by Lynne Olson
Like many parts of Britain, East Anglia had never had much exposure to foreigners. Suddenly, the somnolence of its villages was shattered by hundreds of young U.S. servicemen swarming into shops, careening through narrow streets in jeeps and trucks, making passes at girls, and drinking local pubs dry. For the area’s residents, the American invasion was an overwhelming, sometimes traumatic, experience—one that many more Britons would soon share.
The story was somewhat different in the British capital. As the center of the British empire, London had seen more than its share of foreigners over the centuries; now, as the de facto capital of Europe, it housed tens of thousands of Continental exiles. But even Londoners found themselves daunted by the flood of Americans pouring into their city during the last two years of the war.
By 1944, the U.S. military had commandeered thousands of buildings in the London area, from large country estates just outside the capital to apartment and office blocks in its central districts. Three hundred buildings alone were used to house American troops in London, including twenty-four hotels transformed into officers’ billets. The two-story ballroom of the fashionable Grosvenor House Hotel became the largest military dining mess in the world, catering to officers from the various U.S. headquarters staffs. Known as Willow Run, after the Ford Company’s mile-long aircraft-assembly plant outside Detroit, the one-thousand-seat mess served more than six thousand meals a day.
The hotel was just a few blocks from Grosvenor Square, which, along with the neighborhoods surrounding it, remained the hub of American war activity in Britain. According to one English writer, the area had been “captured—lock, stock, and barrel—by the United States.” It was rare to find a house or office near the square that had not been taken over by a U.S. military or civilian agency. On some streets, as the columnist Ernie Pyle noted, “an Englishman stood out as incongruously as he would in North Platte, Nebraska.” Watching a seemingly endless flow of uniformed Americans enter and leave their west London offices one day, Pyle concluded that the military bureaucracy was as bloated in London as it was in Washington, perhaps even more so.
Pyle, a native of Indiana who wrote for the Scripps Howard newspaper chain, was bemused by the American military’s practice of saluting virtually everything that moved. “Everybody had to salute,” Pyle wrote. “Second lieutenants saluted other second lieutenants. Arms flailed up and down by the thousands, as though everybody were crazy…. On one short street, much traveled by the Americans, they had to make sidewalk traffic one way, presumably to prevent salute casualties.” Ordered by their superiors to “show proper respect” to their British and other Allied counterparts, U.S. servicemen, in the words of one sergeant, simply saluted “everyone in uniform … including, I suspect, even hotel doormen.”
Just as Grosvenor Square was the epicenter of U.S. forces at work in London, Piccadilly Circus was the favored place for Americans at play. From early morning to late at night, thousands of U.S. servicemen on leave joined throngs of other Allied troops in roaming this “bawdy, rowdy ant hill,” as Sergeant Robert Arbib called it, some in search of restaurants and theaters but most looking for liquor and girls.
One of the busiest traffic crossroads in the city, Piccadilly Circus had served as the metaphorical heart of the British empire since its construction in the nineteenth century. Here, colonial officials and traders just back from India or Africa had met their friends for dinner, a drink, or a night on the town after years away from home. Lined with eating places, pubs, music halls, and theaters, the circus was London’s Times Square; before the war, giant signs, emblazoned with electric lights, had bathed the area in a dazzling glow. The lights had been doused in 1939, but even with the blackout, Piccadilly Circus remained the liveliest, most crowded spot in London, helping make the city, in the words of Donald Miller, “one of the most sensational places on the planet.” After experiencing the nighttime delights of the area, one American colonel wrote home: “The conviviality of London in wartime is unimaginable, unless you have actually experienced it. I have seen people who literally hadn’t seen each other five minutes earlier become comrades. Romantic attachments are formed on the spot.” The streets around the circus, observed Miller, “were jammed beyond belief…. Everywhere there were people in search of food, friends, liquor, and sex.”
