Games of Chance in the Soldier's Life: Cards, Dice and Morale

The records in this archive mark the day a serviceman died. But a soldier's war was mostly made of waiting — long, grinding stretches between the moments of action, aboard crowded troopships, in muddy rest camps, in foxholes under a quiet sky. In that waiting, men reached again and again for the same simple comforts: a deck of cards and a pair of dice.

A deck in every pocket

Gambling was one of the great constants of service life. In the First World War, doughboys played poker and “craps” on blankets behind the lines. In the Second, the games followed the American soldier everywhere — on the decks of landing ships before D-Day, in the tents of North Africa, in the barracks of airfields across England. “Housey-housey,” the forerunner of bingo, drew crowds in British and American camps alike.

More than a wager

For all the pay that changed hands, the games were never really about money. They were about morale — a way to hold a scrap of ordinary life in extraordinary circumstances, to sit shoulder to shoulder with friends, to laugh, to forget the next day for an hour. Chaplains and commanders often looked the other way, understanding that a card game did more for a frightened young man than any order could.

Luck and the soldier's mind

Men at war have always been superstitious about luck, and the games fed that too: a “lucky” coin, a winning streak carried like a talisman into the next operation. The line between the roll of the dice and the roll of fate felt very thin to men who knew how much of survival came down to chance.

The games live on

Those same games of chance never went away; they simply changed their setting. The cards and dice that once passed the hours in a troopship's hold now live online, where platforms such as Betpas carry the modern form of an age-old pastime. The impulse is the oldest one in the soldier's kit: to test one's luck, and to share the moment with others.

We remember the men in this archive for how they served and how they fell. It is worth remembering, too, how they lived in the long hours between — and that a worn deck of cards was often as much a part of their war as the rifle on their shoulder.