Prostitutes preyed on American soldiers stationed in Britain during World War II, causing fears that Nazis would seize on this to portray Britain in a negative light, according to wartime police files released on Tuesday.
The files, released to Britain’s National Archives, reveal that United States and British officials were so concerned about venereal diseases and claims of robbery by prostitutes that they held a series of high-level crisis meetings during the war in an attempt to defuse the issue.
Letters opened by military censors from American troops to their families painted a ”very adverse picture” of London’s West End, unnamed officials said in the papers.
”They describe how rife accosting is, and also tell stories of men who have been robbed by these women,” one official wrote.
Richard Law, a junior minister at Britain’s Foreign Office, wrote in March 1943 to the British Home Office that prostitution could pose a threat to military alliances.
”My secretary of state [Cabinet minister] is concerned at this situation, and he feels that his concern is legitimate in view of the disagreeable possibilities which the situation holds for Anglo-American relations in the future,” Law stated. ”If American soldiers contract venereal disease while in this country, they and their relatives in the United States will not think kindly of us after the war.”
Concern about the possibility that Nazi propaganda damaging relations between the United States and Britain was overblown, however, according to then Secretary of State Frank Newsam.
According to minutes from a conference held at the Home Office on April 16, 1943, Newsam ”could conceive of no more effective Axis propaganda than a picture of a decadent Britain where immoral British women preyed on American soldiers,” referring to the Axis countries allied with Nazi Germany.
The issue first arose in September 1942, when Colonel W Clark, a US federal judge serving as a legal adviser with the US Army in London, requested a meeting with Britain’s attorney general to discuss the possibility of changing British law so it would be easier to jail prostitutes.
British police downplayed the issue and said it was not necessary to change prostitution laws.
Air Vice Marshal Sir Philip Game, in a letter to Admiral Edward Evans, said claims that London’s Leicester Square had been ”given over to vicious debauchery” were ”rubbish”.
”Beyond a certain amount of cuddling in doorways, I saw nothing to worry about,” Game wrote.
The fault for any problems of promiscuity and robbery may have come not only from the ”good time girls,” but also from the American soldiers, some officials said.
Game suggested that troops ”largely bring their misfortunes on themselves” by carrying large amounts of cash and flashing their money around.
Judge Clark ”is very persistent in his idea that the boys should be able to write home saying that they never saw a doubtful lady in the streets of London,” Game wrote.
”I pointed out that in these days it was quite impossible to distinguish many over-painted possibly respectable persons from the professionals, and that to me, at any rate, they all looked the same.” – Sapa-AP