MASS SINGING IS ONE OF FEW RELAXATIONS FOR HOMESICK U. S. SOLDIERS IN
OVERSEAS OUTPOSTS. THESE GUADALCANAL YANKS LIKE LUSTY LYRICS BEST
SOLDIERS STILL SING
THEY LIKE BAWDY PARODIES, OLD FAVORITES
AND NEW SONGS WITH A BARBER SHOP FLAVOR
by LILIAN RIXEY
Each month the Army's hard-working Special Services Division dis-
tributes 2,000,000 Hit Kits to encourage soldiers to sing at home
and overseas. These gay little brochures contain words and music to
the Army's latest selection of popular songs, including Blue Skies,
Dinah, For Me and My Gal, Sweet Sue and Margie. Soldiers don't sing
them.
Tin Pan Alley has worked itself into a lather trying to produce a
song that will strike the soldier's fancy. They brought forth Goodby,
Mama, I'm Off to Yokohama, You're a Sap, Mr. Jap, We'll Be Singing
Hallelujah Marching Thru Berlin and Let's Put the Axe to the Axis.
Soldiers don't sing these either.
Soldiers sing songs just as they did in World War I. The songs are
equally bawdy and they are sung with the same gusto. When the 9th
Division followed U. S. tanks in hot pursuit after Rommel down the
road from El Guettar, its men were chanting that unprintable ditty,
The Fly Flew in the Grocery Store. And when the infantry was thrown
into the breach at Kasserine Pass, they were singing the equally un-
mentionable words to
The Old Flannel Drawers That Maggie Wore.
This trend toward mass vocal scatology is evidenced by the fact
that most soldiers wall agree that of all the songs sung on the African
front,
Dirty Gertie from Bizerte is the most popular. That unwashed bit
of femininity from the North African town has not yet been dis-
carded in favor of such newcomers as
Stella, the Belle of Fidelia or
Dirty Gertie's Sicilian rival,
Filthy Annie from Trapani. She has held
her own against the aging
Mademoiselle from Armentières, revived in
innumerable parodies. Over "Mademoiselle" she has the advantage,
not perhaps of tuneful charm, but at least of originality. For "Made-
moiselle" was a direct steal from the British Tommy's
Skiboo, Skiboo
which inquired anxiously of the landlord whether he had "a daugh-
ter fair, with lily-white arms and golden hair."
Since "Dirty Gertie" is this war's most popular soldier song, an
inquiry into its origins becomes a matter of historical necessity. Ac-
cording to one-story, a bunch of the boys went on liberty in Bizerte.
They combed the town in vain for female companionship. Bizerte's
fathers and husbands had inhospitably placed their women under
lock and key. Full of good brandy and frustrated goodwill, the
soldiers came across the only visible representative of the gentler sex
in all the town of Bizerte languishing in the bombed-out display
window of a lingerie shop. She was lying on her side, completely un-
clothed. The soldiers rescued the wax dummy from the window,
christened her "Dirty Gertie" and gently placed her in their jeep.
For several days thereafter, Dirty Gertie rode like a queen through
the streets of Bizerte. The C. O. put a stop to it with five days' bread
and water for the offenders, but not before she had inspired an un-
known songwriter to concoct the great song of World War II.
History's perverters have actually produced photographs of the
wax dummy to prove this tender tale. It is, however, untrue,
"Dirty Gertie" sprang virginal from the brow of a private at Camp
Lee, Va., one cold, blustery November morning. Picking up the
morning paper, Private William L. Russell, late of Cornell, was im-
pressed by the fact that the Yanks were trying to take Bizerte. Pri-
vate Russell couldn't seem to get Bizerte out of his head. The orig
inal verse of this now-famed ditty was practically spontaneous. The
Russell version, telling how Bizerte's mischievous siren lured her
boy friends to their undoing with fleur-de-flirte and a mousetrap, was
first printed in "The Poets Cornered" of the Army magazine Yank.
Gertie really began to get around when she was picked up by the
Algerian edition of Stars and Stripes. Next, Sergeant Paul Reif set her
to a simple, four-four fox-trot melody. And when Josephine Baker,
the dusky chanteuse who left Paris for the comparative safety of
Algiers, introduced her at an Army show, "Dirty Gertie" was in
solid.
Although Russell, now a second lieutenant hospitalized at Walter
Reed, has tried to keep tabs on Gertie by having the original verse
copyrighted, the scores of unprintable versions that have filtered
back from the African front indicate that Gertie has become every
soldier's song. One soldier's printable version:
Dirty Gertie from Bizerte
Saw ze capitaine, made ze flirty.
Captain think she veree purty;
Lose his watch and lose his shirty;
Call ze general alerte.
Ze gendarmes look for Dirty Gertie
From Casablanc' to Gulf of Serte.
Has anyone seen Dirty Gertie?
CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE
Expurgated soldier songs in this collection (Arrowhead Press) were still too ripe for
the Post Office. Though banned from mails, it is now sold at Army post exchanges (25 cents).
WAR SONGS (continued)
Second only to "Dirty Gertie" as favorite vocal selection when
good U. S. soldiers get together over a beer or so is
Bless 'em All,
which dates back to World War I. This song really belongs to the
British. They sing it in waltz time with these words:
Bless 'em all, bless 'em all
The long, the short and the tall
Bless all the sergeants and double-u o ones*
Bless all the corp'rals and their blinkin' sons.
When the Yanks stopped over in England enroute to Africa, they
quickly made
Bless 'em All their own by giving it some sex appeal.
The following is one considerably bowdlerized version of the song
they took to Africa:
Bless all the blondies and all the brunettes.
Each lad is happy to take what he gets.
Cause we're giving the eye to them all,
The ones that attract or appall.
Maud, Maggie or Susie;
You can't be too choosey.
When you re in camp, bless 'em all.
© by Sam Fox Publishing Co. New York, N. Y.
Occasionally soldiers will exhort their fellows to "Bless all the
Germans, the sourpuss ones," or "Bless all Italians and their dopey
sons," but, in general, they prefer the ladies, Maud, Maggie and
Susie.
The repertoire of the U. S. soldier in both Africa and India allows
for a considerable divergence in tastes. There is I Dream of Jeannie
with the Light Brown Skin, and there is
I'm Dreaming of a White Mis-
tress. There is also an unprintable salute to the boys they left behind
them called
Four-F Charlie, with an anatomically complete catalog
of Charlie's physical deficiencies.
Like old soldiers, old favorites never die. In Burma, the Georgia
Tech song has become
I'm a rambling wreck from Buddhapore and A Hell
of a Bombardier. In Sicily the Yanks mournfully intone, "Those 88's
are breaking up that old gang of mine," And in Africa, John Brown's
Warrant officers.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 52
WAR SONGS (continued)
Body goes, "When the war is over, we will all enlist again—We will,
like hell, we will."
In the Southwest Pacific, the U. S. soldier's repertoire of songs has
been greatly enriched by contact with Anzacs, whose tastes are sur-
prisingly like his own. The New Zealander has contributed two
numbers: one dealing with the amazing and disturbing adventures of
three elderly maiden ladies and the other glorifying the charms of
Mary Ann Burns, queen of all the acrobats. From the Aussies, they
have learned all the complicated words to that hardy perennial,
Waltzing Matilda, and some may now even know that "hillabong,"
"tuckerbag" and "jumbuck" have not the slightest taint of double-
entendre. The Anzacs who were with Montgomery in Egypt and Libya
have passed on to the Yanks the tune of the Egyptian national
anthem and a strange hodgepodge of bad Arabic and slang which
begins "King Farouk, let me shake you by the duke. Inte quaes quaes
katea Mungaria." (You're a nice, nice fellow, but I'm hungry.) But
the song that is currently on the upbeat with both Aussies and Yanks
is called simply Darwin and goes like this:
This bloody town's a bloody cuss,
No bloody tram, no bloody bus.
But nobody cares for bloody us.
Chorus: Bloody, Bloody, Bloody,
All bloody clouds, no bloody rains.
All bloody stones and no bloody drams.
The dust gets in your bloody brains.
Perhaps because singing helps
Perhaps because singing helps to ease tension while on alert as
well as on liberty, U. S. fliers do most of the singing in the South-
west Pacific. Australians fortunately do not judge our fliers by the
songs they sing on liberty. If they did, they would conclude that all
they do is gripe about brass hats, hanker for women and liquor,
throw off on the accuracy of their navigators, bombardiers and gun-
ners, curse the day they ever got a flier's wings and pine to go home.
