Just after 9pm on a cool September evening in 1943, a large group of soldiers calmly walked the mile home to camp where they armed themselves with tommy guns, ammunition and bayonets. Putting themselves into formation, they marched back into town, three-a-breast. The sound of their army-issue boots striking the road for nearly a mile echoed heavily in the pitchy-ink of the blacked-out night-time and is something witnesses remember to this day. It seemed as if a ‘whole company’ of troops was moving through the night, it was said later.
Here, author Kate Werran tell us about African American servicemen in Britain during World War Two.
In England, Major Charity E. Adams, Columbia, South Carolina., and Captain Abbie N. Campbell, Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, Alabama, inspect the first members of the African American Women's Army Corps assigned to overseas service.
Undoubtedly the troops who were on the move were ready for the fight of their lives – it just wasn’t the official enemy they had in their sights. Because unbelievably this was not happening in mainland Nazi-occupied Europe, but on Britain’s homefront – specifically the market town of Launceston in Cornwall. And these were American soldiers. Military police patrolling the town could sense impending danger. ‘Everything was so tense that evening that we thought that something might start,’ said one. Another added that all evening ‘…you could feel the tenseness in the air.’ Even publicans working in the town’s many drinking houses felt this was the calm before the storm. One shut early that evening saying how he just sensed ‘…something brewing.’
Suddenly the marching troops appeared ‘in a body’ from out of the darkness to encircle a group of military policemen, fellow Americans, who were standing chatting next to a jeep parked near the town’s war memorial. ‘We saw forty to fifty soldiers coming up the street. They had overcoats on. They walked up almost in formation, and straight toward us… and [we] thought trouble was about to begin,’ said one of the surrounded. A man, who seemed to be spokesman for the group, said very quietly: ‘Why don’t you let us come into town, come into the pubs?’. Flashlights snapped on. ‘Hands up!’ was shouted. The military police raised their arms and backed up. As they did, ‘I heard bolts open on rifles,’ said the jeep’s driver. There was just time for the terrifying realisation to sink in that their compatriots were not only armed but already taking aim when: ‘I heard a bolt crack and a shot landed at our feet. Someone hollered ‘DUCK’. I jumped in behind the wheel of a jeep.’ Next, a volley of fire. ‘I felt a bullet whizz past me.’ A flashlight revealed a soldier ‘with a denim hat and overcoat firing a rifle from the hip and he was really pumping them out.’ A pause. Then chaos as British soldiers, civilians, WAAFs and Land Army girls, as well as the Americans under fire, scrambled for cover amid ricocheting bullets. One old man told the Daily Mirror the next day: ‘There hasn’t been anything like this since the days of the smugglers.’
No-one knows for sure exactly how many soldiers were armed and fighting that night. What is universally acknowledged is a large number was involved – from the 581st Ordnance Ammunition Company who were firing at soldiers from the 115th Infantry’s Second Battalion. It was all over in five minutes before the shooters melted away into the night. What they left behind was a shot up town centre, soldiers and citizens shaken, store windows in shatters, two hole-ridden US army jeeps (it subsequently took 20 soldiers to lift them bodily away), two sergeants with mashed-up legs, the visiting US army with its reputation hugely-dented and bullet holes in Cornish bricks and mortar which for more than seventy years were the sole reminder of an all-American gunfight army authorities wanted forgotten and tried their best to obscure. Because the inconvenient truth here was that these were members of an African American ordnance company who were taking on the white soldiers who policed them. The level of injuries given the firepower on hand that night shows precisely that wholesale slaughter was certainly not the intent, although military prosecutors defied their own investigators recommendations and insisted on bringing attempted murder charges alongside mutiny et al. The ‘mutineers’ were making a point and it was one that was needed to be made.
African American servicemen
There were around 130,000 African Americans among the 1.5 million US servicemen who were in the United Kingdom at any one time in World War Two – altogether 4 million Americans would come to Britain. But this segregated army had an inherent racial friction which began to spill over into violence with increasing frequency whenever the two races met in Britain’s ‘green and pleasant’ land. Riding on the tide of simmering racial tension in US training camps and explosive riots in five American cities during the long hot ‘bloody’ summer of 1943, this enmity inevitably floated across the Atlantic with each wave of arriving servicemen.
