More than 100,000 women from Britain, France, Australia, and the other Allied nations, and tens of thousands more from Germany, Japan, and the lands the Americans had occupied, married American servicemen during the war or in the years just after it. The War Brides Act, signed at the end of 1945, let them enter the United States outside the immigration quotas, and the Army carried them across the Atlantic and the Pacific by the shipload. They left behind parents and homes and nearly everything familiar, often for good, and arrived to husbands they had sometimes known only briefly, to in-laws who did not always welcome them, and to a country whose language, weather, and customs they had to learn from the dock onward.
