Wild Photographs Of Marilyn Monroe Entertaining U.S. Troops In Korea

It was February 1954 and the blonde bombshell was on a four-day whirlwind tour of U.S. military bases in South Korea. Actually, it was a last-minute arrangement. Really, she was in that part of the world to spend her honeymoon with her new husband, legendary baseball Hall-of-Famer Joe DiMaggio. The newly-weds had been scheduled to celebrate their married bliss in Japan.

Initially Monroe had been doubtful about even meeting the Yankee Clipper. But they’d had a first date in 1952 and in the event, the movie star had found the experience better than she’d anticipated. In his Marilyn Monroe: The Biography, published in 1993, Donald Spoto quoted Monroe’s words about her first meeting with DiMaggio. 

Monroe recalled, “I expected a flashy New York sports type and instead I met this reserved guy who didn’t make a pass at me right away. He treated me like something special.” DiMaggio, on the other hand, had seen his pre-meeting illusions about Monroe shattered. As Spoto recorded, he’d first come across her in a promotional photograph in 1951. 

Spoto wrote, “Joe wanted to meet Marilyn Monroe after he saw a news photo of her posing sexily in a short-skirted baseball outfit, aiming to hit a ball.” DiMaggio had understood this to mean that she took a genuine interest in the sport that had made him one of the most famous figures in America. So he’d asked a pal to set up a date.

On that first date at an Italian restaurant, Villa Nova on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard, Monroe kept DiMaggio waiting. Finally she rolled in a whole two hours late. As Spoto pointed out, once they got talking, it turned out that Monroe “had never attended a baseball game and knew nothing about the sport.”

What’s more, DiMaggio had no interest whatsoever in moviemaking. Yet in spite of this highly unpromising start, there was an undeniable spark between the two which soon turned into a full-blown romance. Although DiMaggio was a New Yorker and Monroe was firmly a Los Angeles gal, distance seems to have been no obstacle to true love.

Physically, the relationship seems to have been a humdinger, at least by DiMaggio’s account. He told Rock Positano, author of the 2018 Dinner With DiMaggio: Memories of an American Hero all about it. “When we got together in the bedroom, it was like the gods were fighting; there were thunderclouds and lightning above us,” a lyrical DiMaggio enthused. 

Marriage now beckoned. But the contradictions in the relationship between the retired baseball player and the up-and-coming actress were already apparent. DiMaggio held traditional — some might say Stone Age — views when it came to women. At the end of the day, he felt, their place was in the home as housewives bringing up children.

Back in the 1950s, such male thinking about women was far from rare. But Monroe was already making headlines as a smoldering sex symbol, hardly compatible with the idea of a stay-at-home housewife. And then she appeared on the cover of the very first edition of Playboy in December 1953. Inside the magazine was a series of pictures of her untroubled by clothing. Hardly mom and apple pie.

In fact it was just weeks after Monroe’s Playboy appearance that the two went ahead and got hitched in 1954. Although the two may have had different attitudes towards life — plus the fact that DiMaggio was almost 12 years older than the 27-year-old Monroe — they had one thing in common. Both had been married before. 

Like Monroe, DiMaggio’s first wife Dorothy Arnold was a movie actress. They’d married in 1939 and after that she’d quit the silver screen at the prompting of her husband. A son came along in 1941: Joe DiMaggio Jr. But that wasn’t enough to hold the marriage together and after a couple of separations divorce came in 1944. 

Monroe’s first marriage had come in 1942. She was just 16 when she married factory worker James Dougherty, five years her senior. Apparently the future movie star had been less than happy when Dougherty joined the Merchant Marine after they married, with her playing the role of housewife. The marriage ended in divorce after just a few years in 1946. 

But despite their rather mixed experience of marriage, DiMaggio and Monroe decided in 1953 to take the plunge. In her posthumously published autobiography, the sex symbol told one of her ghost writers, Ben Hecht, “Joe and I had been talking about getting married for some months. We knew it wouldn’t be an easy marriage.”

