How "Piccadilly Commandos" had the GIs surrounded

[T_i_B]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/11/01/nna01.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/11/01/ixportal.html

The Americans, as every schoolboy knows, were guilty of three heinous offences in wartime Britain, being over-paid, over-sexed and over here.

But according to a Metropolitan Police file from the Second World War released at the National Archives today, the GIs who inspired so much envy in their war-weary hosts should be forgiven a little for the over-sexed bit.

They were, after all, mere victims of one of the great unsung elite units in history, the "Piccadilly Commandos".

The women so named were the prostitutes and "good-time girls" who frequented the US servicemen's clubs that by mid-1942 had turned Mayfair and much of the West End into what police described as an "American colony". So numerous and persistent were they that the Foreign Office judged them a serious threat to Anglo-American relations.