Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  As always with soldiers away from the battlefield, awaiting action, sex was a problem: GIs became notorious for their predatory behaviour, and any number of naïve English girls succumbed to their advances – so much so that a contemporary joke promoted an alleged new brand of knickers: ‘One Yank and they’re off’. With so many young British men away at the war, it was hardly surprising that visitors took advantage of the vacuum. As the American historian David Reynolds pointed out,

  The disruption of family life in Britain made a young male presence more desirable. The dark, pinched and anxious atmosphere of wartime encouraged escapism and the search for fun.

  For most country folk, the arrival of black soldiers was a revelation – for the black population of the British Isles was still tiny (fewer than 10,000) and confined to ports like Cardiff, Liverpool, Newcastle and London, and people outside those places had hardly ever set eyes on a black person. Somebody put about a rumour that black American servicemen could not talk, but only bark, and this led to exchanges in several Cotswold towns, with black troops barking at local citizens, and locals barking back as part of the edgy joke.

  Nobody was more delighted by the arrival of blacks than Ken Clark, a boy growing up in Monmouthshire:

  He leaned down from his jeep and scooped me up into the passenger seat, and I was dazzled. Gleaming white smile, flashing brown eyes, shining brown skin and a beautiful uniform … Homer was a black American soldier who arrived in Talywain in the autumn of 1943. He was awesomely attractive, a huge man, with a uniform that was well-tailored – all smooth cloth, colourful insignia and very smart …

  Our black friends were friends despite swarms of children following them, tugging at their clothes and asking, ‘Got any gum, chum?’ They never lost their tempers, were always smiling, and were extremely generous. We loved those first American soldiers, and did not even think about colour, except that they were black and we were white – a natural state of affairs.

  Another boy had a similar experience when delivering bread to the cookhouse at Abbotsinch airport, which was manned by black personnel of the US Air Force. He was standing there, looking around, when suddenly he was lifted off his feet by a huge American sergeant.

  I was so small, he simply lifted me and put me on a table like a doll. Then he shook my hand and gave me some chocolate with a big smile, and off he went. I was amazed at the size of him, so I asked some of the other airmen who he was. They looked at me as if I was mad. ‘Sonny,’ one of them said, ‘don’t you recognise him? He’s the heavyweight champion of the world. That is the great Joe Louis himself, the Brown Bomber.’

  In the American military, segregation was strictly enforced. Ditchingham Hall, in Norfolk, was requisitioned for use by the RAF, but handed over to the US Army for occupation by Company A of the 279th Quartermaster Service Battalion. Members of this all-black unit lived in tents on the estate, while an all-white Engineering Company occupied the Queen Anne manor house.

  GIs from the southern states of America were reluctant to accept the fact that in England race relations were far more relaxed than those at home. The result was that open wars broke out, particularly in dance halls and other places of entertainment, when British whites would back up men of West Indian origin against black Americans. International relationships became strained when, to the chagrin of British Tommies, village girls seemed to prefer dashing black American soldiers to white English ones. The girls knew that the blacks were quartered in camps of their own, but they probably did not realize that the separation from whites reflected the strict segregation that still existed in the United States.

  White Americans keenly resented the ease with which black GIs formed relationships, and irritation (or was it jealousy?) often simmered at a dangerous level. ‘One thing I don’t like is the fact that the English don’t draw any color line,’ wrote an Engineer corporal:

  I’ve seen nice-looking English girls out with American Negro soldiers as black as the ace of spades … I have not only seen the Negro boys dancing with the white girls, but we have actually seen them standing in doorways kissing the girls goodnight … [The situation] irks the boys no end, especially those of the outfit that come from the south. No doubt there will be bloodshed in the near future.

  The corporal’s prediction proved all too accurate. The first major altercation occurred in Antrim in October 1942, when a black GI was killed by white American troops because of interracial dating; and in Leicester in 1943 white paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division attacked black GIs escorting white women to pubs and dances.

