ALL TOGET
THER NOW
Singing provided soldiers with an
essential release—provided they
got to sing the songs their way
By Joseph Connor
S
Recently freed POWs
celebrate around a
piano. The U.S. Army
recognized the vital
outlet that singing
provided—but G.I.s
preferred songs of their
own invention to those
the army pushed (right).
inging has long been part of military life, and the U.S. Army
wanted to keep this heritage alive as it mobilized and trained
more than eight million soldiers to fight in Europe and the
Pacific. The army believed that group singing was important for
“morale building through soldier participation” and “emotional
stability through self-entertainment,” explained Captain M.
Claude Rosenberry, who helped set up
the army music program.
Wanting things done its way, the army adopted
a regimented approach to music. In 1941, it
published its official Army Song Book, containing
67 patriotic, folk, and service songs like “The StarSpangled Banner,” “America the Beautiful,” and
“Pop! Goes the Weasel,” and it expected soldiers
to learn all 67 songs. The Quartermaster Corps
even wrapped pamphlets of religious tunes
around rations to make sure wholesome material
reached the front. The army organized officially
sanctioned sing-alongs and envisioned every platoon with a barbershop quartet and a “camp-fire
instrumentalist (guitar, ukulele, etc.)” and each
company with a song leader and “accordionist,” Captain Rosenberry wrote.
These by-the-book efforts fell flat. The army could tell men what to do,
but G.I.s dug in their heels at being told what to sing and when to sing it.
Soldiers, a New York Herald Tribune editorial noted, “follow only one rule in
their choice of songs. They do not sing what is expected of them by their
elders.” They snubbed army-organized song sessions, too. Their attitude
was “spontaneous or nothing,” noted Sergeant Mack Morriss, a South
Pacific correspondent for Yank magazine.
In place of songs with the army’s imprimatur, the men invented their
own, making up countless verses for current hits, patriotic anthems, and
FEBRUARY 2022
51
well-known folk songs. Their improvised
lyrics, or parodies, were often sarcastic, sometimes bawdy but always brutally honest. Their
verses stretched the limits of poetic license
and sometimes obliterated the boundaries of
good taste, but they carried a power professional songwriters would envy and provide a
glimpse, available nowhere else, into what it
was like to be young, in the service, and fighting the biggest war in history.
THE FATHERS OF THESE G.I.s had marched
to France in 1918 belting out “Over There,”
“It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” and “Mademoiselle from Armentières,” and their sons
carried on this tradition. They lifted their
voices “at beer parties and such get-togethers…on long boat trips where there is not
much else to do,” and while riding on open
trucks, wrote Corporal Pete Seeger, a folksinger who served in the Pacific and whose
musical career spanned more than 50 years.
Collective singing made it possible for servicemen “to feel comradeship, to be happy
together without being emotional, or not visibly, and thus unmanly,” said Samuel Hynes, a
Marine flier in the Pacific and later a professor of literature at Princeton University.
The men’s parodies were more than a way
52
WORLD WAR II
ACROSS THE GLOBE, the song American servicemen most liked to
sing and parody was “Bless ’em All,” a British waltz to which they
added their own lyrics. In 1917, a 37-year-old Englishman, Fred Godfrey, wrote the tune to amuse his pals in the Royal Naval Flying Service, and it became an underground favorite with British troops. In
1940, English songwriters Jimmy Hughes and Frank Lake polished it
up, and it soon enjoyed wide public popularity in Great Britain. It
crossed the Atlantic and was featured in American wartime films like
A Yank in the R.A.F, Captains of the Clouds, and Guadalcanal Diary, and
on recordings by artists like Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians.
Its rollicking chorus begged for group singing—“Bless ’em all/Bless
’em all/The long and the short and the tall”—and its lyrics were already
charmingly irreverent toward military life: “There’ll be no promotions/This side of the ocean/So cheer up, my lads/Bless ’em all.” It was
tailor-made for parodies because “any words chosen at random seem
to fit,” naval intelligence officer Otis Cary explained, but its intangible appeal was what endeared it to the troops. “The song isn’t a fighting song—it doesn’t yell blood & thunder, but people sing it,” Sergeant
Morriss noted: “It has guts.”
