Luxembourg, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Korea, 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.

The term “war brides” was first used to refer to women who married Canadian servicemen overseas and then later immigrated to Canada after the world wars to join their husbands. This term later became popular during World War 2. It first started when in January 1919, the Canadian government offered to transport all dependents of Canadian servicemen from Britain to Canada. This included free ocean transport (third class) and rail passage. There are currently no official figures for the numbers of “war brides” and their children. By the end of 1946, over forty thousand Canadian serviceman had married women from Europe.^[3]

There is no exact number on the number of World War I European brides married to American soldiers. Research shows that between thousands to tens of thousands immigrated to the United States after World War I as war brides from Belgium, England, Ireland, France, Greece, Russia, Italy and Germany.^[4]

The U.S. embassy does not keep records of marriages between U.S. citizens and citizens of other countries, ^[5] but after the end of World War II the number of women from Europe and Asia who became war brides to American soldiers was estimated in the hundreds of thousands.

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.^[6][7] British women were attracted to American soldiers because they had relatively high incomes, and were perceived as friendly.^[8]

Marriage to Asian war brides had a significant impact on United States immigration law, as well as the public perception of interethnic, interracial, interfaith, and interdenominational 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.^[9] This led to widespread defiance of the law by American servicemen, as well as increased tolerance for interethnic and interracial couples in the United States,^[10] and ultimately the repeal of the highly restrictive 1924 Immigration Act in 1952.^[11]