Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (24 page)

The British, however, had no legacy of domestic slavery and no tradition of race separation; at the time, there were fewer than eight thousand black residents in all of England. Consequently, while Americans of any color were novel and therefore innately interesting, black Americans were especially intriguing. Moreover, while white Americans often displayed a brash confidence, blacks were polite, deferential, even courtly. In many venues, the black soldiers were more popular with the British than the white soldiers were. “Everybody here adores the negro troops,” a woman in Wiltshire wrote, “but nobody likes the white Americans. They swagger about as if they were the only people fighting the war, they all get so drunk…, while the negroes are very polite.” A story that was popular at the time, and which was still being told in Devon a half century later, involved the reaction of one local when asked what he thought of the American soldiers. “They’re right fine blokes,” he said, “but I don’t much care for the white buggers they brought with ’em.”
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For many Americans, especially from the South, the very idea that white women of any nationality would “walk out” with black men was not only disorienting but intolerable. Often the very presence of black soldiers in a pub led to fights, as white American soldiers sought to defend the cultural traditions they had been born to. On rare occasions the fights were serious
enough that men were killed. The British were horrified by this and sometimes came to the aid of black soldiers who were under attack from a crowd of angry white Americans. In the end, however, the British were compelled to adjust. Their perceived need for American military partnership proved the trump card, and the British accepted, without embracing, the racial code imposed on them by the Americans. Pubs were designated as either black or white, or in some cases blacks and whites were allowed access only on alternate days.
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THE PRINCIPAL ACTIVITY
of the American troops in England was training—especially training for amphibious assault. Except for those veterans of the North African campaign who were transferred back to Britain in November 1943, most of the GIs were raw recruits in their teens and early twenties, and their officers hoped to complete their combat training in England. Morgan ordered that “advanced amphibious training … be initiated without delay.” In such training, not only did Brits and Yanks have to learn to work together, but so did Army and Navy units, which was no sure thing. Moreover, it was essential “to familiarize troops and naval units with conditions peculiar to [the] English Channel.” The goal was to conduct combined training exercises “under conditions similar to those which prevail in the Channel.”
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To effect this training, the Americans made a number of requests to the British Government for large tracts of land for military exercises. In addition to the forty thousand acres used to house the Americans, and well over twice that amount devoted to American air bases in East Anglia, the United States in September 1943 requested an additional 191,000 acres in southern England for armored training. The British minister of agriculture protested that this would devastate the country’s food and dairy production at a time when Britain could barely feed its people, much less its voracious guests. Nevertheless, though the size of the tract was reduced to 141,000 acres (220 square miles), the British agreed to this, too, assigning much of the Salisbury Plain and the Channel coast west of the Dart River to the American Army.
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Generous as that was, it seemed severely restricted by American standards. For comparative purposes, when George Patton set up a desert
training area in America in the months before Operation Torch, he had appropriated a site in California that was over ten
million
acres (sixteen thousand square miles). In England, that would have constituted one-third of the entire country. The necessarily restricted area set aside for training in Britain meant that much of that training consisted of small arms practice and road marches, with only limited opportunity to maneuver in units larger than a battalion. One American soldier estimated that he had marched some three thousand miles while in England, but during all that time, he had very little training in combat exercises. Navy signalman Paul Fauks recalled that “there wasn’t a lot of training,” and when there was, it consisted of going into a field, pitching a tent, digging a hole, and sending out practice messages in code. Such exercises soon “became repetitive and very boring.” It didn’t help that even in southern England the nights were cold and damp in what one officer called “the moisture-laden, bone-chilling Devon countryside.”
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If the training was boring and repetitive and the weather often cold, at least the surroundings were picturesque. Aside from Cornwall, the County of Devon is the westernmost piece of England, stretching from Dartmouth, Paignton, and Torquay on the Channel coast fifty miles north to the Bristol Channel. A barren and rocky moor (Dartmoor) occupied the middle of it, but it was along the coasts that the Americans established their bases for amphibious exercises: Appledore, on the north coast near Barnstaple, and Slapton Sands, on the English Channel just west of Dartmouth. To many Americans, South Devon in particular looked exactly like what they imagined England to be: small cottages dotting low rolling hills that were checkerboarded with vivid green pastures separated by hedgerows. In a typical reaction, one GI noted upon arrival, “The land … is lovely, divided by hedgerows, green and beautiful.” Those hedgerows looked benign enough, though in fact they were thick rock walls from which a heavy growth had sprouted over several centuries. Indeed, one reason for choosing South Devon as a training site in the first place was that the hedgerows there were superficially similar to those in the
bocage
country in Normandy where the Americans would have to fight after they had seized the beaches.
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Devon was also desirable because of its relative isolation. Large-scale amphibious training could proceed there without attracting too much attention. South Devon was therefore endowed with the new title of “The American Army Battle School,” and to ensure that the training was realistic, with full use of live fire, the three thousand or so residents were told that they would have to move out, abandoning their farms and villages, their churches and their pubs—indeed, empty the countryside altogether—in order to make way for the Americans. This came as a complete shock to the Devonians. It was one thing to turn farmland over to the Americans for their campsites and their armored training; it was quite another to tell Englishmen who had lived there all their lives to get out. Some of the families in South Devon had been there for as long as anyone could remember; in a few of the villages, the Norman churches dated back to the twelfth century. It is one more measure of the British willingness to bend over backward to accommodate the Americans that the Churchill government approved this eviction. With very short notice, the residents of South Devon packed up and left, hoping that the Americans would do no more damage to their homes and farms than was necessary. GIs who arrived at one Norman church in a now-abandoned village found this note tacked to the door:

