“Riding on the tide of simmering racial tension in U.S. 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.”

By Kate Werran

IT WAS A cool September evening in 1943 and a column of American soldiers were on the move. Fully armed with tommy guns, rifles and bayonets, they marched forward in a loose formation towards their objective.

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. It was something witnesses would remember to this day. It seemed as if a ‘whole company’ of troops was moving through the night, it was said later.

Undoubtedly the GIs were bracing for the fight of their lives. But it just wasn’t Axis forces they had in their sights. Unbelievably, this scene of impending battle wasn’t happening somewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe, but on Britain’s homefront – specifically the market town of Launceston in Cornwall.

Military police patrolling the town could sense impending danger.

“Everything was so tense that evening that we thought that something might start,” said one.

“You could feel the tenseness in the air,” another added.

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 that “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 40 to 50 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 MPs.

A man from the column of soldiers – the apparent spokesman for the group – spoke.

“Why don’t you let us come into town, come into the pubs?”

Flashlights beams were trained on the approaching soldiers when one of them barked an order: “Hands up!”

The police raised their arms and backed up.

“I heard bolts open on rifles,” one of them would later recall.

There was just time for the terrifying realization to sink in; the armed GIs were not only armed, but already taking aim.

“I heard a bolt crack and a shot landed at our feet,” the MP recalled. “Someone hollered ‘duck!” I jumped in behind the wheel of a jeep.”

Next came 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 took part in the fighting that night in Launceston. What is universally acknowledged is a large number was involved and that men from the 581^st Ordnance Ammunition Company opened fire on soldiers from the 115^th 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, shaken soldiers and civilians, store windows in shatters, two bullet-riddled U.S. army jeeps (it subsequently took 20 soldiers to lift them bodily away). There were casualties too: two sergeants with mashed-up legs. Worse, the visiting U.S. Army’s reputation was as holed and dented and the Cornish bricks and mortar which for more than 70 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. The ‘mutineers’ were making a point and it was one that was needed to be made.

There were around 130,000 African-Americans among the 1.5 million U.S. servicemen who were in the United Kingdom at any one time in World War Two – altogether four 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 U.S. 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, the unrest 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 Two.

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 organization) as well as editorials and letters to newspapers and government departments shows this confusion among ordinary Brits soon morphed into outright rejection of the “colour bar” – and decided support for African-American troops.

George Orwell who kicked off his first article for Tribune by observing that “the general consensus of opinion seems to be that the only American soldiers with decent manners are the Negroes.”

A Blackpool factory worker noted “…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 train in the United Kingdom. It drove 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’.

Kate Werran is the author of An American Uprising in Second World War England: Mutiny in the Duchy. After reading History at Oxford University, Werran wrote for local and national newspapers before switching to television where she worked for one of Britain’s leading independent documentary makers, producing 20th Century history programmes for Channel 4, Channel 5 and the BBC.