Over Sexed, Over Paid and Over Here  …  Again? Americans on R&R in Vietnam-Era Sydney

Abstract

Between 1967 and 1971, 280,000 US military personnel visited Sydney on ‘Rest and Recreation’ (R&R) leave from the conflict in Vietnam. During the period in which the R&R program was being negotiated, Australian authorities, along with correspondents to daily newspapers, worried that the presence of large numbers of ‘cashed-up’ Americans would see the public repudiate the R&R scheme, the war and the relationship with the United States. These concerns proved largely unfounded as a majority of Australians welcomed the visiting Americans as both the human face of an alliance deemed critical to the nation’s security and a return of a ‘long lost friend’ from World War II.

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors of Australian Historical Studies for their detailed and constructive suggestions, which have done much to improve the piece. They also thank Michelle Arrow and Sean Brawley for their comments on earlier drafts.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors of Australian Historical Studies for their detailed and constructive suggestions, which have done much to improve the piece. They also thank Michelle Arrow and Sean Brawley for their comments on earlier drafts.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

1 William Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), 295.

2 On Vietnam-era R&R schemes in Asia, see Porphant Ouyyanont, ‘The Vietnam War and Tourism in Bangkok’s Development, 1960–1970’, Southeast Asian Studies 39, no. 2 (2001): 157–87; and Peter E. Hamilton, ‘“A Haven for Tortured Souls”: Hong Kong in the Vietnam War’, The International History Review 37, no. 3 (2015): 565–81.

3 United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s reported opposition to the extension of the R&R scheme to Australia was overruled by President Lyndon Johnson. See ‘R&R Arrangements in Australia’, 13 December 1967, National Archives of Australia (hereafter NAA): A1209, 1966/7736.

4 Anthony J. Barker, US Diplomats and Their Spouses during the Cold War: Americans Looking Down on Australia and New Zealand (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 104; Lila Oldmeadow, ‘Six Days to Live: American Servicemen in Australia on Rest and Recreation Leave during the Vietnam War’ (BA Honours thesis, University of Sydney, 2003), 2.

5 ‘Many Flags’ was the US attempt to build a military-logistical alliance to support the intervention in Vietnam.

6 ‘Australia, Now Threatened, Much Like U.S.’, Atlanta Daily World, 21 March 1942. At ‘the height of the war effort’, notes Anni P. Baker, ‘as much as 5 percent of Australia’s population was American’. See Baker, American Soldiers Overseas: The Global Military Presence (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 30.

7 Studies of the American presence in wartime Australia include Roger J. Bell, Unequal Allies: Australian-American Relations and the Pacific War (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1977); John McKerrow, The American Occupation of Australia, 1941–1945: A Marriage of Necessity (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013); John Hammond Moore, Over-Sexed, Over-Paid, and Over Here: Americans in Australia, 1941–1945 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1981); E. Daniel Potts and Annette Potts, Yanks Down Under: The American Impact on Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985); Marilyn Lake, ‘Female Desires: The Meaning of World War II’, Australian Historical Studies 24, no. 95 (1990): 267–84; Marilyn Lake, ‘The Desire for a Yank: Sexual Relations between Australian Women and American Servicemen during World War II’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 2, no. 4 (1992): 621–33.

8 On Australia’s postwar relations with Asia see David Walker, Stranded Nation: White Australia in an Asian Region (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2019); David Lowe, Menzies and the ‘Great World Struggle’: Australia’s Cold War, 1948–1954 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999).

9 On Australia’s Vietnam War see Peter Edwards, Australia and the Vietnam War (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2014); John Murphy, Harvest of Fear: A History of Australia’s Vietnam War (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993); and Donald Horne, Time of Hope: 1966–72 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1980).

10 ‘R&R’, 13 April 1967, NAA: A1209, 1966/7736.

11 ‘US Troops May Rest in Australia’, Sydney Morning Herald, 14 April 1967, 4; Sheila K Fox, ‘A Welcome to Americans’, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 April 1967, 2.