The elimination of “bless” was the first change the G.I.s made. “It
shouldn’t require much imagination for even the most shy and sheltered person to know what word replaced it,” infantryman Dick
Stodghill said. The four-letter substitute, unspeakable in polite circles, was a staple of the G.I. lexicon. Servicemen would have been “virtually speechless” without it, Private Raymond Gantter recalled, and
Robert Leckie, a Marine who served in the Pacific, said he heard it
“from chaplains and captains, from Pfc.’s and Ph.D.’s.” Its use was so
automatic that many servicemen home on leave slipped up at the
dinner table and asked “a younger sister or sweet old grandmother to
‘pass the f--king butter,’” mortarman John B. Babcock recalled with a
JOSEPH A. HORNE/OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; PREVIOUS PAGES: PHOTO BY POPPERFOTO
VIA GETTY IMAGES; SHEET MUSIC: HISTORYNET ARCHIVES; BOOK: GUY ACETO COLLECTION
Folksinger Pete Seeger leads the crowd in “When
We March into Berlin” in 1944. Music helped fill the
void, he said, when “there is not much else to do.”
of amusing themselves and passing the time.
They served as a vital outlet to relieve wartime
anxiety and the frustrations of military life. A
soldier will endure almost anything “as long as
he is permitted to grumble, protest and joke
about his fate, to ridicule his leaders and to
assert his essential autonomy and personal dignity,” noted folklorist Les Cleveland, a New Zealander who fought in the Pacific and in Italy. In
fact, irreverent songs were often “the only
means at their disposal for the expression of
their subversive fears and frustrations,” Cleveland explained.
The men considered the offerings in the official army songbook to be lame—more appropriate for grammar-school children than for
soldiers. Stateside composers churned out
dozens of patriotic songs like “Der Fuehrer’s
Face,” “Goodbye Mama (I’m Off to Yokohama),”
and “You’re a Sap, Mister Jap,” but the G.I.s dismissed these anthems as “a lot of drivel…about
as shallow as a coat of paint,” Sergeant Morriss
wrote. None was “a good, honest, acceptable war song,” army cartoonist Bill Mauldin concluded. Parodies filled the void.
FROM TOP: U.S. NAVY/HENNEPIN COUNTY LIBRARY; BLESS ‘EM ALL, 1941. ELLA DOT MARTIN BLAKE COLLECTION (RB 015)/
SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST LIBRARIES
Military men—like this group
of Minnesotans in the navy—
favored pairing well-known
melodies with concocted, and
typically irreverent, lyrics.
chuckle. This word—and others like it—permeated the G.I. songs, which Life magazine
called “mass vocal scatology.”
It would be a mistake, however, to see this
language as simply the product of an all-male
environment free from civilian restraints.
Like the parodies themselves, the forbidden
words served as safety valves, “precious as a
way for millions of conscripts to note, in a
licensed way, their bitterness and anger,” said
Lieutenant Paul Fussell, later a professor of
literature at the University of Pennsylvania.
By singing “f--k ’em all,” the men could blow off
steam, and the “’em” could denote whoever or
whatever was aggravating them. Among those
who agreed was General George S. Patton, who
believed “an army without profanity couldn’t
fight its way out of a piss-soaked paper bag.”
Pilots used “Bless ’em All” to voice their
anxiety about death, more easily acknowledged under the guise of humor: “No lilies or
violets/For dead fighter pilots/So cheer up, my
lads” and “No future in flying/Unless you like
dying/So cheer up, my lads.” With there-butfor-the-grace-of-God-go-I humor, rear-echelon troops poked fun at their frontline
brethren—“They sit in their trenches/And think
of their wenches/So cheer up, my lads”—and
Marines showed macho pride: “So what if we
suffer?/Marines have it tougher/So cheer up,
my lads.” Sailors mocked the indiggnity of the periodic examination of
—
their genitalia for venereal disease—
“You’ll get no erection/At ‘short-arm
m
—
inspection’/So cheer up, my lads”—
and glider troops derided their airrcraft: “We are lucky fellows/We’ve got
no propellers/So cheer up, my lads.”
hat
Married men sang of the fear that
their wives in the States might be
me
doing more than keeping the home
em
fires burning—“Our future’s a problem
ves
we can’t figure out/Hope that our wives
ors
are alone in their beds”—and sailors
ing
ridiculed the officious and annoying
junior officers arriving from the
d stupid as
States: “They’re salty as hell/And
well/Be sure and salute them, my mates.”
