Sarge's WW II Pinup Page

Hey, Mac! My name's Sarge and welcome to my page. Here I've collected some images of all 'da great dames that helped me pull through that last lousy year in the ETO. These skirts were with me no matter where I was ... and mostly I was at the bottom of foxholes and they were in my barracks bag. (Bein' in da infantry ain't like what those fly-boys up there in the picture had to put up wid — snug as bugs in their warm and toasty huts back in England with their pinups all in a row, nice and neat.) Don't get me wrong. I'm not sayin' it was all bad. Once we got the krauts on the run, I started pullin' em out so me and my squad could remind ourselves of what we were fighting for. Ginger Rogers ... I tacked her up on the wall in a farmhouse in Brittany for a day. And in a cold barn we were at for two weeks somewhere in Belgium, Betty Grable and Gene Tierney pulled some guard duty and watched over us. And I put Hedy and Gene and Gloria up in every mother-lovin' CP we were at as we moved across Germany. Down dere is a picture of me and my buddy Spider in our bunks after the war. And you can see all my girls on the wall. You can see 'dat we all made it through OK.

And now, as dey say, widdout furder adoo, I'd like to turn it over to the Professor, who can give you a more scientific explanation of how this kind of cheesecake affected the average American dogface.

World War II pinups appeared in many forms, from fighter and bomber nose art and bomber jacket art to calendars, postcards, matchbooks, and playing cards. The term pinup was coined during World War II, when soldiers would "pin up" these idealized pictures on their barracks and foxhole walls, and sailors did the same to lockers and bulkheads. There were photos of Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner, and hundreds of other calendar girls and Hollywood starlets whose only claim to fleeting fame was their image seared into a GI's brain from a ragged page of YANK or Esquire magazine.

Servicemen soon began to create their own pinup art, decorating the noses of their planes and their bomber jackets with more primitive paintings of shapely babes.

Sarge's WW II Pinup Page serves as a visual reminder of the many sources of pinup art between 1941 and 1945. We'll be adding to these pages as time goes on. So check back frequently to see new images. Click on the silohuettes at the bottom to navigate to other pages. And, for those of you with an interest in the the psychology of sex during wartime and the allure of the forties pinup, here are some recommended links:

Sex in Wartime