IN HIS LETTER noting the horde of bibulous Americans in the capital, C. D. Jackson concluded with the comment: “I think that there is plenty of trouble brewing.”* Gil Winant, well aware that the massive American buildup was making life considerably more difficult for Britons, agreed. According to Theodore Achilles, the ambassador worried about “the reaction of the GIs toward the British people and the reactions of British soldiers toward the GIs, who had come to Great Britain with more money and nattier-looking uniforms.” Days after the United States entered the war, Winant began acting as an intermediary between U.S. military authorities and British officials to try to make the invasion of American troops as peaceful as possible.
When Eisenhower arrived in London in June 1942, he became a fully committed partner in Winant’s effort. Like the ambassador, the general was concerned about the material and psychological strains placed on British society by the massive influx of his countrymen. “Every American soldier coming to Britain was almost certain to consider himself a privileged crusader, sent there to help Britain out of a hole. He would expect to be treated as such,” Eisenhower later wrote. “On the other hand, the British public looked upon itself as one of the saviors of democracy, particularly because, for an entire year, it had stood alone as the unbreakable opponent of Nazism.”
As always for Winant—and for Eisenhower, too—education was the key to creating mutual understanding. Both men were instrumental in launching a U.S.-British program to teach GIs about Britain before they arrived there. A film co-produced by the British Ministry of Information and U.S. Office of War Information, and starring Burgess Meredith in the role of a U.S. soldier, demonstrated how different the two countries were, despite their common language, and gave tips to American troops on how to avoid offending the British. Those en route to Britain also received a handbook written by the British-born novelist Eric Knight, who had become a U.S. citizen. “The British will welcome you as friends and allies,” Knight wrote. “But remember that crossing the ocean doesn’t automatically make you a hero…. You are coming to Britain from a country where your home is still safe, food is still plentiful, and lights are still burning. So stop and think before you sound off about lukewarm beer, or cold boiled potatoes, or the way English cigarettes taste…. Don’t make fun of British speech or accents. You sound just as funny to them but they will be too polite to show it.”
Having built up, in Anthony Eden’s words, “a remarkable personal relationship with the people of Great Britain,” Winant now drew heavily on that relationship in his parallel effort to prepare the British public for the American troops’ arrival. His campaign included participation in a series of BBC broadcasts called Let’s Get Acquainted.
For the rest of the war, much of Winant’s time and effort was spent trying to resolve problems relating to the American incursion and to foster a good relationship between U.S. servicemen and their British hosts. Although he worked closely with Eisenhower, the general was gone from Britain for much of the war—in North Africa from November 1942 to January 1944 and in France after June 1944. When Eisenhower was in London, his attention was necessarily focused on the upcoming military campaigns; as a result, he left many of the details of the American-British relationship to the ambassador and his subordinates. “No one else could possibly have been so effective as yourself in helping me solve many important problems which, without your assistance, might well have had the most serious results,” Eisenhower wrote to Winant shortly before leaving for North Africa in late 1942. “I want you to know that any success that may spring from our present military efforts will be, in no small measure, due to you.”
When American military men got into trouble, Win
ant was largely responsible for ensuring they would be judged by their own authorities rather than by British courts. Shortly after the first GIs arrived in the country, he read in a newspaper that an American soldier found guilty of robbing a cab driver at gunpoint had been sentenced to a whipping as well as to a six-month jail term. Winant persuaded the British home secretary, Herbert Morrison, to cancel the whipping. Then he joined forces with Eisenhower and Eden to press for legislation giving U.S. military authorities sole jurisdiction over criminal offenses committed in Britain by American servicemen. The issue, not surprisingly, was highly controversial, but, thanks in no small part to Winant’s close relations with the Foreign Office and many MPs, the law, which applied to no other Allied force, was passed by Parliament with little opposition.