At first it baffled the British. Despite ruling an empire upon which ‘the sun never set’ there were surprisingly few people of colour, roughly 15,000, in Britain during World War 2. Undoubtedly, in such a mono-cultural society, racism was bound to thrive as proved by race riots in 1919 and exemplified by the experiences of Learie Constantine, the West Indian cricketer, who came to live in Britain in the 1920s and described how ‘personal slights’ were ‘an unpleasant part of life in Britain for anyone of my colour.’ But evidence from thousands of censored letters, secret reports from the Ministry of Information’s Home Intelligence division, surveys for Mass Observation (the nascent polling organisation) as well as editorials and letters to newspapers and government departments shows this confusion amongst ordinary Brits soon morphed into outright rejection of the ‘colour bar’ – and decided support for African American troops. From George Orwell who kicked off his first article for Tribune with “The general consensus of opinion seems to be that the only American soldiers with decent manners are the Negroes” to a Blackpool factory worker raging against how “…the American troops literally kick, and I mean kick, the coloured soldiers off the pavement." Whatever British and American officials would have people believe, displays of discrimination and violence shamelessly paraded on British cobbles and village greens provoked a general sympathy amongst ordinary British people for the African American soldiers who came to trial and train for D-Day and put an invisible wedge in Anglo-American relations.
An American Uprising in Second World War England: Mutiny in the Duchy tells the story of the soldiers, the trial and what this meant for Britain, America and what has subsequently been dubbed the ‘special relationship’.
Court
Turning that first page of the original court martial transcript, which arrived courtesy of a freedom of information request, was like beginning a film script. So too was the narrative that developed behind why the shooting happened, which I pieced together using once-secret government documents from various sources including the National Archives, the National Archives of America and the British Library. By the time I found out the targeted soldiers in Launceston happened to be tasked with Omaha Beach on D-day – it felt almost inevitable. The extraordinary timeline around this Launceston uprising made the 581st Ordnance Ammunition Company, the men – and 26 September 1943, the hour. It was a slam dunk of a story and needed to be told, especially since nearly 80 years on nobody knew what had really happened here, why and the ultimate fate of those involved.
The story began with the United States army that came to trial and train for D-Day, which was segregated, mimicking the ‘Jim Crow’ separation of society in the American south. One in every ten of its soldiers was African American and eventually 130,000 came to the UK before journeying to France after D-Day. With the rare exceptions of units such as the Tuskagee airmen and the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, these servicemen soon discovered they would be fighting from the supply side of things - the decidedly more inglorious face of battle incorporating the Quartermaster Corps, the Corps of Engineers and the Transportation Corps. Their training experience was universally discriminatory, oppressive and – all too often - violent. This fractious rubbing alongside of African American and white soldiers was happening in camps across the nation. The Launceston ‘mutineers’ time in training was embarrassingly typical, according to Walter White, secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) who discovered they were repeatedly denied the chance for rest and recreation.
Outside United States Army camps, general racial tension spilled over in the long hot ‘bloody’ summer of 1943 when full-blown fights, riots and clashes flared in five American cities. The Second World War had heightened inequality between black and white communities over housing, work and even who got plaudits for fighting, and feuding broke out first in the streets of Los Angeles. Next it exploded in Detroit leaving 34 dead – 25 of whom were black – before ending in New York when rioting erupted after a policeman killed a black soldier. The ripple effect in the military was almost tangible and inevitably floated across the Atlantic to Britain with each wave of arriving servicemen. It was on this swell that the 581stOrdnance Ammunition Company came riding into Cornwall.
Although ruling ‘an empire on which the sun never sets’, there were surprisingly few people of colour in Britain itself when the Second World War started. The black British community was no bigger than about 15,000 and centred mainly in port cities such as Bristol, Cardiff and Liverpool. Unsurprisingly, in such a mono-cultural nation, racism was bound to exist. Race riots broke out in 1919 around those same British port towns leaving five dead, hundreds injured and 250 arrested. Learie Constantine, the cricketer who moved from the West Indies to Britain in 1923, described how ‘personal slights’ were ‘an unpleasant part of life in Britain for anyone of my colour.’ And this only increased, with depressing predictability, probably more frequently in the upper than lower echelons of British society, once the segregated Americans arrived.
Plentiful anecdotal evidence of American scuffles being played out on English cobbles and greens proliferated as black soldiers were pushed out of pubs, off buses and away from cinemas. However, a fresh look at evidence shows this in fact inspired a powerful British feeling about the visiting American army and race – which was recorded everywhere from Mass Observation and weekly secret Home Intelligence Division reports – to newspaper editorials and letters picked up by the censors. The story was nearly always the same. As George Orwell wrote in his first piece for Tribune: “The general consensus of opinion seems to be that the only American soldiers with decent manners are the Negroes.” Mass Observation, the nascent polling organisation, concluded feelings about Americans was ‘can be fairly sharply divided into feelings about white and coloured troops. As a general rule…the latter have made themselves more liked in his country.’ The feeling came from Blackpool, where one report told: ‘I have personally seen the American troops literally kick, and I mean kick, the coloured soldiers off the pavement’ to Essex when a ‘particularly disgusted’ father protested angrily to the Foreign Office that American white soldiers set upon a black soldier who ‘dared’ to take to the floor with a white woman at a dance.