12 E. Gray, ‘US Troops on Leave’, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 May 1967, 2. See also E.M. Nicholson, ‘US Leave in Australia’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 April 1967, 2; W. Burge, ‘Leave for US Troops’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 April 1967, 2.

13 Burge, 2.

14 In 1967, 87.8 per cent of Australians felt that relations with the USA should be either ‘Very’ or ‘Fairly’ close. In 1969, 89.3 per cent did. See Donald Aitkin, Michael Kahan and Donald Stokes, Australian National Political Attitudes Survey, 1967: Study Documentation (Canberra: Australian Data Archive, 2003), 239, https://dataverse.ada.edu.au/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.26193/YKNUXT (accessed 20 December 2021); and Donald Aitkin, Michael Kahan and Donald Stokes, Australian National Political Attitudes Survey, 1969: Study Documentation (Canberra: Australian Data Archive, 2003), 239, https://dataverse.ada.edu.au/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.26193/OTUJCZ (accessed 20 December 2021).

15 Gray, 2.

16 Robyn Arrowsmith, All the Way to the USA: Australian WWII War Brides (Mittagong: Robyn Arrowsmith, 2013). On the ‘Americanisation’ of Australian understandings of love, see Lake, ‘Desire for a Yank’; Hsu-Ming Teo, ‘The Americanisation of Romantic Love in Australia’, in Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, eds Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2005), 171–92.

17 ‘U.S. Servicemen Fly 5,000 Miles for Leave in Sydney’, Australian-American Journal (1968): 47, 50; ‘US Servicemen Arrive in Sydney for R&R’, ABC Four Corners, 15 March 1968, available at https://www.abc.net.au/archives/80days/stories/2012/01/19/3411498.htm (accessed 20 December 2021).

18 ‘Decision No. 224: Rest and Recreation Facilities in Australia for United States and Allied Forces Serving in Vietnam’, 12 April 1967, NAA: A6980, S250151.

19 On venereal disease panics during World War II, see Lisa Featherstone, Let’s Talk about Sex: Histories of Sexuality in Australia from Federation to the Pill (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011), ch. 8.

20 Commonwealth, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 18 April 1967, 1318 (Albert James, Member for Hunter).

21 ‘Rest and Recuperation Facilities in Australia for United States and Allied Servicemen in Vietnam: Notes on Cabinet Submission No. 264’, 9 May 1967, NAA: A4940, C4558; R.W. Swartz to Prime Minister, 17 May 1967, NAA: A1209, 1966/7736. See also Sue Sun, ‘Where the Girls Are: The Management of Venereal Disease by United States Military Forces in Vietnam’, Literature and Medicine 23, no. 1 (2003): 66–87.

22 ‘Rest and Recuperation Facilities in Australia for United States and Allied Servicemen in Vietnam: Report by Inter-Departmental Committee’, 4 May 1967, NAA: A6980, S250151.

23 Nicholson, 2.

24 E. Gabriel, ‘Don’t Underrate the R&R Scheme Hazards’, Tribune, 1 November 1967, 7.

25 Bert Fagin, ‘Attitude to GIs’, Tribune, 26 July 1967, 4. On perceptions of Americans among the antiwar movement see Ann Curthoys, ‘Vietnam: Public Memory of an Anti-War Movement’, in Memory and History in 20th-Century Australia, eds Kate Darian Smith and Paula Hamilton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 113–34.

26 ‘They’re Coming Here’, 1967, in Queensland Peace Committee for International Co-operation and Disarmament Ephemera, FVF311, Fryer Library, Queensland. Sexual attitudes in the antiwar movement have been examined in Ann Curthoys, ‘“Shut up you Bourgeois Bitch”: Sexual Identity and Political Action in the Anti-Vietnam War Movement’, in Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, eds Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 311–40.

27 Commonwealth, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 5 September 1967, 755 (Philip Stokes, Member for Maribyrnong).