THE TROOP-RELATED problems with which Winant and the U.S. military had to cope were many and various, ranging from an epidemic of traffic accidents caused by Americans driving on the wrong side of the road to the destruction of huge swaths of English countryside for the building of U.S. airfields and training grounds. In East Anglia, American crews felled centuries-old hedgerows, trees, and thatched cottages, and plowed up hundreds of thousands of acres of prime farmland to build their mosaic of airbases. Watching a farmer chase a U.S. military surveyor off his beet field one day, Robert Arbib, an Army engineer, felt a pang of sadness and loss. A Yale graduate and amateur conservationist, Arbib knew that, no matter how hard the farmer fought, his “heritage and masterpiece” would soon be buried under eight inches of concrete. “The war,” Arbib later wrote, “wrecked this man’s monument—his family’s monument—just as surely as bombs wrecked the monuments of architects and stonemasons when they exploded beautiful churches in London.” But Arbib, who would become a National Audubon Society executive years after the war, acknowledged that most of his engineering and construction colleagues failed to share his sensitivity to despoiling nature: they “saw it as a job to be done and went to work with no remorse.”
In Devon, on the southwest coast of England, there was similar angst when the British government in late 1943 ordered the eviction of several seaside villages and towns, together with some five hundred farms, so that American forces could use the area for amphibious training in preparation for D-Day. As one writer noted, “compensation was minimal, complaints unproductive.” Without the exercises, the U.S. military argued, the invasion of France would fail; military leaders enlisted Winant’s aid to put pressure on Churchill and the cabinet to authorize the evictions. When the plan was announced, the U.S. consul in Plymouth reported considerable criticism of the “autocratic and undemocratic methods” used in banishing some 2,700 people from their homes and livelihoods for the indefinite future.
As they left, Anglican vicars in the area pinned a notice from their bishop to the front doors of their evacuated churches. Addressed to “our United States allies,” the notice read in part: “This church has stood for several hundred years. Around it has grown a community which has lived in these houses and tilled these fields ever since there was a church. This church, this churchyard in which their loved ones lie at rest; these homes, these fields are as dear to those who have left them as are the homes and graves which you, our Allies, have left behind you. They hope to return one day, as you hope to return to yours, to find them waiting to welcome them home.”
Naturally, these evacuations and the destruction of British property did nothing to endear Americans to the British, nor did they help Winant’s and Eisenhower’s attempts to promote a greater mutual understanding. Complicating that job even further was the lack of interest on the part of many GIs in getting to know their British hosts. Before being shipped to Britain, a sizable number of American troops had never been outside their home states before, let alone their country. Many came from German and Irish immigrant families that were traditionally hostile to the British. GIs, for the most part, were interested in little but an end to the war and a quick trip home. “They hadn’t wanted to come, so it followed—did it not?—that their hearts were not with us in our hour of need,” remarked a British woman worker in an American Red Cross club. Pinpointing the difference in thinking between the two countries, Harold Nicolson noted that “for us, Anglo-American cooperation means security, [but] for them it suggests danger.”
The problem was exacerbated by the fact that most Britons encountered Americans only when the GIs were off duty. Trying to relieve the regimentation of Army life and the boredom of endless training, they invaded pubs, talked loudly, got drunk, picked up women, and in the words of the anthropologist Margaret Mead, acted “as if they owned the world.” As Maurice Gorham, a BBC executive, put it, “We never saw an American soldier doing anything.” When Gorham traveled to France after D-Day and observed “how the Americans could look when they were on the job, I longed to bring a handful of them back to London and say to the people in Piccadilly, ‘Look, these are Americans, too.’ ”
Gorham believed, as did Winant and Eisenhower, that the GIs in Britain were too isolated from the British people. Their camps and bases were American oases, with their own newspapers, radio programs, and movies—and little communication or interest in the world outside. That mentality was fostered by many American commanders, who had the mind-set that “these men are fighters. They are being conditioned for combat. They don’t have to know whether they are in Britain or New Britain; it makes no difference to them.” As a result of their exposure to this “scrupulously American environment,” said Gorham, GIs “had nothing in common” with the British. “They had not eaten the same food, read the same news or even heard the same radio. They had no common ground.”
To a fair number of American troops, brimming over with hustle and pent-up energy, Britain was little more than a small, battered, backward country with primitive living conditions, unfriendly citizens, weak beer, and a sluggish, passive approach to life. “The general reaction of many Americans to the British people was, ‘If they’d forget the damn tea and crumpets in the middle of the afternoon, wake up and get moving, we wouldn’t have to fight their war for them,’ ” recalled one GI.
