On February 4, 1946, the SS Argentina, an American passenger liner turned troopship, arrives in New York City with 452 British war brides, one war groom and 173 children. The group, which departed from Southampton, England, a week earlier, represents the first wave in Operation War Bride, an Army-coordinated effort to reunite American servicemen and women with the spouses they married overseas. Other shiploads will soon follow—eventually transporting close to 300,000 war brides and children to ports on the East and West Coasts, according to the National World War II Museum.
LIFE magazine, which chronicled the Argentina’s voyage in a photo essay, reported that on the first day out, “the girls at meals stuff themselves and their youngsters with such long-missed delicacies as oranges, beef, chicken, bacon and eggs. They also thronged the Argentina’s canteen to buy candy, lipsticks and cigaret (sic) lighters.”
“It was an arrival the like of which New York had never before experienced,” The New York Times’ longtime ship news reporter, George Horne, wrote the day after the Argentina tied up at Pier 54. “It was a ‘bride’s ship,’ and historically minded men among the Army staff assigned to the West Fourteenth Street pier reported that ‘the last one’ must have been back in the pre-Revolutionary days.”
(In all the excitement, they seem to have forgotten the previous world war. The National World War I Museum and Memorial reports that, “While we do not know the exact number, research shows that between 5,000 to 18,000 women immigrated to the United States after World War I as war brides from Belgium, England, Ireland, France, Russia, Italy and Germany.”)
The Argentina's passengers represented just the first wave of war brides. On February 10, 1946, the far larger British liner Queen Mary arrived in New York, carrying a reported 1,719 war brides and 615 children. The Queen Mary alone would transport nearly 13,000 British and European war brides and children to the U.S. and Canada in six voyages over the next several months, followed by another seven trips to Canada later in the year.
As the war wound down in late 1945, American leaders began to plan for this influx of new citizens. To get around restrictive U.S. immigration laws, Congress passed the so-called War Brides Act on December 28, 1945, to "expedite the admission to the United States of alien spouses and alien minor children of citizen members of the United States armed forces.”
In 1945, the British edition of Good Housekeeping magazine also pitched in, publishing a pamphlet called A Bride’s Guide to the U.S.A. It offered such advice as, “Keep your accent while you can; most English accents, especially when spoken by a girl, are regarded in America as charming.”
