Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (23 page)

Even so, the camps could not be built fast enough to house the tens of thousands of Americans who arrived weekly, and soon enough the new arrivals were being billeted in local hotels. The hotel owners received compensation from the British government, though they were not asked to give their permission. One widow who owned a small tourist hotel in the seaside town of Torquay—a hotel much like Fawlty Towers, depicted in the popular late 1970s British television series—found this out in most dramatic fashion. She had been informed by the authorities that her property was being commandeered by the Americans. It was nonetheless a shock on the night of January 29, 1944, when trucks pulled up to her door and soldiers began clomping into the building in their “heavy army boots” and headed upstairs. All that night, and for some days afterward, the woman and her daughter huddled fearfully in their ground-floor apartment listening to the foot traffic on the other side of the door and hearing the strange accents of her alien occupiers. Eventually, however, she met some of her “guests” and gradually got to know them. Soon enough she began inviting them downstairs to listen to the radio in the evenings. When they finally left months later, there were hugs and tears all around.
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In a few cases, Americans were billeted in private homes. The authorities resisted such an intrusive option. After all, the Quartering Act of 1774, which had obligated Bostonians to house British soldiers in their inns and homes, had helped spark a revolution. Now that the shoe was on the other foot, some wondered if the British would tolerate an imposed obligation to take American GIs into their homes. Controversial as it was, there seemed to be no other solution. Some half a million men needed to be housed in the seven counties of the so-called West Country, from Land’s End in Cornwall to Portsmouth in Hampshire, and nearly a hundred thousand of them were billeted in private homes. At first it proved awkward. As a platoon of American soldiers marched down the street of a village, the officer in charge would order a halt. Consulting his clipboard to confirm the street number, he would then announce: “Two men are going to live here. Okay, Jones and Smith, go up, knock on the door, and introduce yourselves. That’s where you’re going to live.” Then the column marched on. Jones and Smith had no option but to walk up to the door and knock. Awkward as those first moments were, for the most part the program was quite successful. The soldiers themselves considered it “a great treat,” and the homeowners received a small stipend, critical to many families in a society that had never managed to climb fully out of the Depression before the war struck. By and large the British welcomed the Americans, and some remained in contact with them for the rest of their lives.
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A
MERICANS IN
B
RITAIN
, D
ECEMBER
1943–M
AY
1944

For their part, the GIs recognized that they were not in Kansas anymore. One big difference was simply the scale of things. The huts were more crowded, the roads much narrower, the shops smaller, and the space allotted for almost any activity severely restricted. Britain was not only a small country, it was, to American eyes, a tiny country with miniature-scale everything, from trains to food portions. The natives were just as impressed with the much larger scale of almost everything American, from their big trucks to their big American teeth. One Hampshire resident watching the arrival of the Americans from her window recorded her astonishment at “the size of everything.” And it was not only the size but the quantity. She stood “positively spellbound by the unending procession of American military equipment” as it rolled past her home. In a society where scarcity had been the hallmark of daily life for most of a generation, such abundance was positively world-shattering.
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Feeding and supplying an army of a million men was an enormous logistics problem, and given the limits of Allied shipping, it made sense to supply the American occupiers with locally produced food whenever possible. The British were willing enough, even in some cases eager, to take on this responsibility, seeing it as a way to pay back the United States for all the support it had provided through Lend-Lease. They even referred to it as “reverse Lend-Lease.” The difficulty was that the American troops recoiled at the kind of fare that was available in Britain in 1943. This was not entirely unexpected. Roosevelt himself had decreed the year before that “American
soldiers could not live on British rations.” From the start, the GIs were allocated more meat (12 ounces per day) than British soldiers (8 ounces per day), and far more than the ration for British civilians (4 ounces per day). On the other hand, most of that meat was mutton, or sometimes pork. For many Americans, “meat” was synonymous with “beef,” and beef was in very short supply in England, where most of the cattle were dairy cows. American sailors fared little better. In September 1943, Stark had decreed that U.S. naval personnel should call on the Royal Navy for “general stores, services, fresh provisions, and fresh vegetables, bread, cakes, and pastries.” Unfortunately, the Royal Navy was no better off than the troops ashore, and sailors on U.S. ships got mostly powdered eggs, powdered milk, and powdered potatoes. Their principal meat was Spam, “with some bologna thrown in now and then.” For soldiers and sailors alike, vegetables were also a problem. They were plentiful enough, but the GIs objected to both the type and the quality. The most readily available vegetable was Brussels sprouts, which Americans almost universally despised.
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Even the bread, instead of being made of enriched wheat flour, was made of barley and oats.
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If food was a source of complaint, the Americans in Britain seemed never to be short of what the British called “sweets”: candy and gum. From the beginning, Marshall had recognized that a civilian conscript army had to have access to certain benefits, including Hershey bars, chewing gum, and Coca-Cola, as well as American-made cigarettes, regular mail service, and a well-stocked post exchange, or PX. Despite the shipping problem, each American division was allocated thirty-two thousand tons of supplies, which gave the U.S. Army a higher “tail-to-teeth” ratio (tons of supply per front-line soldier) than any other military service in the world. Almost at once, these American luxuries became a kind of ersatz currency in the developing relationship between American occupiers and British residents. Chewing gum had been all but unknown in Britain until the arrival of the
Americans, but the GIs seemed to be constantly working on a wad of gum with their big white American teeth. British children, especially the boys, found that they were nearly always successful when they approached a GI to ask: “Any gum, chum?” Soon it was a common sight to see British schoolboys happily chomping away on their sticks of American gum.
