The wife (Kay Kendall) of brilliant, but boisterous and ill-tempered conductor (Yul Brynner) of the London Symphony puts up with his childishness, but the last straw is drawn when he begins an affair with a young pianist.

There’s a deficit of good, honest women in the West, and Roy Whitman wants to change that. His solution is to bring a caravan of over 100 mail-order brides from Chicago to California. It will be a long, difficult and dangerous journey for the women. So Whitman hires hardened, cynical Buck Wyatt to be their guide across the inhospitable frontier. But as disaster strikes on the trail, Buck just might discover that these women are stronger than he thinks.

Private Snafu is seen performing the tedious task of sorting boots. Driven to madness by boredom he is taken to visit his brothers, Seaman Tarfu and Fubar by the gruff Technical Fairy, First Class, somewhat in the spirit of Ebenezer Scrooge and the Ghosts of Christmas.