398th Bomb Group
Memorial
Association


Rest and Relaxation, WW II Style
1945


By
Paul Wagner
Pilot, 600th Squadron

After several mission we were allowed to "stand-down" and have a few days rest.  Bud [co-pilot], Dan [bombardier] and I took advantage of the time off to spend a day in London.  We caught a ride to Royston (about 5 miles away) and the train to King's Cross Railway Station in London, 37 miles away.  The trip, in one of the old steam powered trains with compartments that had doors on either side of the train, took two hours.

We were curious to see what the action was at Piccadilly Circus.  So as soon as we arrived we went into the city center via the underground.  Sure enough, there at Rainbow Corner, where the large Red Cross Club was located, right across from the sandbagged stature of Eros at the center of the Circus were the famous Piccadilly commandos, the "ladies of the night" who strolled openly along the street offering good times to servicemen wearing uniforms of a dozen countries.  The price for an evening's entertainment ran about $16.  Many of the girls were young, eighteen was not an unusual age, and were often quite pretty.  I understand that many of them worked eight hour shifts and lived reasonably normal lives the rest of the time.  I got this information from a service man I met at one of the large dance halls in London who told me he had just danced with a young lady with whom he had slept some weeks before and when he propositioned her again she informed him that she wasn't working, she was on her time off. 
 
To an American raised in the puritanical culture of the Great Depression in the U.S. this open discussion of sex for sale, carried out in broad daylight by girls who looked exactly like their wholesome American counterparts, was most astounding.  Dan and I spoke with several of the girls but the whole thing was a little too cold blooded for either of us and the novelty soon wore off.

My major diversion in London was dancing.  There was a large dance hall just a few blocks from Piccadilly called the  Palladium, that had three dance bands on rotation so there was continuous music and dancing.  I went there at every opportunity. The English girls were wonderful dancers and I couldn't get enough of them.  Also, the skirt style for many of the dancers was one that was snugly fitted at the hips and pleated from the hips down so that when they spun while dancing, the skirts would stand straight out giving the viewer a good look.  We Americans loved it and the English girls, who seemed to take such a display as a matter of course, loved titillating us. 

In March of 1945, after a particularly exhausting series of flying missions, I went to London hoping to get some rest and do some dancing but was devastated to discover that the Palladium had been hit by a V-2 rocket bomb and destroyed.  I didn't make many trips to London but I had always gone dancing, it was certainly a great place while it lasted.

Between flying combat missions, flying practice missions and doing odd jobs like test-flying new or repaired B-17s or flying to other bases for people or supplies, I actually had very little time off.  Since trips to London were time-consuming and expensive, I tended to take advantage of the entertainments offered in the nearby towns that could be visited in the evening either by group truck (they would drop us off and pick us up at a prearranged time) or by taking the local trains.  Royston, being the closest, was the town I frequented most.   As always, I sought out opportunities for dancing and discovered that there were evening dances in the basement of the Royston Town Hall.  Since there was an ATS (Army Territorial Service, much like our WAACS) station nearby there was a plentiful supply of young, neatly uniformed, British girls.  These were supplemented by the girls from the town and other uniformed British or Canadian service women.  The restrictions on the interactions of officers and enlisted personnel didn't appear to be enforced when we dated non-Americans so I got to know a fair number of these service girls.  In most respects the young ladies I met weren't terribly different from the girls back home. 
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On one of my first evenings at the Town Hall I was attracted to a girl born and brought up in Royston.   She was petite, very pretty, had a wonderful complexion and looked every bit the soft, English girl that she was. I danced with her at every opportunity and after my second sortie to  Royston to go to the dance, I asked her out and we left the dance and to go to a nearby pub for a drink.  She was very friendly and pleasant, didn't drink much, was rather quiet and a nice date.  After the drink I walked her to her home and met her mother and father.  When it was time for me to leave her home, she walked me to the GI truck pick-up (the girls did this as a matter of course, a custom I really appreciated) and when I tried to kiss her she resisted and told me she was "walking out" with a particular boy, a gunner in the 398th and while she liked me and like dancing with me, that would be as far as it would go. 
 
As time went on, we stayed friends.  I told her about life in America and she told me what she could remember about life in peacetime England, which wasn't very much since England had been at war for over five years at the time and she was quite young (probably not even the eighteen she claimed).  She was very frank about subjects I had always viewed as being quite private, if not forbidden.  When I finally asked her just what "walking out" meant she told me that in England, when a young man and woman dated more than once or twice, it was assumed they were "walking out" together.  I asked her if this was the same as Americans going steady (which I described to her) and was surprised to find that the staid and proper English were far more tolerant of sex between the unmarried young than were the Americans.  "Walking out" actually implied a sexual relationship between the young lovers.  This amazed me, here was this sweet, shy and reserved girl who readily admitted to her past and present sexual partners.  But she was true to her man, we danced, socialized and even kissed now and again but that was as far as it went, her gunner was the lucky guy.


From "The Youngest Crew" by Paul Wagner
Lagumo Press, Cheyenne, WY, 1997, ISBN 1-878117-18-1


Veteran: Paul Wagner
Pilot, 600th Squadron
Date of Personal History: July 2003 Web Page submission. Excerpted from "The Youngest Crew" by Paul Wagner.
Author: Paul Wagner
Submitted to 398th Web Pages by: Paul Wagner


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