The strategic deployment of the United States Air Force (USAF) in Britain in the early cold war led to the annual stationing of some 45,000 US servicemen in Britain during the 1950s. This precipitated a social engagement between soldiers and civilians in cold war Britain which has yet to be fully explored, especially when compared with the research carried out on the social and cultural effects of the ‘occupation’ of Britain by two million GIs during the Second World War.Footnote ¹ Such a study may also usefully parallel the substantial recent research on relationships between the civilian population in West Germany and 300,000 American GIs posted there annually in the 1950s, particularly those with German women.Footnote ²

This article examines efforts of the British government, often with the help of USAF commanders, to regulate contacts between US servicemen and British women. This was more than a postscript to government efforts to manage interactions during the war years. Many problems were similar, but the background, ostensibly peacetime, was the politically charged climate of the cold war. Relevant government departments in Whitehall wished that nothing might lessen US commitment to the defence of Britain and Western Europe. Accordingly, Whitehall and various enthusiasts for close Anglo-American relations set about resolving all problems occasioned by the presence of foreign soldiers among a civilian population. Welfare, entertainment, hospitality, marriage, paternity and interracial relations had to be addressed to counteract ‘anti-American’ sentiment in Britain and, even more, to prevent the projection of the British people in a bad light across the Atlantic. Nowhere was this anxiety more apparent than in official efforts carefully to arrange meetings between US servicemen and the ‘type’ of British girl whose behaviour would not harm Britain's image.

British responses to the presence of US servicemen

Problems left behind by US troops in Britain during the Second World War – rejected ‘war brides’ and court cases concerning injury to British citizens – had not been completely resolved when the first US strategic bombers were ‘invited’ to use British bases during the Berlin crisis in July 1948. By June 1949 the USAF presence numbered 6,000 personnel, and in the early 1950s reached around 45,000 stationed in forty-three bases and installations spread across East Anglia, the Home Counties and Lancashire.Footnote ³

These figures came nowhere near the wartime numbers of American GIs in Britain, but the circumstances differed considerably. The British public could be told that US bombers were necessary to Britain's cold war defences, but there was neither the wartime urgency nor the daily evidence of sacrifice by US airmen which had dampened so much criticism a decade earlier. The Americans were warmly received by many, but the only visible ‘on duty’ American activities were irritants which easily attract resentment in peacetime, and with the help of the popular press: aircraft flying disturbingly low, US Air Police patrolling streets or diverting traffic, British civilians ‘held’ on bases by US personnel during security drills, or even shot at by a trigger-happy sentry.Footnote ⁴ Contacts ‘after hours’ could be even more troublesome. Many Americans, posted in Britain for up to three years, could bring over their families, creating an urgent housing problem around US bases. Younger airmen, usually on shorter missions, elicited the old wartime complaints: too much pay, too much drink, too much promiscuity.

Both the British and US authorities were concerned about potential friction. The air ministry – the Whitehall department in charge of the USAF presence – began from mid-1950 to show an interest in the social welfare of the growing number of US airmen. General Dwight Eisenhower, the newly appointed supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe, told a Senate committee in February 1951 that ‘a very touchy problem’ was created across Western Europe because ‘as usual, the American soldier could outspend his allied comrades on wine and women’.Footnote ⁵ A suggestion that their spending ability be somehow restricted was rejected by the foreign office for fear of antagonising US servicemen; after all, it was a problem for their commanders to solve.Footnote ⁶

In Britain, as across the Channel and especially in West Germany, commercial contacts between the US soldiers and the local population brought prosperity and transformed the character of neighbouring towns and rural areas.Footnote ⁷ The responses were complex. As during the war, American ‘glamour’ attracted the young, but offended older and more conservative elements in British society. Financial disparity often left both sides resentful: the British at American wealth, the Americans because of impressions some locals created that every American was fair game for fleecing. It did little for British pride that the relationship much resembled that between the British garrison in the Suez Canal Zone and the Egyptian population. ‘One almost expects’, observed The Times, ‘a cry of “baksheesh!” to fall from the lips of some of the taxi-men who lounge about the bases on pay day, at the end of each month.’Footnote ⁸

