"The term 'D-Day Dodgers' is attributed to Nancy, Lady Astor, Britain's first woman MP and a harsh-spoken, American-born Tory matron who campaingned tirelessly against sex and drink.
In October 1944 Lady Astor was a member of an all-party Parliament delegation that was allowed to visit Italy to study the troops' living conditions. It is said that as a result, she not merely described the troops as 'D-Day Dodgers', but declared them to be drunken and dissolute. She was also said to have opined that as so many had spent so much of their time in brothels, the incidence of VD among them was extremely high; and that when they came home on leave, they should be made to wear yellow arm-bands, so that British womanhood could identify them for what they were, and be warned.
Lady Astor herself indignantly and repeatedly denied that she had ever thought, let alone uttered, anything of the kind. She wrote to the editor of the Daily Mirror, asking him to publish her denial, but received a somewhat brusque refusal.
Recent searches through newspapers of the period, Hansard's reports of Parliamentary debates and Lady Astor's own papers have failed to bring to light any record of her remarks, if in fact she did make them.
What is beyond question is that virtually every British serviceman in Italy was convinced that she did, and regarded her alleged remarks as typical of the slurs being made against them back home. The accepted version is that she mde the remarks in the House of Commons, and that Winston Curchill only disowned her when the protestors from thr front became intense." (Martin Page, "Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major": The Songs and Ballads of World War II, Panther, 1973, pp. 192-193)

~Masato