Soldiers and Marines mocked the arrival of
the U.S. Navy—“In 10,000 sections/From 18
directions/Oh Lord, what a f--ed-up stampede”—and Marines bemoaned the sore subject of inaccurate tactical air support: “They
bombed out two donkeys/Five horses, three
monkeys/And seven platoons of Marines.” One
version, crafted by crewmen of B-17 Flying
Fortresses to describe returning from a tough
mission, embodied the grimmest of humor:
“They say there’s a Fortress just leaving Calais/
Bound for the Limey shore/It’s heavily laden
The 1940 version of a
1917 tune was popular
in Great Britain. It also
was the song American
G.I.s most parodied—
adapting it to an
extraordinary variety
of themes.
FEBRUARY 2022
53
54
WORLD WAR II
with petrified men/And stiffs who are laid on the
floor.” The variations of “Bless ’em All” were as
endless as the men’s limitless ingenuity.
ANY TUNE WITH A well-known melody
was fair game, and making up new lyrics for
old songs was another army tradition. In the
First World War, for example, doughboys had
modified “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” a
popular marching tune, to “That’s the Wrong
Way to Tickle Mary” and had improvised
dozens of bawdy verses for “Mademoiselle
from Armentières,”
Armentière one of the best-known
th earlier war.
songs from the
p
The parody
process was Darwina
ian, and
only the best versions
gai
gained traction. Explained
P Seeger: “a parody, unless
Pete
i is a good song in its own
it
right, will not catch on and
last.” He estimated that
most of these ditties were
“sung for a laugh once or
t
twice…and
then forgotten.”
T
They
were rarely written
dow but the good ones were
down,
spre by word of mouth in “a
spread
gen
nuine oral tradition, like folk balgenuine
Samu Hynes noted. The usual
S
lads,” Samuel
inspirations Seeger said, were “disgust for
inspirations,
war and the army (or navy),” and Hynes listed
war,
the most common topics as being military
life, senior officers, sex, and death. Whatever
the subject, all were “comic, or were intended
to be,” Hynes said, and the men sang them
“humorously, half cynically, never mournfully,” folklorist A. S. Limouze explained.
There’s no “official” version of any of these
songs because the men adapted each to fit
local circumstances and were constantly
modifying the lyrics.
Soldiers weren’t trained singers, and many
had trouble carrying a tune, but they substituted enthusiasm for lack of vocal talent.
“When the average group of soldiers burst
forth in song, it makes a chorus of tree frogs
sound like grand opera,” Stodghill remembered. Listening to one sing-along, Morriss
noted in his diary that “those guys can’t sing
sober and even with a guitar they can’t sing
drunk. But they sure are trying.” Sometimes,
however, things clicked. Seeger, whose musical career took him to concert halls and
recording studios, recalled a song session in
1943 at Keesler Field, Mississippi, during
which nearly 40 men crowded into the tilewalled barracks latrine. The acoustics were
perfect, Seeger said, and the result was “some
of the best music I ever made in my life.”
Another favorite song for the creative process was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a
Civil War anthem that appeared in the official
army songbook—but not in the way the G.I.s
sang it. Airborne troops whistled past the
graveyard about a paratrooper whose chute
failed to open—“Gory, gory/What a hell of a
way to die/And he ain’t gonna jump no more”—
and sailors griped about shipboard life—“Holy
Jesus/What a hell of a way to live/Then we ain’t
going to sea no more.”
