Maybe a couple thousand.
Someone should do some new interviews with the World War II “war brides,” because there aren’t very many still living.
I count 1,195 still married and living with their husbands. That means there might be something like 2,000 living if you count widows and those who have remarried. We don’t know exactly how many there were, but various sources put the number at 60,000 or more.
Here’s how I got that current number, using the American Community Survey three-year file, 2010-2012. It’s all the couples who met the following conditions:
- Married, spouse-present
- She was born outside the U.S.
- He was born in the U.S.
- He is a WWII-era veteran
- They were married in the years 1941-1945
- She immigrated in or after the year of their marriage
It’s a pretty simple set of rules.
Some caveats: This doesn’t include any widows or widowers, just those still married (otherwise the ACS doesn’t have any spouse information). I didn’t set a requirement that she be born in a place where American soldiers were during the war (I don’t know all the places they were). I don’t know that all of the WWII-era veterans served outside the U.S. So some of these might not be real war brides, in the sense of women who met and married American military men outside the U.S. during a war.
Still, I think the formula works well. These are the women it turned up:
- 84% immigrated in 1945 or 1946
- The age range is 82-94, with a median of 85
- About two-thirds were under age 20 when they married
- 61% from the United Kingdom (mostly England)
- 11% from elsewhere in Western Europe (France, Belgium, Italy)
- 7% from Eastern Europe (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia)
- The remaining 20% from Canada, Australia/New Zealand, Israel/Palestine, Japan, other)
If you follow my suggestion of finding and interviewing these women or their husbands, here are some other sources you might use:
- “In Search of Asian War Brides,” a 1994 article in Demography by Rogelio Saenz, Sean-Shong Hwang and Benigno E. Aguirre
- “On Growing Old in America: Perceptions of the Okinawan War Bride,” a 2003 article from the Journal of Women & Aging, by Rebecca A. Lopez and Mamiko Yamazato
- The Wikipedia entry on war brides
- The WWII War Brides Association (uswarbrides.com)
Family Inequality 
Many founding members of the Soka Gakkai USA, a Buddhist “new religious movement”, were Japanese war brides. So working within this organization would be one way to find them (I interviewed a few for a project on migration and religion.)
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My mother Elsie Joan Fishwick Clegg buried today at age 100. From Frankston. Married my father in frankston in 1943. She then arranged passage on a retuning navy troop ship. And the rest is history. John h clegg iii
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My mother Elsie Joan Clegg just passed away at age 100. She came from frankston victoria Australia. She married my father there in 1944 while he was on R and R with US Marines. She has been in port Lavaca texas all this time
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