Some American soldiers were not shy about voicing their unfavorable opinions about the country to the British themselves. One day, two military policemen on duty outside U.S. Army headquarters in London were approached by a pretty young woman in the uniform of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the women’s branch of the British Army. After chatting with the men awhile, she asked them how they liked England. “I like it fine,” one MP politely responded, but the other blurted out, “Lady, they should cut all those goddamn [barrage] balloons loose and let this SOB place sink.” Giving the MPs “one hell of a look,” the young woman turned on her heel and walked away. A civilian guard scurried over. “Do you know who that was?” he asked. “That was Princess Elizabeth. She’s doing her time in the Army.” Years later, the MP who had answered politely declared: “I was so embarrassed I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I shall just never forget that long, hard look” given him and his outspoken compatriot by the future queen of England.
While Princess Elizabeth never made public any disapproval she might have felt about the Americans, many of her countrymen were considerably less restrained. To the British, who had lost so much during the war, their brash, wisecracking U.S. allies seemed like rich, spoiled, arrogant, and boastful children. The American troops, they felt, had no respect or appreciation for their history and institutions and, as Eisenhower noted, no sense of the sacrifices their country had made to stop Hitler and save democracy.
The gulf between the two nationalities was delightfully illustrated in a wartime encounter between Harold Nicolson and a group of GIs touring Parliament. A witty and gregarious habitué of White’s and other London clubs, Nicolson was—in addition to being a member of Parliament, novelist, biographer, and former diplomat—the husband of the writer and Bloomsbury denizen Vita Sackville-West. A graduate of Oxford’s Balliol College, he had always considered himself superior to m
ost men, but especially to Americans. Not surprisingly, then, he reacted with utter dismay when asked one day to act as a tour guide around Parliament for a group of American soldiers.
“In they slouched,” Nicolson wrote that night to his two sons, “chewing gum, conscious of their inferiority in training, equipment, breeding, culture, experience and history, determined in no circumstances to be either interested or impressed.” In the House of Lords chamber, Nicolson and his bored Americans ran into another covey of U.S. troops, being shown around by none other than Sir John Simon, the British lord chancellor and former foreign secretary, who had been one of the foremost champions of appeasement in the 1930s. The pompous, self-important Simon proceeded to lecture the two groups—”fifty blank faces, their jaws working at the gum”—about the operations of the House of Commons and House of Lords. “Now,” said Simon, “come to my room, boys—or should I call you doughboys?—and I will show you the Great Seal.” Nicolson described the scene that followed:
Through the corridors they slouched apathetically, expecting to be shown a large wet animal such as they had seen so often at the aquarium in San Francisco. But not at all. All they were shown were two cylinders of steel with a pattern inside. And then a man fetched the mace for them to see. “I must now ask you, my friends, to leave me to my labours. Even a Lord Chancellor sometimes has work to do. Harold, perhaps you will conduct our friends to the exit?” Harold did. We slouched along to Central Hall. To my surprise and pleasure, one of the doughboys suddenly ceased chewing, flung his wad of Wrigley into his cheek with a deft movement of his tongue, and said, “Say, Sur, who was that guy?”
CONVINCED THAT DEEPER personal contact would help lessen the power of stereotypes and increase rapport between the soldiers and the British, Winant and Eisenhower, supported by Anthony Eden and the Foreign Office, strongly promoted a program encouraging GIs to visit British homes. Eisenhower felt, Harry Butcher wrote, that “if an American soldier has the opportunity of living, say, for a weekend, in the home of a British family … there could be developed a much greater degree of friendliness and companionship than if both are standoffish.” The idea had been advanced by Lady Reading’s Women’s Voluntary Service, whose members had provided the only hospitality to newly arrived GIs in the early days of the Anglo-American alliance, welcoming them at British ports with sandwiches and cups of tea. In proposing the home visits, Lady Reading told the women of WVS: “This is a wonderful opportunity to get to know the people with whom our destiny is now completely bound up.” Following Winant’s advice that Americans shouldn’t add to British privations, Eisenhower suggested that, when troops did visit British families, they should take with them food items that were hard to find in the country, like meat, fats, and sweets.