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: STOCKTREK IMAGES, INC./ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; SOME WONDERFUL OLD THINGS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; GUY ACETO COLLECTION
Pilots sing in their
ready room aboard
the USS Ranger before
the 1942 invasion of
Morocco. Judging by
the smiles, this was
not a sanctioned
song—although the
army and navy tried
their best to inspire
by dispensing official
lyrics on “Hit Kit”
fliers and music on
V-discs.
HISTORYNET ARCHIVES
Soldiers ridiculed General Douglas MacArthur’s perceived penchant for pompous pronouncements—“Mine
eyes have seen MacArthur/With a Bible on his knee/He is
pounding out communiques/For guys like you and me”—
and airmen groused about their branch of the service
—“Ain’t the air force f--cking awful?” The best-known
“Battle Hymn” parody, popular in all theaters and
among all branches of the service, reflected the sarcasm of men itching to return to civilian life: “When the
war is over/We will all enlist again.”
Another popular number was “Down in the Valley,” a
well-known folk song recently recorded by the Andrews
Sisters, a prominent vocal group. Bomber crews
lamented dangerous missions over Germany—“Down
the Ruhr Valley/Valley so low/Some chair-borne bastard/
Said we must go”—and joked about their fear of being
shot down and taken prisoner: “Write me a letter/Send it
to me/Send it in care of/Stalag Luft III.” Transport pilots
sang of the extreme danger of flying fuel and other supplies over the Hump, as they called the Himalaya
Mountains: “This is the story/Of a Hump pilot’s life/For
a gallon of gas, boys/He gave up his life.”
The men dusted off “Mademoiselle from Armentières” to mock the publicity given to female soldiers
(WACs) and sailors (WAVES)— “The WACs and WAVES
will win the war/So what the hell are we here for?/Hinky,
dinky, parlez-vous”—and to grouse about any state
where they had trained: “----- is a hell of a state/Asshole
of the 48/Hinky, dinky, parlez-vous.”
Some parodies poked fun at the men’s own courage.
Portraying themselves “as a band of ignominious, selfseeking cowards rather than as valiant, battlefield
heroes” was good for a laugh, folklorist Les Cleveland
explained, and acted as “a comic demolition of the
entire military enterprise.” B-17 crewmen sang of their
wish for a mechanical problem to send them back to
their base before they met the enemy—“F--k the Flying
Fortress/And pray that she’ll abort/We’d rather be at
home/Than in the f--king Flying Fort”—and of another
inglorious way to end a mission: “We dropped our bombs
in the ocean/Which nobody can deny.” In “I Wanted
Wings (’Til I Got the Goddamn Things),” a song concocted by Chicago Sun correspondent Jack Dowling,
airmen urged discretion over valor: “You can save those
goddamn Zeros/For those other goddamn heroes” and
“I’d rather be a bellhop/Than a flier on a flattop.” They
realized, they sang, that “there’s one thing you can’t
laugh off/And that’s when they shoot your ass off.”
THE ARMY MADE VALIANT EFFORTS to bring
the music currently popular on the home front to the
troops overseas. It distributed thousands of “Hit Kits,”
monthly bulletins of the lyrics for popular songs, and
“V-discs,” recordings of what it called “current and
favorite songs and marches.” It even shipped wind-up
Miss Popularity
In the summer of 1943, the surprise hit song among
G.I.s in the Mediterranean Theater was “Dirty Gertie
from Bizerte,” which Life magazine called the saga of a
“mischievous siren [who] lured her boy friends to their
undoing.” Among the diabolical tricks recounted in the
song’s lyrics, Gertie “hid a mousetrap ’neath her skirtie.”
Bizerte was a city in North Africa that the Allies had
liberated earlier that year, and everyone assumed
“Dirty Gertie” had originated there. Some G.I.s even
claimed to have met the real Gertie, and another rumor
spread that the song was really a tongue-in-cheek
tribute to a mannequin—the only female
companionship soldiers
had been able to find in
the war-torn city. But the
truth was far stranger.
