Annabel Venning
IT WAS a quiet Sunday night in the Cornish town of Launceston in September 1943. Most locals were heading for bed and the pubs were closing. A few Land Girls were sitting in the market square chatting to some American military policemen when the sound of marching boots was heard.
Suddenly, through the blackout gloom, gunshots rang out. Panicking civilians ran through the town screaming. A casualty cried out – he had been hit.
Even at this stage of the war, fears of an invasion from Nazi-occupied Europe were never far from anyone’s minds. But the shots that night had nothing to do with the Germans. The attack force opening fire was made up of American soldiers – and their targets were their own countrymen. It was, in fact, a mutiny.
The astonishing scenes resulted in a sensational court case and raised questions about exactly what kind of behaviour could be tolerated from our closest allies, because the attack was fuelled by imported racism that had created a deep divide among US forces posted in Britain ahead of D-Day.
Now a fascinating new book reveals the full story of the little-known Launceston mutiny, and shines a spotlight on this highly controversial aspect of the US presence in wartime Britain.
While black servicemen were mostly welcomed as saviours by the British public, many of their white comrades brought the deeply entrenched attitudes of the American South to these shores – leading to race riots, murders and mutinies.
The first American troops arrived in Britain just six weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on January 26, 1942, as a band played The Star Spangled Banner to welcome them.
Ship after ship of American servicemen arrived in the following months and, by May 1944, a month before D-Day, nearly two million American servicemen were stationed in Britain.
Although there were some complaints that “the Yanks” were “overpaid, over-sexed and over here”, for the most part the friendly, generous Americans were popular with their British hosts.
There was, however, one characteristic of the US military many British found utterly unacceptable. The American Army was segregated with black-only units. Black soldiers were generally assigned non-combat roles as labourers, drivers, kitchen and domestic staff.
THE British government, desperate to accommodate their American allies, decided they could not interfere, but they would not actively support segregation or racial discrimination against troops as it was contrary to government policy.
Therefore British police were told they should “not make themselves responsible in any way for the enforcement of such orders”.
But many ministers and senior officials felt deeply uneasy with this compromise.
Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden’s private secretary felt the American military’s attitude to its black servicemen was a “great ulcer on the American civilisation”.
And the Minister of Information, Brendan Bracken, wrote in the Sunday Express that racial prejudice “should die a natural death as
segregated when entertained by stars
many prejudices have done”. Although some Britons clearly held racist views, on the whole black GIs were preferred to their sometimes swaggering white counterparts.
“It is difficult to go anywhere in London without having the feeling that Britain is now Occupied Territory,” reported George Orwell.
The “general consensus of opinion”, he wrote, was that the only US soldiers with “decent manners” were the black GIs.
The “black Yanks” were pleasantly surprised by British attitudes towards them.
“They are very friendly towards us and treat us like they do the white soldiers,” said one.
Indeed, many Britons were angered when they witnessed “Jim Crow” – racial segregation – practices on British streets. “I have personally seen the American troops literally kick, and I mean kick, the coloured soldiers off the pavement,” recalled an appalled factory worker in Blackpool.
A publican who was asked to segregate his pub said he would gladly do so. When American military officers returned to check, the owner had put up a sign stating that only black GIs were welcome.
Women found the black GIs more gentlemanly than their white counterparts.
“The girls really go for them [the black GIs] in preference to the white boys,” noted an American corporal. “A fact that irks the boys no end.”
As more black soldiers arrived in Britain, race-related altercations became more frequent. Locals often sided with the black soldiers, who they viewed as the underdogs of American policy, reveals Kate Werran’s new book, An American Uprising In Second World