  It was not only American soldiers who got into trouble. On 7 October 1942 two Canadian marines were on exercise high on the heathery slopes of Hankley Common, near Godalming, in Surrey, when they came on a female arm sticking out of a mound of earth near the top of a ridge. Local police immediately set a guard on the site, pending the arrival of the Home Office pathologist Professor Keith Simpson, who came down from London with a colleague next day. Working carefully with shovels, the two specialists exhumed the sprawling, badly decomposed body of a girl, lying face-down, clad in a green and white summer dress. Her protruding fingers had been chewed by rats, and her remains were alive with maggots.

  Detective work soon established her identity. She was Joan Pearl Wolfe – a girl of twenty-one who had run away from home and taken to living rough in a wigwam built from branches and twigs. The architect of that flimsy shelter was August Sangret, a twenty-eight-year-old French-Canadian private soldier of part Cree Indian birth, stationed at Jasper, a nearby Canadian Army camp. Searches of the area where the girl was found turned up various small belongings scattered about the hill, among them a letter she had written to Sangret, saying she was pregnant by him, and hoped he would marry her. Her simplicity was revealed by the fact that in the days before her death people had seen her knitting baby clothes.

  Forensic analysis by Professor Simpson revealed that she had been stabbed in the back with a knife; that she had fallen on her face, knocking out three teeth; that while lying face-down she had been dealt a tremendously heavy blow on the back of her head which had fractured her skull, and that her assailant had then dragged her body 400 yards uphill to the spot where he half buried her, apparently re-enacting tribal ritual whereby a chief hauled the body of his victim to the highest point in the neighbourhood to advertise his victory.

  Sangret at first denied having killed Joan, but the evidence against him was overwhelming, and during his trial Simpson created history by producing the dead girl’s skull in court, so that the jury could appreciate the severity of the blow that killed her. They found the prisoner guilty, but, strangely enough, recommended mercy. When Sangret appealed, his plea was considered, but rejected, and he was executed at Wandsworth Prison on 29 April 1943. Even though it was one tiny incident in the turmoil of war, its gruesome details gripped the public imagination, for the case had been prominently reported in the newspapers.

  The popularity of black soldiers among English girls posed a difficult problem for the US military authorities, who could not enforce the colour bar which operated at home. In September 1942 General Dwight D. Eisenhower (always known as ‘Ike’, and at that time Commander of the European Theatre of Operations) acknowledged this in a letter to Washington:

  To most English people, including the village girls – even those of perfectly fine character – the negro soldier is just another man, rather fascinating because he is unique in their experience, a jolly good fellow and with money to spend.

  The build-up of black GIs in Britain increased rapidly. At the end of 1942 the total was just over 7000; a year later it had reached 65,000, and by D-Day it was 130,000. The US military authorities could not prevent casual sexual encounters between black Americans and white English girls, many of which took place out of doors: in the summer of 1943 alfresco assignations became so frequent that Derbyshire police began prosecuting couples because of the damage they were inflicting on growing crops (echoes of Shakespeare’s ‘B
etween the acres of the rye/These pretty country fools would lie’).

  One acute problem was that of VD, which was rife both in American troops and in lower-class British women. In the autumn of 1942 the VD rate among GIs in England hit a peak of fifty-eight cases per thousand men (compared with thirty-nine at home), and the problem took on political overtones when, in December, the House of Commons rejected a motion for the compulsory notification of British VD suspects. In 1943, however, Mass Observation recorded a change of attitude among working-class people in London, calling it ‘a minor revolution’, and this led to more active efforts, both military and civilian, to control the spread of the disease. The US Army did all it could to discourage its soldiers from marrying British girls, and the British authorities took a similar line. But in 1944, before D-Day, there was an immense upsurge in weddings as men and women became reckless, driven on by the certainty that huge numbers of GIs would lose their lives in the invasion of Europe.

