MANNERS & MORALS: The Path of Love

For 36 months there had been no cheaper, easier or surer way of entering the U.S. than just following the path of love & marriage. If an American G.I. married a foreigner the U.S. not only admitted her, but paid her passage as well. The wives of ex-G.I.s were also welcome. So were their fiancées—although, according to law, unmarried girls were hustled right back home if they didn’t get their men to the altar in go days.

It was a scheme that cast a fine pink glow over the grim, grey postwar world. Foreign women who were genuinely in love with U.S. soldiers were assured a wonderful wedding gift, foreign adventuresses were so inspired that whole battalions of G.I.s came to rank themselves with Casanova and Don Juan. In all by December an estimated 112,000 brides, husbands and children had come from overseas to share the good life in Boston, Paducah, and Walla Walla, Wash.

Operation Crow. In December—the last month for unrestricted immigration of war brides and war fiancées—migration became a flood. The U.S. organized a special airlift (incongruously named Operation Crow) to bring Europeans across the Atlantic. Chartered planes flew others across the Pacific.

Last week, planes loaded with war brides arrived at Honolulu’s airport on an average of every two hours, day & night. There were Chinese, Japanese and Filipino girls (almost all of whom were married to G.I.s of Oriental parentage), plus Eurasians, Australians and White Russians.

They wore every variety of Occidental and Oriental costume, carried every conceivable type of luggage (one had a large canvas sack of roasted peanuts). They registered every degree of astonishment at their first look at a hallmark of U.S. life—the neon-trimmed jukebox.

Another small army of females was converging on the U.S. from Europe. Among them were Greek “picture brides.” Like one Greek girl who was bound for Anchorage, Alaska, many spoke no English, had never met the men they were to marry (they had only swapped photographs by mail), and seemed to have no idea of where they were going.

Romantic Gesture. One of the “alien spouses” turned out to be a husband—a displaced Hungarian photographer named Gabor Rona who had married an ex-SPAR named Blossom Bernstein. Then there was Elisabeth Albinus, a pretty German girl whose ex-sergeant boy friend walked out on her two hours after she arrived at Idlewild Airport. Lissome Elisabeth got her picture in the tabloids, received at least one offer of adoption, 50, proposals and a free English course from the Linguaphone Institute of America.

On New Year’s Day there were other difficulties—dozens of war brides and fiancees had been delayed enroute to the U.S., and had not managed to arrive before the deadline. But at week’s end, Attorney General Tom Clark solved the problem nicely with a wide, romantic gesture. He gave the fiancees eight more days to get to the promised land.