“On the other hand, we couldn’t keep on going forever as a pair of cross-country lovers. It might begin to hurt both our careers,” Marilyn had observed. At the time when they were discussing the possibility of marriage in late 1953, Monroe was having a contract dispute with her studio, 20th Century Fox. Studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck actually suspended her at the beginning of January 1954.

As she recalled in her autobiography, DiMaggio felt that this enforced idle period for Monroe could happily dovetail with their marriage plans. Monroe remembered that DiMaggio said, “You’re having all this trouble with the studio and not working so why don’t we get married now? I’ve got to go to Japan anyway on some baseball business, and we could make a honeymoon out of the trip.”

“And so we were married and took off for Japan on our honeymoon,” Monroe recalled. The two wed on January 14 at San Francisco City Hall. It had apparently been planned as a low-key affair. But the press got hold of the story somehow and the newly hitched pair were mobbed by enthusiastic crowds. 

A couple of weeks after that civil ceremony, it was time for Monroe and DiMaggio to catch a flight to Tokyo for that Japanese honeymoon they’d promised themselves. As they boarded the plane, there was no inkling that Monroe would soon be taking a detour to Korea. But by the time their Boeing 377 Stratocruiser touched down, Monroe had agreed to a tour. How on earth had that happened?

The inside line on the tale was recounted by writer and journalist Liesl Bradner in an article published in 2019 on the Historynet website. She wrote that during the flight to Japan a senior Far East Command officer, Major General Charles W. Christenberry, approached the couple with a proposal. They were all ears.

Christenberry asked, “How would you like to visit Korea for a few days and entertain the American troops currently stationed in Seoul as part of the UN occupation force?” It was DiMaggio who responded to the military man. “I’d like to, but I don’t think I’ll have time this trip,” DiMaggio replied.

Quick as a flash, Christenberry came back with, “I wasn’t asking you, Mr DiMaggio. My inquiry was directed at your wife.” Monroe chipped in, “I’d love to do it. What do you think, Joe?” DiMaggio’s somewhat ungraceful response had been, “Go ahead if you want. It’s your honeymoon.” Ouch. And as Liesl pointed out, “Actually, it was their honeymoon.”

So that was it. Monroe had agreed on the spur of the moment to a tour of Korea, entertaining the American troops stationed there. Which brings us to another question: just why in February 1954 were more than 225,000 U.S. troops serving in Korea? The answer, of course, was the Korean War. 

In fact, by the time Monroe visited Korea, the fighting was over. Although the war was not, and it still isn’t. While a ceasefire agreement was signed in August 1953, no formal peace treaty was ever signed. Officially, North and South Korea are still at war today. That explains the continuing hostility between the two nations.

So how did this intractable conflict start? We need to wind back to the end of WWII to find the answer. During the war, the Japanese had occupied the Korean Peninsula, as they had done since 1905. After the war ended with Japanese defeat, the nation’s colonial lands were confiscated. Korea was now split in two.

The territory north of the 38th Parallel, a line of latitude that runs across the peninsula, came under Russian influence. South of this imaginary line was the responsibility of the U.S. It was an arbitrary division, but it was real enough on the ground. And this was the status quo until events took a dramatic turn on June 25, 1950.

On that day an invading force of some 75,000 North Korean People’s Army troops poured south, sweeping ineffective South Korean defenders before them. This had suddenly become the hottest moment of the Cold War to date between the Communist world and the U.S. and her allies. America now led a United Nations initiative to send military aid to South Korea. 

A U.N. resolution supported by many nations stipulated that an armed force be sent to Korea. In the event, the vast majority of the troops and equipment came from the United States. As the fighting escalated, China — which has a border with North Korea along the Yalu River — poured thousands of troops into Korea. 

A bitter three-year war ensued until the ceasefire in July 1953. By that time, almost 34,000 American troops had lost their lives. The border between North and South Korea was restored to the 38th Parallel, where it remains today. But despite the fact that fighting had stopped, a massive American garrison remained in South Korea. And it was those G.I.s whom Monroe had agreed to entertain in a series of concert appearances. 

