'Jim Crow' Army

[Hobilar]

The US Army that came to Britain was very much a racially segregated one- a 'Jim Crow' Army, a policy unchanged since the American Civil War, and a policy that would not be changed until 1947 when a Presidential Order ended this miltary apartheid. When black Americans, severely hurt by the depression, began to enlist in the US Army during the 1930s they were assigned exclusively to non-combatant tasks. They could be employed as labourers, transport operators, stevedores, kitchen and domestic staff and stewards, but were forbidden to enlist in the elite Army Air Corps or the Marine Corps. Nevertheless many were employed on Air Force Bases during the war doing a variety of Ancillary jobs, including such hazardous tasks as loading bombs.

After his re-election in 1940 President Roosevelt imposed a quota system on the number of black Americans who would be permitted to serve in the army. This specified that the number of black Americans permitted would be the same as their proportion within the US population-about one in ten. They would however be allowed to serve in all theatres of war.

The British Government initially did not want black GIs to come to Britain and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden even suggested to US ambassador Winant that 'our climate was badly suited to the negroes'. The British population (with only a few examples of outright racism), for the most part did not share the same opinion. To the British public 'They're all soldiers. They've come to fight the same war'. Most Britains saw no reason to distinguish between the white Americans and the black ones, and a lot of people were deeply disturbed by the US army's treatment of its own black soldiers. Shop keepers, Cafe owners and Publicans were often amongst the most incensed. Resenting being dictated to regarding whom they could or could not serve. Most 'welcomed any soldier, regardless of colour who behaved himself and could pay for his drink'.

The US military remained intransigent. A system of 'rotating passes' ensured that black troops (and there were some 130,000 of them in Britain by D-day) would not be allowed to visit the nearest town to their bases on the same nights as white troops. This would occasionally result in some resentment and there were several occassions when violent and sometimes tragic clashes occurred between black and white US troops, including on one occasion a dreadful gunfight outside a pub in Newbury, Berkshire resulting in two black GIs and the publican's wife being killed.