“Gertie” was actually
the brainchild of Private
William L. Russell, who
had never set foot in
North Africa. In
November 1942, Russell,
who had dabbled in
poetry as a student at
Cornell University, had
dashed off the verse
while nursing a
hangover at Camp Lee,
Virginia. He had seen
Bizerte in the news and
thought the name had a
nice ring to it. Russell sent
A cleaned-up version of “Dirty
his eight-line poem to Yank
Gertie from Bizerte,” in which
magazine, which published
a G.I. woos a lovely lady, lacked
it in its column of G.I. poetry. the raunchier version’s appeal.
Over in North Africa,
Sergeant Paul Reif, a composer in civilian life, saw
Russell’s published poem. He set it to a simple fox-trot
melody, and Sergeant Jack Goldstein added a few
verses. Soon, Josephine Baker, an African American
singer who had gained fame in the cabarets of prewar
Paris, was singing “Dirty Gertie” to entertain the
troops. The men loved it and, soldiers being soldiers,
they quickly cooked up their own scandalous verses.
Back in the States, Russell, now stationed at Camp
Edwards, Massachusetts, was flabbergasted that his
poem had become a hit song because, he admitted, he
himself couldn’t carry a tune or even whistle one. As for
the racy lyrics, all he would say was, “Mother isn’t very
proud of Gertie.” Nevertheless, Russell smelled
opportunity and traveled to New York City to pitch his
song. Music publishers were interested, hoping the ditty
would become as popular at home as it was with G.I.s.
The salty lyrics, however, would never pass muster on
American airwaves, so they had to be cleaned up.
“Dirty Gertie” became “Flirty Gertie,” and instead of
hiding a “mousetrap ’neath her skirtie,” she was simply
“purty, purty, purty as can be.” Alas, the spic-and-span
Gertie lacked the allure of the saucy one, and the song
never became a big hit back home. —Joseph Connor
FEBRUARY 2022
55
About to board landing craft prior to D-Day, G.I.s bolster morale with a
song. Collective singing encouraged comradery and helped stanch fear.
phonographs overseas to enable the troops to play the V-discs. The
men quickly went to work on the new tunes.
Airmen doctored up “As Time Goes By,” featured in the 1942 film
Casablanca. They sang about the danger of antiaircraft fire—“You must
remember this/The flak can’t always miss”—and the Fifteenth Air
Force in Italy mocked the Eighth Air Force in England as publicity
hounds: “It’s still the same old story/The Eighth gets all the glory.”
G.I.s used “Don’t Fence Me In,” popularized by cowboy star Roy
Rogers, to ridicule paper-pushers happy to spend the war safely in the
States—“Let me rest at my desk/With the pencil that I love/Don’t ship me
out”—and servicewomen converted “Pretty Baby,” a ragtime era hit,
into an ode to the surefire ticket home: “If you’re nervous in the service/
And you don’t know what to do/Have a baby, have a baby.” For infantrymen, “Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine,” a popular standard, became a tribute to buddies lost to German 88mm
artillery shells—“Eighty-Eights Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of
Mine”—and fliers used it to eulogize comrades shot down by German
Me 109 fighter planes: “Those Messerschmitts Are Breaking Up That
Old Gang of Mine.” A parody of “White Christmas,” a signature song of
crooner Bing Crosby, targeted the men’s longing for female company:
“I’m dreaming of a white mistress….”
Even the service songs were fair game. “The Air Force Song,” for
example, was used to mock military bureaucrats—“Here we go/Into the
file case yonder/Diving deep into the drawer”—and Marines used their
anthem to note a dubious achievement: “We have the highest VD rate/
We’re United States Marines.”
Another genre of soldier songs extolled the virtue (or lack thereof)
of exotic women in faraway places. Two favorites were “Dirty Gertie
from Bizerte” (who “hid a mousetrap ’neath her skirtie”—see “Miss
Popularity,” page 55), and “Filthy Annie from Trapani” (who “stashed
a razor up her fanny”). Rival temptresses were “Stella, the Belle of
Fedala,” “Luscious Lena from Messina,” and “Venal Vera from Gezira.”
These titles were often more intriguing than the actual songs.
