Love, VALOR, AND ENDURANCE: WORLD WAR II WAR BRIDES MAKING A HOME IN MONTANA

Not quite fifteen when World War II began, Joyce Butler of Hampshire, England, went to work for a transistor and battery firm-her contribution to the British war effort. At a canteen run by the U.S. Army, Joyce met a GI from Somers, Montana, Russell DeLong, who would later become her husband and a whirlwind courtship followed. The pair received the army's permission to marry just before the Normandy invasion and when the war was over made plans to move to Montana. As Joyce recalled: "Most people had not heard of Montana.... They said, 'If you are going to Montana they will have cowboys and Indians there ... and they don't have any water in the house, and you will have to go outside to the toilet.'"1

Undeterred, Joyce left for the United States with a nine-month-old baby in February 1945. The trip took two weeks in high seas due to bad weather. The next step was the train trip west, held up for eighteen hours in a blizzard at Wolf Point, Montana. At the Kalispell train station Joyce was met by her husband, "who said I was the sorriest looking lady he ever saw.... It was some experience.... When I first came over I cried myself to sleep every night. I thought, 'Why did I do this?' Now I think I didn't make a mistake.... I go back to England and I wouldn't want to live there anymore."2

Joyce's story is representative of those told by many women who married GIs during World War II and moved to Montana. For most of these women, Montana was a truly alien place. They had to adapt to the state's open spaces, sparse population, and harsh climate as well as to new families, communities, ways of speaking, and customs. Doing so in the absence of their families and often while dependent upon a single person, their husband, who also faced a period of readjustment, called for uncommon abilities to deal with hardship. All managed, albeit not without tears. Heroic on a personal level, the narratives are success stories.

But these individual histories do more than offer stories about building satisfying lives: they illustrate the connections between a person's life decisions and the social context in which they are made. For all of these women, their understanding of gender roles, expectations for marriage, and acclimation to hardship underlay the successful transitions to new lives.

More than any other factor, World War II shaped the lives and outlooks of the war brides who came to Montana. To understand their lives, it is necessary to remember how young these women were when the war began. They were, for the most part, twelve to sixteen years old in 1939 and most had graduated at age fourteen from eighth grade. Prior to the war, they would have entered the workforce, continued in technical programs, or continued their formal educations. All that changed with the onset of war. By 1941, the British government was recruiting young women into female service organizations such as the Civil Defense Women's Volunteer Service, Women's Auxiliary Air Force, and the Women's Land Army and directing them to areas with labor shortages.

When the war started, Evelyn "Chub" Tuss was fourteen years old, living with her family in Diehl, a town on the English Channel twenty-one miles from France. She recalled: "You could see France on a clear day. We were called Hellfire Corner. We were bombed, we were shelled, we were machine-gunned. We had warships coming and shooting shells on the beaches. . . . Dad was in the ambulance [service] and mom was too. . . . But when you were fourteen, everybody had to do a job. . . . We were Civil Defense workers. We all had to wear the . . . tin hats. The fourteen-year-olds used the fire hydrants to [put out the] incendiary bombs. We used to climb the roof and put them out-that was our job."3

War experiences differed, of course, but there are commonalities among all the participants: scarcity of food, scarcity of clothes, scarcity of recreational opportunities. Scarcity is a relative concept, but all talked about how they and their families learned to "make do." A comment from Ruth Batchen, who grew up on the outskirts of Liverpool, illustrates: "We were living pretty much as we were living before except for the air raids, the shortage of food. For instance, two ounces of butter a week per person and two ounces of meat per person to eat, so that was hard on my mother trying to, you know, eke out the meals for four of us. And it was difficult, but, you know, you think you can't get by, but you can."4

Elvia Stockton, who grew up in a village outside of Paris, was seventeen when Hitler invaded France. Under German occupation, young girls returned to school and she recalled: "We went because we were allowed some biscuits-a kind of dog-biscuit-shaped thing with vitamins. We went for that . . . and of course, there was a little, how do you say, indoctrination. We were supposed to really obey the law and stuff-no food, no way to open your mouth. I mean you just knew that you were under very strong pressure. You had to be very, very careful [about offending the Germans]."5