  In the United Kingdom rape was not a capital crime; but it was in much of the American South, and in the US Army. Thus in April 1944, when two black GIs were sentenced to death by a US Court-Martial for raping a sixteen-year-old girl at Bishop’s Cleeve, near Bath, the British Government was powerless to intervene, as America had exclusive jurisdiction over its own troops, and in due course the men were hanged.

  The case seemed to arouse little public interest; but another which followed immediately after it caused a storm in the press. At about midnight on 5 June 1944 – a few hours before the launch of the D-Day invasion – Leroy Henry, a black truck driver, allegedly raped a thirty-three-year-old woman in Combe Down, a village near Bath. A military court held in a camp near Warminster, before a jury of one black and seven white officers, unanimously found him guilty of rape and sentenced him to be hanged; but the outcry, led by the Daily Mirror, caused a furore: 33,000 citizens of Bath, including the Mayor, signed a petition to General Eisenhower, demanding clemency on the grounds that the woman was a prostitute and had a record of consorting with black GIs for money. It emerged that she had twice voluntarily had sex with Henry, for which he had paid her – and the judgement was quashed after a personal intervention by the General.

  Another phenomenon associated with the military camps was the way they collected dogs. How the soldiers acquired them it was difficult to say, but packs of them assembled with remarkable speed, and often accompanied squads of men on route marches. Whenever a dog disappeared from a farm or a village, the owners usually blamed gypsies and accused them of transporting it to a different part of the country and selling it to the Americans there.

  A month after the arrival of the US Army chiefs, the first American airmen flew in. On 23 February 1942 an advance party of the US Eighth Air Force Bomber Command arrived at RAF Daws Hill, near High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. Chief of the Eighth was Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, an articulate, softly spoken but ardent advocate of strategic bombing, and a natural partner for Air Marshal Sir Arthur (Bomber) Harris, who had just been appointed Commander-in-Chief of RAF Bomber Command.

  Eaker wanted his base to be within five miles of the RAF headquarters so that officers from both commands could attend each other’s briefings with the minimum of travel; and, having scouted the area within a five-mile circle, he decided that the only establishment with suitable buildings was Wycombe Abbey girls’ school, set in a beautiful 160-acre park in the middle of High Wycombe.

  When the Ministry of Aviation requisitioned the property, the school was given only sixteen days to find other accommodation. In the words of the official history, the headmistress’s ‘trust in the School’s security of tenure had been cruelly betrayed’, and after a frantic search for alternative premises had failed, the establishment was forced to close down for the remainder of the war. Not only Wycombe Abbey’s own pupils, but also those of St Paul’s Girls’ School, who had joined them when evacuated from London, were cast upon the world, scattered among more than forty different schools – and the American airmen moved in to what they regarded as ‘sumptuous premises’.

  A few survivors remained in situ, including the headmistress, Miss W. M. Crosthwaite, described by an American officer as a ‘true friend alike of the school and the Eighth’. But she would have been dreadfully shocked if she had known what happened on the first night the Americans occupied her buildings. The enlisted men were sent to sleep in the girls’ dormitories, and soon officers were roused by bells ringing in the teachers’ offices, where they themselves had bedded down. Investigation revealed that, up aloft, above the bell-pushes were signs, ‘If mistress is desired, ring bell’.

  Inevitably the peace of the Abbey’s lovely grounds was torn apart. Subterranean bunkers were dug and lined with bomb-proof concrete, to become operations rooms. A city of tents and Nissen huts sprang up. Machine-gun emplacements sprouted. Bulldozers gouged new roads out of the turf. Tarmac coated a new parade ground. Jeeps scorched over open fields. Inside the Abbey, the school hall was divided into a dozen separate offices, and the various girls’ houses were designated headquarters for Air Force Surgeon, Air Force Engineer, Public Relations Officer and so on.