56
WORLD WAR II
MOST COMMANDERS tolerated the
parodies. They understood the need to
gripe, grouse, and blow off steam, and
older officers undoubtedly recalled
with fondness the irreverent tunes they
had sung back in 1918. One outlier was
by-the-book Colonel Eugene R. Householder, a 59-year-old West Point graduate who
commanded an air force training center in
Atlantic City, New Jersey. In 1943, he banned
nearly a dozen of the soldiers’ songs because,
he said, they impugned the men’s courage and
encouraged drinking. Among the tunes he
outlawed were “I’ve Been Working on the
Railroad” and “The Beer Barrel Polka.” The
men rolled their eyes, and Householder’s edict
soon became the target of parodies, the New
York Times reported.
The U.S. Post Office also disapproved. In
1943, an author named Eric Posselt published
a book entitled Give Out!, containing what he
called authentic soldier songs and what Time
magazine described as “the salty songs roared
by men away from women.” Postal authorities
took one look, labeled the book “lewd and
obscene,” and banned it from the U.S. mail.
An anonymous reviewer from Yank magazine
shook his head in disbelief, saying many of
Posselt’s songs sounded as if they’d been written by public-relations officers or Sunday
school teachers.
J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI saw one ditty—“Gee,
But I Want to Go Home”—as part of a subversive plot to make soldiers homesick. In reality,
it was nothing more than good-natured griping about army chow: “The coffee that they
give you/They say is mighty fine/It’s good for
cuts and bruises/And tastes like iodine.”
On occasion, a song reflected true bitterness. In 1944, Lady Astor, a sharp-tongued
member of the British Parliament, reportedly
called Allied troops in Italy “D-Day dodgers”
because they hadn’t taken part in the Nor-
PHOTO 12/GETTY IMAGES
Oddly, few songs showed hatred for
the enemy. In fact, these verses directed
more venom and humor at their own
officers than the Germans or Japanese.
One exception was a takeoff on the
“Colonel Bogey March,” a British tune
later immortalized in the 1957 film The
Bridge on the River Kwai. It mocked the
alleged anatomical peculiarities of the
Nazi leaders: “Hitler has only got one
ball/Göring has got none at all.”
LIEUTENANT B. GALLAGHER/U.S. NAVY/NATIONAL ARCHIVES
Enlisted men aboard
the USS Ticonderoga
celebrate news of the
Japanese surrender.
After the war, the song
parodies that had been
so enjoyed were
largely forgotten.
mandy landings. It’s uncertain if Lady Astor
actually did say this, but British, American,
and Canadian soldiers in Italy believed she
had. They were irate because they had suffered
greatly and endured heavy losses in the Italian
campaign, which lasted more than a year and
cost more than 300,000 Allied casualties.
British troops used “Lili Marlene,” a German
love song as popular with Allied troops as with
the enemy, to skewer the viscountess, and this
parody caught on with G.I.s, too.
The troops bluntly told Lady Astor what
they thought of her: “You’re England’s sweetheart and her pride/We think your mouth’s too
bloody wide.” They described, with biting sarcasm, their living conditions—“Sleeping ’til
noon and playing games/We live in Rome with
lots of dames”—and the fighting in Italy: “We
landed at Salerno, a holiday with pay.” But to
them, the enduring image was the crosses
over the graves of their fallen comrades:
“Heartbreak and toil and suffering gone/The
boys beneath them slumber on/They are the
D-Day Dodgers/who’ll stay in Italy.”
After the war, the G.I.s’ lyrics for “Bless ’em
All” and other tunes were largely forgotten,
as veterans seemed reluctant to disclose to
their friends and families the verses they had
sung overseas. Maybe the rough language
embarrassed them, or perhaps they feared
civilians would misunderstand their sardonic
wartime humor. There was no reason, of
course, to worry either way, for these songs
stand as a testament to the wit, resilience, and
spunk of those who carried the day at a pivotal
moment in history. +
Most
commanders
tolerated the
parodies. They
understood
the need to
gripe, grouse,
and blow off
steam.
FEBRUARY 2022
57
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