28 For more on histories of prostitution in Australia see Raelene Frances, Selling Sex: A Hidden History of Prostitution (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007).

29 Michael P. Marsh, ‘US Troops on Leave’, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 May 1967, 2.

30 Kenneth Peters, ‘Entertainment for Americans’, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 May 1967, 2.

31 ‘US Servicemen Arrive in Sydney for R&R’.

32 See in particular Michelle Arrow, The Seventies: The Personal, the Political, and the Making of Modern Australia (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2019).

33 E. Miller, ‘Leave for US Troops’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 May 1967, 2. On Australian women’s World War II perceptions of American servicemen, see Travis J. Hardy, The White Men’s Countries: Racial Identity in the United States-Australian Relationship, 1933–1953 (New York: Peter Lang, 2020), 58–9.

34 ‘For Cabinet: Rest and Recreation Facilities in Australia for United States and Allied forces serving in Viet Nam’, undated, NAA: A6980, S250151.

35 On the black presence in wartime Australia, see Sean Brawley and Chris Dixon, ‘Jim Crow Downunder? African American Encounters with White Australia, 1942–1945’, Pacific Historical Review 71 (2002): 607–32; Chris Dixon, ‘Confronting the “Bulwark of White Supremacy”: The African American Challenge to White Australia, 1941–1945’, Journal of African American History 106, no. 1 (2021): 78–102.

36 Gwenda Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia (Melbourne: Scribe, 2005), 105.

37 Commonwealth, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 9 March 1966, 69 (Hubert Opperman, Minister for Immigration).

38 Commonwealth, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 24 March 1966, 589, 600 (Charles Jones, Member for Newcastle).

39 ‘“Cautious” Migration Policy’, Canberra Times, 1 May 1967, 2.

40 ‘“Black Power” Warning on Vote’, Canberra Times, 12 April 1967; Jon Piccini, Transnational Protest, Australia and the 1960s: Global Radicals (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 152–5.

41 Trezzvant W. Anderson, ‘World News’, Pittsburgh Courier, 4 February 1950, 8.

42 ‘Civil Rights Plank’, Pittsburgh Courier, 23 July 1960, 4.

43 ‘Going to Australia? Good Riddance’, Pittsburgh Courier, 1 January 1966, 8.

44 Era Bell Thompson, ‘Australia: Its White Policy and the Negro’, Tharunka, 12 March 1968, 2 (reprinted from Ebony).

45 ‘U.S. Servicemen Fly 5,000 Miles for Leave in Sydney’, 54.

46 Australian Embassy, Washington to Defence, Canberra, 26 January 1967, NAA: A1209, 1966/7736.

47 ‘Notes of Inter-Departmental Meeting Held at Department of Defence, Canberra on 17th April, 1967’, NAA: A6980, S250151.

48 ‘Confidential: Assistant Secretary’, 19 April 1967, NAA: 7980, S250151.

49 On white American apprehensions regarding Australians’ friendly treatment of African Americans during World War II, see Chris Dixon, African Americans and the Pacific War: Race, Nationality, and the Fight for Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 163–4.

50 ‘Notes of Inter-Departmental Meeting Held at Department of Defence, Canberra on 17th April, 1967’, NAA: A6980, S250151.

51 On racial problems within the US military, see James Westheider, The African American Experience in Vietnam: Brothers in Arms (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), ch. 5.

52 Joel Davis, quoted in Ronald H. Spector, After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 272.

53 On South Korean participation in the Vietnam War, see Sean Brawley, ‘Hangkuk, Daihan, Korean: Korean Voices of the Wol-nam-jon/American War/Vietnam War’, in War, Society, and Culture: Approaches and Issues, eds Chris Dixon and Luke Auton (Newcastle: Research Group for War, Society, and Culture, 2002), 73–92.

54 Commonwealth, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 12 April 1967, 1172 (Hubert Opperman, Minister for Immigration).

55 Dan Halvorson, Commonwealth Responsibility and Cold War Solidarity: Australia in Asia, 1944–74 (Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2019), 84.