Frequent comparison with the much-talked-about British bases in Egypt highlighted the fact that that the cold war presence of US troops, unlike the intense but short wartime experience, wounded British national pride and was politically controversial, with no D-Day in sight. As a symbol of British dependency, the USAF presence irritated the irreverent popular press, which often added US troop behaviour to its long catalogue of complaints about the American allies. Much of the popular press supported the Conservative Party,Footnote ⁹ but the Conservative Party itself was basically committed to the Anglo-American cold war alliance. While in opposition Winston Churchill publicly expressed concern about the possible consequences to Britain of the establishment of the bases,Footnote ¹⁰ and after returning as prime minister he secured from President Truman a public agreement for a British say in their use.Footnote ¹¹ Churchill believed that the bases were ‘an essential feature in the cold war’ and showed personal interest in the ‘welfare’ of US airmen in Britain when the subject was debated in Cabinet in November 1952, especially housing provision for USAF families, lack of which caused tension around US bases. Continuous efforts to foster good relations between the USAF and the local population were essential, Churchill summed up, and instructed the air minister, Lord de L'Isle, to report to him on the ongoing work.Footnote ¹²

In the Labour Party – whose government had first sanctioned the establishment of the bases and whose leadership still essentially supported this policy in opposition – there was growing discontent in the early 1950s over the existence of the bases and their nuclear capabilities. However, doubts expressed by the Labour left about the ‘atom bases’, or open calls for their removal, were accompanied by assurances that this had nothing to do with ‘American soldiers who throng some of our streets’.Footnote ¹³ When discussing Britain's use as an American ‘aircraft carrier’, it was believed that a ‘serious political issue and mere xenophobia have become confused’.Footnote ¹⁴ ‘Some people don't agree with America's being allowed the use of British air-bases’, wrote the Labour left weekly Tribune, ‘but why take it out on every American serviceman here?’Footnote ¹⁵

The small but vocal British Communist Party had no such qualms in exploiting popular ‘anti-American’ feelings. The communists were not slow off the mark to demand ‘the ending of the military occupation of Britain by American troops and bombers and the restoration of Britain's national independence’.Footnote ¹⁶ During the Korean war the communist ‘America Go Home’ campaign was launched in March 1951, with a pamphlet vociferously attacking US military might, capitalism, morality and culture, calling to get rid of ‘Coca Cola . . . and American GIs’.Footnote ¹⁷ The communists claimed that by resisting the US ‘occupation’ they were the ‘true patriots’,Footnote ¹⁸ and nationalist rhetoric and imagery was very apparent in their vitriolic attitude towards ‘the spreading plague’ of the USAF in Britain.Footnote ¹⁹ The communist Daily Worker reported almost daily on friction between US servicemen and British locals. ‘SACRILEGE: NEW U.S. CRIME IN BRITAIN’, headlined the front page on 1 November 1952, reporting on a drunken American ‘GI’ who vandalised an old church in Surrey that stood on ‘the site where the Saxon Kings of England were once crowned’.

Whitehall encourages ‘hospitality’

Such stories in the communist and popular press alarmed British government officials. They had wished to utilise the renewed US military presence in Britain to achieve goodwill at home and in particular good publicity across the Atlantic, where the forces of isolationism had searched since the beginning of the Second World War for any reason to persuade the US public to relinquish its commitment to the freedom and defence of Britain and Western Europe. Whitehall could rely in its endeavours on the enthusiasm of voluntary organisations such as the Women's Voluntary Service (WVS) headed by Lady Reading, the veteran wartime commander of welfare and entertainment for troops. A constant source of aid and agitation was the English-Speaking Union (ESU), the most important Anglo-American voluntary organisation in terms of the number of its mostly middle-class membership organised in dozens of local branches and committees.Footnote ²⁰ Most of the voluntary work by the ESU in the early post-war years, such as hospitality schemes for American tourists or American GIs stationed in Germany, was geared to help official efforts to educate Americans about British aspirations. Something, however, was always expected to rub off on the British side too.

As numbers of US bases and airmen built up rapidly, so did Whitehall concern about accommodation, welfare and relations with the locals. By late 1951 it received from the ESU troubling reports of ‘drunkenness and vice’ around US bases in East Anglia.Footnote ²¹ The involvement of the foreign office grew after Anthony Eden returned as foreign secretary and took a personal interest. The air ministry approached a recently retired air chief marshal, Sir George Pirie, to study the matter. Pirie had served in Washington as the senior RAF representative and knew the United States well.

