Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Great Britain

Book Notes #44

Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Great Britain, by David Reynolds, is a book about the American occupation of Britain during WWII. The first several chapters of the book delve too deeply into general WWII history and American military history than is needed for the actual subject matter of the book, unless one is a complete neophyte on such things. Eventually, the book does get to the point where it is discussing the real effects of the massive American troop presence in the British Isles. Operation Bolero established the Bolero Committee, which created the Bolero Plan to manage the troop buildup.

Aside from American involvement, the war itself degraded British culture, for example, in the following way:

P. 34:

“The old barriers between what one journalist called “old-school-tie England” and “cap-in-hand England” appeared to be crumbling under the solvent of total war. James “Scotty” Reston, then a correspondent in London, declared in September: “What centuries of history have not done for this country, Chancellor Hitler is doing now. He is breaking down the class structure of England every night his bombers come over. . . . Why, it has even got so now that total strangers speak to each other on the streets, a completely un-English thing to do. Many people think they are seeing the start of a great movement here.””

Although American textbooks covered some British history, it was minimal and Britain was not precisely viewed as a friendly nation. The era of the “special relationship” had not yet come, and the brief support for the British during the Great War had not transformed the American perception of Britain, which was minimal at that. For the British, America was even less relevant.

P. 35:

“Conservative elements in Britain had therefore been persistently anxious about America as a subversive force, whether political, economic, or cultural. That was to continue, as we shall see, in reactions to Hollywood and to the GIs. Nevertheless, overall, America had been far more peripheral to Britain’s self-image than Britain was to the cultural identity of the United States. This pattern would be reversed in the 1940s, with America looming ever larger for Britain as the latter shrank in interest and significance for the United States. And the GIs played a part in that transposition. But in 1942 all this lay in the future.”

A survey conducted by the BBC reveals that most British had no opinions on America whatsoever.

P. 36:

“In April 1942, four months after Pearl Harbor, a BBC survey asserted that it was “probably not an exaggeration to say that a great many people are simply without opinions of any kind, or even prejudices, about anything so remote as America.” The MOI had reached a similar conclusion in January when gathering evidence for its special report:

“The majority of interviewers agreed that it was the most difficult Survey they had undertaken. The interest in the United States shown by the public was scant. Most interviewers added that they were surprised at the indifference they had encountered. . . . An interviewer of more than four years experience remarked, “I met so many ‘Don't knows’ that even I began to feel embarrassed.””

The American soldier had one foot in the military and the other in civilian life. Most soldiers were drafted and were not professional soldiers by trade. Those who were staged in Britain for months or years (in the army, not the Air Corps), did no fighting and did not participate in military action until Operation Torch or as late as D-Day.

P. 71:

“In 1944 the playwright Arthur Miller was commissioned as script-writer for a movie about the real life of “GI Joe.” Traveling around army camps Miller became aware that “the American soldier is a much more complicated character than he is ever given credit for being. He cannot be written into a script as though he were a civilian wearing a brown suit with metal buttons, nor can he be regarded as a ‘soldier,’ a being whose reactions are totally divorced from civilian emotions.” In similar vein, historian Lee Kennett has observed that the GI was “suspended between two ways of life. . . . Physically he left civilian life, yet mentally he never joined the Army; he was in the service but not of it.” Understanding the dual identity of these citizen soldiers is essential if we want to make sense of their conduct in wartime Britain.

The fundamental point about the GIs is that most were conscripts.”

Because the soldiers were conscripted and without a real purpose, and lack the esprit de corps of a well-disciplined professional army like the British (who relied very much on punishment), the Americans required a higher standard of life, more akin to the generally higher quality life they had come to know after the Depression ended.

P. 88:

“In the U.S. Army, therefore, morale was always in danger of being equated with welfare. The American way of life not merely sustained the troops, it became their surrogate war aim. Home itself had become an ideal, a metaphor—as shown in journalist John Hersey’s classic story about U.S. Marines on Guadalcanal in October 1942. “What are you fighting for?” he asked them. There was a long silence.

“Their faces became pale. Their eyes wandered. They looked like men bothered by a memory. They did not answer for what seemed a very long time. Then one of them spoke, but not to me. He whispered:

“Jesus, what I’d give for a piece of blueberry pie.””

Providing troops abroad with their “blueberry pie” became a prime object of Army policy. Even more than at home, welfare seemed vital to warfare. Yet even if material comforts could be provided, they were rarely enough to dispel the ennui of an army of occupation. There had to be a sense of purpose as well. In Britain, that was particularly hard to generate because combat was endlessly postponed.”

Although Americans were stationed in Britain from 1942 onward, it was not until a few months before D-Day that the country underwent a massive “occupation” by a foreign army.

P. 104:

“On the eve of D-Day there were at least 1,650,000 members of the United States armed forces in the British Isles, more than double the number at the end of 1943. […] the intense period of occupation was much briefer than often thought. The real buildup of American personnel—ground troops, airmen, and sailors—occurred only in the six months prior to D-Day.”

As I mentioned in the beginning of the review, it is not until around page 100 that the book actually starts to get into the effects of the occupation, which I found quite irritating. I would suggest that one could start reading the book at Chapter 8: Making Space, which begins with a story about the massive training spaces the American military was accustomed to in the homeland.

P. 107:

“Even in the United States, of course, there were limits to the land available for Army use. In January 1942 Marshall grudgingly instructed that, to avoid “unnecessary expense,” camps for infantry divisions would be “limited in acreage to that necessary for sound training and will generally not exceed 40,000 acres.” But by British standards forty-thousand acres per division was an unheard-of indulgence, equivalent to nearly half the Isle of Wight. And most GIs did basic training in the vast camps of the old Confederacy—the biggest, Benning and Bragg, being around 100,000 acres. Facilities there may have been primitive in the hell-for-leather expansion of 1942, but space for accommodation and training was not an issue. When the War Department decided to establish a Desert Training Center to simulate conditions in North Africa, Patton and his staff flew out to California in March 1942 to reconnoitre. After surveying a barren wasteland about the size of Pennsylvania, he selected some sixteen thousand square miles and had the center in operation within weeks. It was as if he had taken over one-third of England.

As Patton established his empire in the California desert, Gen. Marshall was in London telling the British that they would need to find room for one million GIs by the following spring. Hastily the combined Anglo-American Bolero committee addressed the administrative nightmares this would pose. In early meetings there was even talk about the need to “evacuate towns wholesale and hand them over to the armed forces.” The panic abated somewhat as it became clear that the Marshall Plan was utopian, and in 1942-43 Bolero planners struggled to make meaningful logistic projections amid the fluctuations of grand strategy. In the end there were four Bolero Key Plans. But the guidelines laid down in the early weeks set the pattern for the whole American occupation.

British forces were concentrated in southeastern England, against the residual possibility of invasion. U.S. troops and supplies would arrive in the ports of western Britain on the Clyde, Mersey, and Bristol Channel. For logistic reasons it therefore seemed sensible to assume that in an invasion of France, the British would be on the left (east) and the Americans on the right, with a dividing line around the Isle of Wight. Such thinking was also administratively convenient. because it coincided with the borderline between the British Army’s Southeastern and Southern Commands. Therefore the Bolero planners quickly concluded that the U.S. Army should gradually take over Southern Command’s facilities from Hampshire west to Cornwall. This would constitute the base of an American triangle. Supply and communication facilities from there towards the northwestern ports would form the other two sides of the American area, with an apex in the West Midlands. Although Torch delayed execution of these plans. leaving only one U.S. combat division in Britain in the winter of 1942-43, the eventual buildup of 1943-44 followed their outline. Of the twenty American divisions in Britain at the beginning of June 1944, sixteen were in the southern triangle.

The Marshall Plan of 1942 was superimposed on and interwoven with the project of creating a vast American bomber force in England. In this case the strategic and logistic geography pointed to East Anglia. That was the area of England closest to Germany yet partly protected by the fighter screen around London and the southeast. Numerous RAF airfields were already in existence or under construction and space was available for new bases as needed. RAF Bomber Command would gradually be moved north into Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. As with ground troops, the decision to mount Torch undercut expectations of a vast buildup in 1942-43. But the eight RAF bases around Huntingdon, some sixty miles north of London, that Gen. Eaker took over in the spring of 1942 formed the nucleus of what would be a vast Army Air Force empire by 1944. There was a significant 9th AAF presence by D-Day in Kent to provide tactical support for the invasion forces, and the huge maintenance depot at Burtonwood near Manchester constituted another AAF pocket, but the bulk of the 426,000 American airmen were located in Norfolk and Suffolk. It was as if 130 airbases had been dropped down in the state of Vermont.

On a smaller scale, Northern Ireland was another important American area. This was also a legacy of decisions made early in 1942 when two U.S. divisions were sent there to complete their training and assist in its defence. Although both departed for North Africa at the end of the year, the infrastructure for an American presence had been established. When Bolero resumed in late 1943, Ulster became an essential holding area and training ground for troops awaiting space in England. Four American combat divisions (the 2nd, 5th, 8th, and 82nd Airborne) were there at the end of 1943. In addition, Londonderry remained a significant naval base; there was a major aircraft repair depot at Langford Lodge, twenty miles west of Belfast; and five AAF bases were engaged in the vital task of training replacement bomb crew for units in England. The rundown after D-Day was rapid but in early 1944 GIs seemed omnipresent in Ulster, peaking at 120,000.”