Foreign friends and foes!

Wartime Britain was surprisingly cosmopolitan: French sailors, bush-hatted Australian soldiers and exuberant GI's were familiar figures on the streets. There were German soldiers occupying the Channel Islands, and, of course, the spectre of enemy spies everywhere.


IN JANUARY 1942 the first US servicemen began to arrive in the British Isles to set up military bases. About 1.5 million were to pass through the
United Kingdom before the war was over - friendly, outgoing types in stylishly tailored uniforms who spread like a tide across the countryside from East Anglian air bases to West Country army camps. The GIs (so-called because their equipment was all labelled Government Issue) were better paid than their British counterparts and wherever they went they were prone to lavish local people with the fruits of their PX (post exchange) or camp stores.
From the PX came cartons of Lucky Strike and Camel cigarettes; precious nylon stockings that took the place of the silk stockings that had long vanished from the shops; scented soap; razor blades of pre-war quality; chocolate; ice cream and more. Gum-chewing, jeep driving and open-handed with gifts, the 'Yanks' seemed impossibly glamorous - at least to schoolchildren and their older sisters. And their camps and bases were like little pockets of America from which a wealth of things new to British life would spill.
American slang swept the nation. Children also learned of comic-book heroes such as Superman, with his X-ray vision, and super cop Dick Tracy with his two-way wrist TV. English schoolboys who had thrilled to the heroics of Arsenal or Tottenham footballers now slouched in corners, clicking their fingers to the rhythms of swing and jazz gods such as Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Fats Wailer. The American aircraft, with exciting names like Grumann Hellcat, were much admired. A Tyneside man who was aged 13 at the time of the American invasion remembers gawping at the statistics of the Flying Fortress, with its bomb-sight so accurate, so it was claimed, that it could drop a bomb into a pickle-barrel from 20,000 feet, 'and the American troop carriers, huge four-engined monoplanes that made our old biplanes look like rubbish from the Science Museum'.
If the schoolboys were impressed, their sisters were overwhelmed. It was through the Gl's that many British girls received their first lessons in jitterbugging, a dance craze that spread with such enthusiasm that many ballrooms had to ban it to protect their sprung floors. The jitterbug was for the uninhibited - like the Gls themselves. The American visitors took British girls to the best local clubs and restaurants, caring nothing for distinctions of rank and class prevalent in British society.

Good times: American soldiers drink coffee at the Rainbow Corner, a wartime club for GI's near Piccadilly Circus in London. Below: a GI offers British boys candy, a major attraction with sweet rationing in force in Britain.

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The Yanks were sufficiently well paid to 'live it up' in a style unknown to local women, many of whom were doing 12-hour shifts in munitions factories and the like. British girls were captivated. Some 80,000 were to become GI brides, emigrating to America.
Obviously, British men felt less delirious enthusiasm for the GIs, who were often thought of as 'overpaid, oversexed and over here'. The American authorities were aware of the tensions that their relative affluence might create, and the official booklet of advice to US forces reminded servicemen: 'Stop and think before you sound off about lukewarm beer or cold boiled potatoes, or the way English cigarettes taste. If British civilians look dowdy and badly dressed, it is not because they do not like good clothes or know how to wear them. All clothing is rationed.'
Overall, the American arrival was welcomed by a nation very much aware of the crucial part they were playing in the Allied struggle.

 

Spies and aliens

In 1940, it was whispered that invading Germans were being parachuted into Britain dressed as nuns an example of the rumours that circulated in Britain during the war. The edgy atmosphere was not diminished by government posters reminding people that 'Careless Talk Costs Lives!', and 'Walls Have Ears!', and exhorting them to 'Keep It Under Your Hat!' or 'Be Like Dad - Keep Mum'.
The official worry was that information about the positions of armed forces, munitions and ships might reach enemy ears through stray conversations. But the campaign had the effect of suggesting that the Germans possessed vast spy networks in Britain, a notion wildly out of scale with reality.

Over here: American service personnel were issued with a guide to help them come to terms with the British way of life. It contained much sensible and practical advice.

"The British have movies (which they call "cinemas") but the great place of recreation is the "pub". Don't show off or brag or bluster "swank" as the British say. Don't make fun of British speech or accents. NEVER criticize the King or Queen."

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Night Club: Segregated from white American servicemen, Black Gi's mixed freely with British Women

The people who suffered most through spy mania were the many thousands of civilians living in Britain who had been born in what were now enemy states. In 1939, for example, there were 68,000 German, Austrian and Czech nationals in Britain - many of them refugees from Nazi persecution. Most had been rounded up by the summer of 1940, and were being held in bleak transit camps pending internment. In June, when Italy entered the war, there were attacks on Italian restaurants and ice-cream parlours. Partly for their own safety, 4000 Italians were interned too.

I Spy: A poster by 'Fougasse' warns against spies. The few real German agents in Britain were of low calibre. (Picked up after landing by parachute near St Albans, Karel Richter was unable to explain why he was wearing three sets of underclothes.) ​

 

The Occupation of the Channels Islands

They crowded British streets - German soldiers in field-grey uniform, buying rounds in local pubs, winking at shop-girls in Boots the Chemist, marching, too, along the country lanes singing German songs. The occupation of the Channel Islands is one of the war's oddest episodes. Jersey, Guernsey and the smaller islands of Alderney and Sark all succumbed without a struggle to Hitler's invasion forces in the summer of 1940, People were overwhelmed by the strangeness of their situation, for no part of Britain had been occupied by another foreign power since 1066, Suddenly, the swastika was flying over familiar public buildings, At the local Gaumont cinema on Guernsey posters advertised Nazi propaganda films like the feature-length documentary Sieg lm Westen (Victory in the West)

Round Up: Women held in Britain as Aliens are sent to the Isle of Man for internment. Everyone thought it would be like a concentration camp, one recalled. But in the summer of 1943 most had been released.​

The islanders were treated leniently by comparison with many other peoples of Occupied Europe - at least at the outset. Rationing and curfews were imposed, of course, and there was censorship of the Press and books, But German soldiers played football with local men, and children sometimes picked up their marching songs, The occupying troops went to local dances, too, and often turned the heads of impressionable girls, Women who went out with German soldiers were dubbed 'Jerrybags' by other islanders, but there were large numbers of them, attracted by the soldiers' good looks and generosity. Privations were certainly known, however. Root vegetables became the staple of the islanders' diet and families learned to make tea from blackberry or rose leaves. The soap shortage was so bad that even the smallest cut was prone to fester and one doctor gave the name 'Occupation ulcer' to a type of leg sore.
From 1942, the Germans made the islands a key part of their Atlantic Wall defences against Allied invasion. Colossal resources of steel and concrete were poured in to build blockhouses and antitank walls, while thousands of foreign slave labourers were imported to work under the auspices of the Organisation Toot, which was responsible, among other things, for military construction. Several islanders took risks to try and help the handful of escapers. But there could be no assistance for the inmates of Alderney. The isle's population had been almost entirely evacuated, and it became a site for SS camps patrolled by guards with dogs overseeing haggard, pyjama uniformed prisoners.

Jersey 1940: The Evening Post (below) conveys the German Commandant's orders,

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