American disputes
Put simply, the British sided with the underdog and were beginning to involve themselves in American disputes up and down the country. One of the most extreme cases was in Bamber Bridge, Lancashire, where one soldier was killed and several MPs and soldiers injured in an armed incident sparked by heavy-handed military policing in June 1943. Here, the British servicewomen and locals drinking at Ye Olde Hob Inn Public House backed the African Americans. Two hundred odd miles away in Corsham, Wiltshire, just a few days later again the violence of American military policemen towards African American soldiers caused a near riot. Head of Southern Command Sir Harry Haig reported: ‘A large group of civilians gathered and were heard saying: “They don’t like the blacks”; “Why don’t they leave them alone?”; “They’re as good as they are"; “That’s democracy.” The situation eventually developed into one of mass insubordination by the coloured troops, and at one point a coloured sergeant who had been ordered to bring his Company Commander, replied: “We aint no slaves, this is England.” The clash in Launceston is a perfect reflection of both emotions within the US Army and its outward-facing relations with the British home front at that precise moment in time. After that, things only got worse. A month before D-Day, a US Army morale report noted tersely that ‘the whites dislike the Negroes and the Negroes dislike the whites…The predominant note is that if the invasion doesn’t occur soon, trouble will.’ Clearly, the ‘colour bar’ was a wedge in the American army and it was something the authorities were determined to obfuscate.
By a quirky twist of fate the 581st Ordnance Ammunition Company arrived in Cornwall, slap bang in the heart of GI country, in the dying ebbs of that scratchy summer. The 29th Infantry division relocated from Tidworth Barracks, Wiltshire, in May 1943 to Devon and Cornwall where it planted its three principal units and it was the Second Battalion of the 115thInfantry Regiment that came to Launceston and built a base for itself at a farm on the top of a hill nearly a mile from the town’s market square - and half a mile from the African American soldiers’ base at Pennygillam. It is difficult to exaggerate just how much swing and glamour forced its way through the cobbles and winding country roads of this market town edging Bodmin Moor as a result of their arrival. Clinging to the coat-tips of incoming US Army arrivals, it meant untold luxuries like Hershey’s chocolate and Lucky Strike cigarettes to visits from big band leader Artie Shaw and boxing legend Joe Louis. But underneath all the glamour pulsed a racial tension beating at the heart of the US Army which turned some British people against white GIs and hurled an invisible lance into Anglo American relations.
Curiouser still, was that the men arrived days after events in Britain polarised feeling about ‘the colour bar’ or segregation once and for all, starting with that most quintessential bastion of British sport – cricket. On September 3, news leaked that Learie Constantine, captain of the West Indies and a professional cricketer in England since the 1920s, had been thrown out of a London hotel because of American complaints. Newspapers had a field day. The response was a national outcry monitored secretly by the British government’s Home Intelligence Unit. Hot on its heels came the case of Amelia King, a young black British woman from Stepney, who was refused entry to the Women’s Land Army because it was felt white farmers would reject her help solely because of her ethnicity. Instead of taking the rejection lying down, she coolly raised it with her MP who voiced the outrageous situation in Parliament four days after the 581st arrived in Britain – and barely a week after the Constantine scandal erupted. It was the deciding blow. What followed was an almighty row about the blindingly unfair treatment of Constantine and King which rumbled on throughout September and October culminating just days before the Paignton court martial opened with a volcanic poll for Mass Observation revealing 75 per cent of respondents felt ‘definite disapproval’ of the colour bar.
When the 581st Ordnance Ammunition Company arrived in September they had been restricted to their last two camps in America. In their first roll call in Cornwall, they were told they were to be restricted for a third time as they did not have the correct ‘dress uniform’ to go into town – although it didn’t seem to stop fellow white soldiers. It was the final straw. The American authorities tried repeatedly to censor the reporting of the shooting that followed; firstly, by trying to ban the reporting of race in the Paignton court martial which had, by law, to be held in public – a move foiled by a plucky objection from the Daily Mirror. Next it banned the public reporting of the sentence. This was precisely because of what the episode said about the state of its army’s internal relations and the truth it revealed at the heart of what would subsequently be dubbed the ‘special relationship’. George Orwell was alive to it, the trial itself caused Churchill ‘grave anxiety’ and it was something the authorities wished would just go away. But it couldn’t because the shoot out that happened in Launceston one September night in 1943 was both a result and reflection of race relations in Britain in that tunnel of time – of the enmity between white and black Americans and the sympathy of Brits for African Americans. It explained the court martial’s bulging press benches – and why it made headlines all over the United Kingdom and the United States.
An American Uprising in Second World War England: Mutiny in the Duchy recounts what happened next in this fascinating episode that crosses over between military and social history. It is available here in the UK through Pen & Sword Books. The book is available to US readers here.