While the isolation of South Devon was an advantage in many ways, it was also a logistical nightmare. Between those green but solid hedgerows, the country lanes, most of them unpaved, were barely wide enough for a single vehicle or horse cart. Occasional turnouts allowed one vehicle to pass another. Should two vehicles meet face-to-face, one or the other of them had to back down to the nearest turnout so they could squeeze past
each other. In prewar days, drivers might pause there to discuss the weather or local events before proceeding. Once the hundreds of thousands of Americans began arriving, however, the country lanes became the source of much cursing and gear grinding by the drivers of the oversize two-and-a-half-ton American trucks (the famous “deuce and a half”) that plied the roads in an almost unending stream from the summer of 1943 until the invasion began the following year. The Americans built 17 miles of new roads, widened 230 miles more, and built five new bridges, but in spite of that, between July 1943 and March 1944 there were some twenty-four thousand reported traffic collisions on these country lanes, a full quarter of them at speeds of less than five miles per hour, which suggests they were incurred as vehicles sought—unsuccessfully—to maneuver past each other while their drivers colored the air with scatological imprecations.
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FROM THE BEGINNING
, the Anglo-American partnership had traveled a bumpy road. Despite subsequent talk about the “special relationship,” and the much-publicized friendship between Churchill and Roosevelt, the tension between the two English-speaking allies never fully disappeared. First at the conference table, then in North Africa and Sicily, and finally in England, the cultural collision of Brits and Yanks threatened but never quite broke the partnership. Mostly this was due to mutual need. The British needed American men, American money, and American equipment, and they were willing to surrender convenience, pride, and even a little bit of sovereignty to get them. The Americans needed the British, too. Most of all, perhaps, they needed Britain itself—the base from which the invasion would be launched, though they also needed British experience even if they too often undervalued it.

If the cultural and institutional differences were evident in the Allies’ divergent approaches to grand strategy, they were also evident in the day-today operations of the military forces. As Morgan put it, “It seems that the word ‘command’ has two different meanings in our two services.” In the United States Army and Navy, it was common practice for senior officers to outline an objective along with a rough timetable, and then delegate the details of its execution to their subordinates. The British found that
approach slipshod at best, and very likely dangerous. In their view, it was essential to ensure that there was complete agreement and understanding of virtually every facet of an operation up and down the chain of command. This was especially true of any operation in which Winston Churchill had a stake. Indeed, it was Churchill himself who offered what was perhaps the most overt expression of this view. “In practice,” he wrote, “it is found not sufficient for a Government to give a General a directive to beat the enemy and wait to see what happens.” To him it was clear that “a definite measure of guidance and control is required from the Staffs and from High Government authorities.” By which, of course, he meant himself.
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Another significant difference, not unrelated to the first, was that while the Americans were always in a hurry, the British tended to adopt a more careful, analytical approach to most issues, an approach that struck the Americans as old-fogeyism. The British were aware that the Americans thought them cold and reluctant. One very senior British officer wrote his wife, “No doubt after years of war we look more closely at things before we say what we will or will not do, whereas the Yanks are new at this game and have the enthusiasm of beginners.” He also recognized an important reality: “They are as good for us as we are for them.”
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To the British, evidence of this “enthusiasm of beginners” was manifest in the American tendency to throw around nearly unimaginable numbers and seemingly impossible deadlines. The very idea of assembling two million men and five thousand ships in a relatively short period of time struck the British as not only naive but evidence of hubris. In this, at least, both sides were right. The Americans
were
naive, and their boastful confidence certainly bordered on hubris; they undoubtedly benefited from a strong dose of British realism, especially in 1942. Yet the British also underestimated the American ability to produce previously unthinkable numbers of ships, planes, and tanks. Morgan saw all of this in his dealings with both sides. When the Americans proposed a particular operation, Morgan wrote, a common British response was something like this: