I fondly remember watching It Ain’t Half Hot Mum when I was a young boy. It was a British sitcom about a Royal Artillery concert party based in Deolali in British India. The soldiers would often put on shows where they would be dressed up as women.
I never realized that this was quite common, not only with the British troops but also with the US Army.
One of the downsides for many men in World War II was they did not have women integrated into units or allowed on the front lines. As a result, many servicemen would perform as women for their fellow servicemen, whether for unit-wide events in barracks at night for fun, as a stress relief from missing women or even as a means of distancing themselves from the horrors of combat.
Below are just some of these brave men who basically turned the burdens of World War II less into a drag—by performing in drag.
(Army Signal Corps photograph SC-204637,courtesy of the National Archives)
(Photo: John Topham/TopFoto.co.uk).
Sources
https://www.forces.net/heritage/history/did-ww2-soldiers-fight-hitlers-nazi-germany-while-drag
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/drag-entertainment-world-war-ii
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