The list of tuneful complaints intoned by fliers give the impression
that they are the most unhappy of men. Typical of the evils with
which they have to contend is The 69th's Lament, sung by that bom-
bardment squadron to the tune of Abdul, the Bulbul Ameer:
Oh, the pilots all drink
The airplanes stink
And the navvies don't know where they are
The bombardiers couldn't hit
A target when lit.
Oh, Colonel, we've been here too long.
But most such songs have a definite purpose. To take the sting off
an unlucky mission, fliers customarily indulge in the following self-
derision to the tune of For He's a Jolly Good Fellow:
. . . We dropped our bombs in the ocean
Which nobody can deny.
At officers' mess, whenever a flier begins to sound off about his
prowess against Mitsubishi or Zero or with the ladies, his friends
gather around and begin.
Hooray for____________, he's a damned fine guy.
He certainly is a daisy
He drives the women crazy.
Ein, Zwi, drei, vier,
Who's gonna buy the beer?
Hooray for____________, he's a damned fine guy.
Whereupon the offender has to buy the evening's drinks. If he con-
tinues his boasting, his friends are apt to gang up on him again with
a nonbowdlerized version of
One-Eyed Riley. This ends with the com-
pany pointing accusing fingers at him and shouting, "There goes the
dirty old so-and-so" who played fast and loose with Riley's daughter.
Wherever airmen gather in the Southwest Pacific, sooner or later
they get around to I Want to Go Home, a doleful waltz-time plaint
revived from World War I. Chorus:
These B-26's they rattle and roar,
I don't want to fly over Munda no more.
Take me back to Brisbane,
Where the brass hats clamor in vain.
Oh, ma, I'm too young to die.
I want to go home.
When he gets back to Brisbane or Sydney, one of the first things a
CONTINUED ON PAGE 54
WAR SONGS (continued)
flier likes to do is get pleasantly lit and sing the rollicking song that
begins, "Hardships, you — —, you don't know what hardships are.
With Zeros here and Zeros there and the goddamn ack-ack fills the
air." Another brass-hat baiter is The Alan Behind the Armor-Plated
Desk which pokes heavy fun at the high-ranking officer who was
personally allergic to ack-ack. If there are any brass hats within
hearing, and there generally are, they look the other way.
Marine Corps fliers seem to like parodies. They take the Road to
Mandalay and put these words to it:
Take me somewhere east of Ewa
Where the best ain't like the worst
Where there ain't no Doug Mac Arthur
And a man can drown his thirst.
Where the Army takes the medals
And the Navy takes the Queens
But the hoys that take the rooking
Are the United States Marines.
Chorus:
Hit the road to Gizo Bay
Where the Jap fleet spends the day.
You can hear the duds a-chunkin'
From Rabaul to Lunga Quay.
Pack a load to Gizo Bay
Where the float-plane Zeros play
And the bombs come down like thunder
On the natives 'cross the way.
By far the favorite of all airmen, however, is the parody on I
Wanted Wings, written by the Chicago Daily News correspondent,
Jack Dowling. There are as many verses as there are different types
of planes, ranging from "I'm too young to die in a bloody PBY" to
"I'd rather dance with a woman than get shot up in a Grumman."
Only one verse bears quoting in full:
I wanted wings till I got the goddamned things.
Now I don't want them any more.
They taught me how to fly and sent me here to die.
I've had a bellyful of war.
You can leave all the Zeros to the goddamned heroes.
Distinguished Flying Crosses don't compensate for losses.
Oh, I wanted wings till I got the goddamned things.
Now, I don't want them any more.
These are the songs that World War II soldiers sing. The lu-
gubrious lament,
When This Cruel War Is Over, became so popular
with both Yankees and Rebels in the Civil War that it was banned
in the Army of the Potomac for its supposedly depressing effect.
Morale officers in this war take a different tack. Whatever the
tone of the songs the soldiers sing, they do not jump to the conclu-
sion that the whole Army is about to go A.W.O.L. On the con-
trary, morale officers in the Southwest Pacific teach their men every
new song they pick up. They maintain that such mass singing is
a safety valve which helps ease the tension of war.
Dirty Gertie was fond name given this dilapidated dummy by Sergeant V. M. Geroelli
who rescued her from wreckage of a Bizerte shop. Dummy did not inspire famed song.