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Quite beyond the question of housing and food, the interaction of the Americans with their British hosts involved a number of more complex issues. British law had long established the precedent that soldiers of any nationality were “subject to all the duties and liabilities of an ordinary citizen” when in the British Isles. That meant they had to abide by the same laws, and were subject to the same penalties, as everyone else. Under U.S. law, however, American soldiers who committed a crime, regardless of where that crime occurred, were subject only to U.S. military law and only to U.S. military courts. It was an indication of British willingness to do almost anything to accommodate the Americans that Parliament quickly passed a special act exempting American soldiers from prosecution for any crimes they might commit in England. Interestingly, the law did not apply to the Canadians, French, Poles, Norwegians, or any other nationality that also had soldiers in England—only to Americans.
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That kind of special treatment bred resentment among some Britons, especially those in uniform. Eisenhower recognized that the British soldiers had grounds for resenting the favored treatment that American soldiers received. “Our scale of pay is much higher,” he noted, “our ration is more elaborate; the amount devoted by the [American] Red Cross and the Government for recreation and amusement is greater.” In addition, British soldiers felt that the carefree Americans simply did not take things seriously enough. Even when on watch, British officers noted that American soldiers “leaned on their rifles, chewed gum, and smoked cigarettes, and generally adopted a most unsoldierly-like attitude.” Off duty, they swaggered into the pubs, talked loudly about how they had come over to pull British chestnuts out of the fire, then plunked down ostentatiously large bills while ordering their pints. A poll taken by a British newspaper revealed that the Americans were less well regarded in England than the Czechs, Dutch, Russians, French, or even the Italians, who until late 1943 were their
erstwhile enemies. British soldiers resented the Americans’ new, clean liberty uniforms that included a necktie, which made them all look like officers. And they resented the medals they wore, including the European Theater of Operations (ETO) medal, issued to every soldier who arrived. As the British put it, the Americans got medals for “just showing up.” Would these men really be able to stand up to the Germans when the time came? One British officer suggested, though only within his own circle, that perhaps the best thing to do was to assign British officers to command American soldiers, in much the same way they commanded colonial troops from India or South Africa, so that they could put a little starch into them.
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One particularly sensitive point was the relationship between American GIs and British women. Because Britain had been at war since 1939, with British soldiers fighting on battlefields from Burma to Egypt (and now in Sicily and Italy), the military-age male population of Britain was little in evidence in 1943. British women were too fully occupied to sit around waiting for them. Nearly half a million British women were in the armed services themselves, and virtually all the rest worked, for there was no unemployment in wartime Britain. Indeed, a wartime British law required that any man who worked less than sixty hours a week and any woman who worked less than fifty-five hours a week also had to serve at least one night a week on fire watch. Of course, all this was new since the war began, and it had bred a dramatic change in the social dynamic. Before the war, respectable women did not go out unescorted, especially in the evening, but due to the dearth of possible escorts those rules no longer applied. Given the new social fluidity, the arrival of a million free-spending, joke-cracking Americans was all but explosive. Brenda Devereux, who was a teenager in the Channel port city of Bournemouth, recalled that when the Americans hit town, “they swaggered, they boasted, and they threw their money about,” unlike British men, who found such behavior vulgar and tawdry. Brenda was “captivated.” “How we loved it,” she gushed. British men, especially British soldiers, blamed the erosion of the old standards on the GIs who, in the famous phrase of the day, were “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” But many Americans felt that equal responsibility belonged to British women, who, liberated from the straitjacketed life of the prewar years, often
welcomed the advances of the GIs with enthusiasm. As one GI put it, “The English girls were a lot friendlier than English men.”
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In an effort to control the burgeoning social revolution, the British government created an agency to provide social outlets for the occupiers. They authorized clubs and other centers for social interaction. However, the fare was sparse, the music bland, and the mood sedate. Americans much preferred the clubs set up and run by the American Red Cross, where the beer was cold, the cigarettes were American-made, and the radios were tuned to the jive sounds of the American Armed Forces Network instead of the drear and pedantic BBC. The British resented the obvious American preference for replicating a piece of the USA in Britain rather than integrating into British culture. Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, complained about it to John Dill. “We had hoped,” he wrote in August 1943, “that the presence of large numbers of American troops … would have done much to develop mutual understanding.” Instead, he reported, “American military authorities in England tend to discourage fraternization as a waste of time.” Similarly, the director of the BBC, Godfrey Adams, betrayed his pique when he remarked that “the American Army authorities are anxious to have everything over here of their own—their own equipment, of course; their own food, their own sports kit to play their own games, and so forth. In a word, pretty well all they require from this country is a piece of land to camp on until the ‘second front’ opens.”
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One slice of American culture that migrated across the Atlantic with the soldiers was the tradition of racial separation and discrimination. As David Reynolds writes in his excellent history of the American “occupation” of Britain, the experience “proved something of a sociological laboratory for black GIs.” The U.S. Army of World War II was still segregated, though black soldiers made up 10 percent of the whole, serving mainly as drivers, as cooks, and on laundry detail, the kind of work that is done mostly by contract laborers in the twenty-first century. When Major General James E. Chaney had been in command, he strongly recommended that no black soldiers be sent to England at all. Roosevelt overruled him, declaring that 10 percent of the Army should be composed of black soldiers, and that this
proportion should be reflected in all command theaters.
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After Eisenhower replaced Chaney in England, he sought to reduce racial tensions by issuing an order that “the spreading of derogatory statements concerning the character of any group of United States troops, either white or colored, must be considered as conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline.” Nevertheless, black American soldiers in England were billeted separately, ate separately, and were generally restricted to their own area unless they were making a delivery or assigned to a work project. White Americans, both officers and enlisted, accepted this as perfectly normal.
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