  After the war one US Air Force officer sought to justify such vandalism by quoting the results which it produced. ‘It is worth recording the achievements of one year of operations conducted from the Abbey,’ he wrote.

  In 1944 the Eighth reached the peak of its offensive power. On December 24th it despatched in one day 2,034 heavy bombers and 936 fighters. Over 21,000 Americans flew in that armada over marshalling yards, communication centres and airfields behind the enemy lines. Many times that number worked on the ground to launch these planes and to direct their assault. During 1944 alone the Eighth hit the enemy with 43,000 tons of bombs … More than 3,000,000 bombs and incendiaries were loaded on the planes, and 53,000,000 rounds of ammunition were hand-linked and loaded. At the Abbey headquarters the telephone exchanges handled as many as 14,000 telephone calls in a single day. Without the smooth operating brain of operations housed in the Abbey, these achievements would have been impossible.

  RAF Bomber Command had begun the war by launching daylight offensives against German industrial installations and cities, but these had proved disastrously expensive, with flak and Luftwaffe fighters taking a heavy toll. By the time the USAF arrived, the RAF had switched to night bombing, leaving the Americans free to mount high-altitude daylight attacks on enemy targets. As always, the Yanks planned on an enormous scale: their aim was to build up a force of 3500 aircraft in the United Kingdom within a year, and they predicted that more than eighty new airfields would be needed, mainly in East Anglia, but some in Northern Ireland.

  Soon American airmen were pouring into England. ‘Rumour was part of everyday life in wartime English villages,’ wrote the air historian Roger A. Freeman (who himself, as a boy, had been thrilled when the Americans slapped down a base on farmland near his home in Suffolk):

  So it was not surprising that when Americans were said to have been seen on the local airfield at Polebrook, Northamptonshire, speculation was rife. Rumours were soon given some substance in June when a troop train pulled into the little country station at nearby Oundle and disgorged several hundred men clad in olive drab, speaking English with accents that most of the locals associated with the cinema. On July 6th native curiosity was roused still further when large, four-engined aircraft marked with a white star on a blue disc background landed at Polebrook.

  These were the first of the Flying Fortresses, the B-17s, which, for most British people, became the symbol of United States’ airpower over the next three years, outshining in public imagination the other American heavy bomber, the Liberator. One factor for which the Americans had not bargained was the fickleness of British and continental weather, with its heavy cloud cover and frequent rainstorms. Used as they were to flying in clear skies, the pilots of Eighth found not only that precision bombing was difficult, but that even assembling a large force of heavy bombers at altitude posed serious
problems. The first combat mission from Polebrook was ordered on the evening of 9 August 1942, but bad weather forced its postponement. On the 11th a B-17, caught in cloud, flew into a mountain in Wales, killing all on board. Next came another postponement, and the group did not take off until the 17th. Then a relatively small force of a dozen B-17s, escorted by RAF Spitfires, carried out a successful raid on railway marshalling yards at Rouen.

  From that modest start the USAF’s efforts expanded mightily until Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk were thickly peppered with American bases, all of them substantial installations. For instance, Ridgewell, in Essex, built for the RAF but taken over by the USAF in 1943 as a heavy-bomber station, needed – besides its runways and hangars – thirty miles of drains, 500 buildings and a sewage plant for almost 3000 people.

  Country people living round the airfields – sometimes right up against them – were fascinated by the size and power of the aircraft, most of which were emblazoned beneath the cockpit windows with a saucy painting of a naked lady and her name – Iza Vailable, Any Time Annie, and so on. Many formations had their own decorators – for instance the 385th Bombardment Group’s resident nose artist, Anne Heyward. Rejected for service in the British Red Cross because she had an Austrian mother, the former art student was taken on by the American Red Cross and became a permanent fixture at the Great Ashfield base near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, painting murals in mess halls and on individual flying jackets as well as on B-17s. Such was her reputation that one B-17 was named after her – Haybag Annie, which flew 105 combat missions.