56 ‘R&R facilities in Australia’, 23 November 1966, NAA: A1209, 1966/7736.

57 ‘Request for R&R Facilities’, 29 November 1966, NAA: A1209, 1966/7736.

58 ‘R&R facilities in Australia’, 26 November 1966, NAA: A1209, 1966/7736.

59 ‘Imposed upon by Sly Grog Sellers: American Complaint’, Worker, 8 March 1943, 7.

60 Kate Darian-Smith, War on the Home Front: Melbourne in Wartime, 1939–1945 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009), 218–20. On the Leonski murders, see Ivan Chapman, Private Eddie Leonski (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1982).

61 ‘Soldier’s Sly Grog Deals’, The Courier-Mail, 12 March 1943, 3.

62 D.R.A. Manderson, ‘The First Loss of Freedom: Early Opium Laws in Australia’, Australian Drug and Alcohol Review 7, no. 4 (1988): 439–53.

63 ‘Battle against Drugs Widens’, Canberra Times, 25 October 1967, 3; Simon Hasleton, ‘The Incidence and Correlates of Marijuana Use in an Australian Undergraduate Population’, The Medical Journal of Australia 2, no. 6 (1971): 302.

64 See Andrew Nette’s collation of pulp fiction covers from this era: https://www.pulpcurry.com/2014/02/pulp-friday-passion-pits-and-twilight-zones-kings-cross-pulp-fiction/ (accessed 12 March 2021).

65 ‘Schoolgirls Prostitutes for Drugs’, Canberra Times, 20 October 1967, 7.

66 ‘Drugs Kill 300 in NSW This Year’, Canberra Times, 27 October 1967, 1.

67 Jeremy Kuzmarov, ‘The Myth of the “Addicted Army”: Drug Use in Vietnam in Historical Perspective’, War & Society 26, no. 2 (2007): 123; Max Hastings, Vietnam: An Epic History of a Tragic War (London: William Collins, 2018), 329.

68 Robert D. Heinl, Jr., ‘The Collapse of the Armed Forces’, Armed Forces Journal, 7 June 1971, 30–8.

69 ‘Notes of Inter-Departmental Meeting Held at Department of Defence, Canberra on 17th April, 1967’.

70 ‘Rest and Recuperation Facilities in Australia for United States and Allied Servicemen in Vietnam: Report by Inter-Departmental Committee’.

71 ‘Notes of Inter-Departmental Meeting Held at Department of Defence, Canberra on 17th April, 1967’.

72 ‘2nd American Arrested as Drug Suspect’, Sun-Herald, 10 December 1967, 2.

73 ‘GIs and Drug Traffic’, Tribune, 13 December 1967, 2.

74 See Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in South-East Asia (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).

75 ‘Notes on meeting in Department of Customs, 2pm, 6 December 1967’, NAA: A1209, 1966/7736.

76 F.T. Homer, Department of External Affairs, to the Secretary, Prime Minister’s Department, 21 March 1967, NAA: A1209, 1966/7736.

77 ‘Notes of Inter-Departmental Meeting Held at Department of Defence, Canberra on 17th April, 1967’.

78 ‘R&R Arrangements in Australia’.

79 ‘Notes of Inter-Departmental Meeting Held at Department of Defence, Canberra on 17th April, 1967’.

80 ‘The Secretary’, 8 December 1967, NAA: A1209, 1966/7736.

81 ‘GIs Fined $75 for Bringing Drug on Leave’, The Australian, 16 January 1968, 2.

82 ‘Conviction R&R Personnel for Marijuana Smuggling’, 17 January 1968, NAA: A1209, 1966/7736.

83 Philip Bell and Roger Bell have argued convincingly that ‘Australia has been implicated in complex and peculiar ways in the worldwide process of modernisation variously labelled “westernisation”, “Americanisation”, or “development”’. See Philip Bell and Roger Bell, Implicated: The United States in Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993), 208.