Were War Grooms Really That Uncommon?

In a little googling around I couldn't find exact numbers of American men and women in the European theater in 1945, but I did find the basis for doing some rough approximate calculations.

There were 61 divisions in the European Theater. A division is approximately 15000 men. That's about 915000 men. A little under half of the people classified as "Ground Forces" were part of a division (as opposed to being in a smaller unit that was not, in turn, part of a division). So being a little bit conservative on that percentage, let's say 1.8 million "ground forces". In the US Army at the time about a third of the Army was "Ground Forces". That percentage would figure to be higher outside of the US during war time, but there still needs to be a fair amount of support (not to mention things like the Army Air Force, which I don't think would have been "Ground Forces"). So, I'm thinking that 3.5 million men would be a very conservative estimate.

By contrast, the number of WACs in the European Theater that I found was "over 8000", which means less that 9000 in that kind of context.

So, the numbers that you're looking at are something like 2 or 3 American women for every 1000 American men. So that would be the baseline ratio of marriages to locals if the behaviors of the men and women were identical with respect to their involvement with locals.

However, I seriously doubt that behaviors would have been identical, at least in terms of percentages.

For starters, those women would have been swamped by eligible potential mates without any issues of language barriers and such, and those men would have been the ones that they were most often in contact with; whereas the vast majority of the men would have no option for "companionship" other than the locals. Secondly, given the level of double standards at the time, a women known to be "running around" with local men stood to be perceived *much* more negatively than a man doing the same thing with local women; concern over their reputation would prevent more women than men from having affairs with locals. Those double standards also said that a wife following her husband (in terms of moving / relocation) was generally the expected norm, not the other way around. That would effectively prevent a number of such marriages, and end up meaning that a fair percentage of the marriages that did happen would not involve the European man applying to immigrate to the US.

All together, I'm betting that: Yes, it was *that* uncommon to see a man filing the "war bride" documents; uncommon enough for the pre-departure billets and transport ships not to have accommodations set aside for such men.