Once she’d said “yes” to Major General Christenberry, all that remained was to organize the logistics of Monroe’s visit. Of course, she was already in Tokyo, ostensibly for her honeymoon, so she didn’t have too far to travel to get to South Korea. But first the star had to be officially enrolled on the United Service Organizations roster.

Marilyn was duly issued with an I.D. card that named her as Mrs Norma Jeane DiMaggio. Her original name had been Norma Jeane Mortenson. In the short time available, Monroe managed to fit in some rehearsal time in Japan with the musicians who would accompany her. They were Anything Goes, a combo led by pianist Corporal Al Guastafeste.

Bradner quoted Guastafeste’s memories of working with Monroe. The corporal, just 21 at the time, recalled, “She was Marilyn Monroe, but she didn’t seem to realize it. If I made a mistake, she said she was sorry. When she made a mistake she apologized.” Guastafeste went on to publish a memoir about his experience, A Different View of Marilyn.

Monroe arrived in Seoul by helicopter and as Bradner has it, “[She] looked radiant in a flight suit as she stepped out into the damp cold, with her blonde curls perfectly coiffed and a huge smile that could have melted the Sun.” Now it was time for her to get into her tour proper with a visit to 1st Marine Division’s mountain camp. 

As Monroe’s chopper circled the base prior to landing, two G.I.s held onto her as she leaned out of the aircraft blowing kisses to the thousands of Marines already gathered below. Their response to the sex symbol’s greeting was predictably tumultuous. Or as Bradner put it, “The Marines went wild.”

During her performance at the base on a makeshift stage, it was actually snowing. Yet she performed in a revealing cocktail dress and high-heeled sandals while many of her audience, enthusiastic to the point of delirium, were wrapped in blankets. She must have been freezing. But as far as the Marines were concerned, she couldn’t have been hotter. 

And it seems that performing for soldiers in Korea was actually a very important moment in the life of Monroe. She later told Hecht, “There were 17,000 soldiers in front of me yelling at the top of their lungs. I stood there smiling at them. It had started snowing, but I felt warm, as if I were standing in the bright Sun.”

The movie star continued, “I’ve always been frightened by large audiences, but standing in the snowfall facing these shouting soldiers, I felt no fear for the first time. I only felt happy. I felt at home. This is what I’ve always wanted, I guess.” It seems that out in the middle of nowhere singing for free to a bunch of raucous G.I.s, Monroe had found somewhere where she could truly be herself. 

For a superstar, Monroe was pleasingly modest in her demands. First Lieutenant George H. Waple III had the job of making sure everything was to the screen icon’s satisfaction while she was in South Korea. Waple remembered, “Marilyn never complained. She seemed to like the basic living arrangement. Her only quibble was with the weather. She hadn’t expected it to be so cold and snowy. She was unspoiled to the nth degree.”

One thing was for sure: Monroe had a pretty good grasp of what her audiences wanted. She performed for the 2nd Infantry Division and one man who saw the show was Don Loraine. He recalled, “Marilyn came out dressed in a heavy parka. She started to sing, suddenly stopped, and said, ‘That’s not what you came to see,’ and took off the parka.”

Loraine continued, “She was dressed in a low-cut purple cocktail dress. She was so beautiful, we all went wild, and, I might add, it was colder than Hell that day. She brought a lot of joy to a group of combat-weary Marines, and I for one will never forget her.” Wherever she went, Monroe sprinkled her own unique brand of stardust. 

By the end of her four-day, ten-gig tour, Monroe had put on spectacular shows for around 100,000 soldiers. At her final appearance, performing for the 45th Division, the sex symbol told her audience, “I’ll never forget my honeymoon — with the 45th Division. Come see me in San Francisco.” It seems that the star of the silver screen got as much out of her tour as those excited G.I.s had.