Unlike Germany, where the US military authorities took the lead in developing cordial relations with their former enemies,Footnote ²² in Britain the USAF seemed more confident in local goodwill and did less to promote relations. In March 1952 Pirie visited several US bases and neighbouring towns. He found that US commanders were primarily interested in preventing incidents and in the morale of their men. Happy and self-entertained in their bases, many had little interest in the outside world. Married families, particularly, kept to themselves ‘in much the same way as British families do in our overseas colonies’. There was some drunkenness in local pubs, mainly involving unmarried airmen on shorter missions, but their commanders claimed that the British press highlighted American offenders while playing down local abuse of or theft from Americans. Pirie found no serious ‘ill-feeling’ but suggested setting up near bases ‘hospitality’ committees chaired by an influential local citizen and consisting of representatives from local branches of helpful voluntary organisations.Footnote ²³ He was reluctant to co-ordinate these efforts but agreed to do so on a voluntary basis.

Whitehall's main desire in setting up ‘hospitality’ activities was for the US servicemen and their thousands of dependants to know Britain and form a better opinion of the British people.Footnote ²⁴ However, Whitehall and eventually the USAF high command spent considerable time fretting over images of civilian–soldier friction, not least in the national popular press. There were favourable headlines too, especially in times of distress when the Americans lent a hand. For example, USAF rescue and salvage operations during the east coast floods in 1953 received much positive publicity.Footnote ²⁵ Whitehall, however, mostly had to deal with negative popular press reports involving US servicemen, many concerning British women. Numerous incidents occurred in 1952. Attacks on Americans in Manchester by British gangs were highlighted also in the US press, causing the usual worries to the foreign office.Footnote ²⁶ Sir Roger Makins, soon to be British ambassador to the United States, believed that ‘there are bound to be some unfortunate incidents between foreign forces and the local population’, but at least the worst incident reported by the British press had eluded the vigilant US press: in London a group of thirty prostitutes violently attacked a US serviceman's wife near Piccadilly Circus, accusing her of ‘poaching’ on their territory as she was strolling with her husband.Footnote ²⁷

The ‘good-time girls’ of the 1950s

Prostitution in the Piccadilly area had been viewed by senior foreign office men as a potential threat to Anglo-American relations during the war years.Footnote ²⁸ That the highly paid Americans attracted scores of British prostitutes was a problem the authorities also had to contend with in the early 1950s, against the background of public concern about the supposed effects of prostitution on the capital's image during the Festival of Britain in 1951 and the run-up to the coronation events of 1953.Footnote ²⁹ Residents in the neighbourhood of the largest USAF club in London's West End complained that the area had become flooded with prostitutes since the Americans moved in; Manchester's broadest thoroughfare, also named Piccadilly, was also patrolled by prostitutes when the Americans were in town.Footnote ³⁰

The problem was not confined to the big cities. An ESU survey in 1951 investigating incidents involving US airmen suggested an urgent need ‘to protect’ Americans in the vicinity of their rural bases from prostitutes, ‘mostly not local girls, but from all parts of the United Kingdom and chiefly from London’.Footnote ³¹ Reporting to the air ministry in March 1952, Sir George Pirie noted too that venereal disease among the Americans – much debated also during the war – was due to prostitutes mainly from London. This was especially so in summer when what the US commanders called ‘haystack queens’ arrived near the bases and would ‘spend from 7–10 days with a haystack for shelter . . . fed by US airmen-clients’.Footnote ³² The police tried at most to press charges for vagrancy or trespassing and the local inhabitants were reported to be ‘filled with disgust’.Footnote ³³ The USAF authorities pointed out that they had no jurisdiction over British offenders, who were a matter for the British police, and observed (as they had during the war) that prostitution was much more freely tolerated in Britain than in the United States.Footnote ³⁴ Indeed, in 1951, there were widely debated proposals to ‘clean up London streets’ by amending the Metropolitan Police Act, which allowed only relatively small fines for street prostitution or soliciting, and imposing heavy fines and prison sentences.Footnote ³⁵

Yet the main concern about declining moral standards seemed to be not so much prostitution, but the promiscuous and open sexual relationships between the servicemen and young British women, many still teenagers, attracted to the Americans and their wealth.Footnote ³⁶ The expression ‘good-time girls’, used to describe the same phenomenon during the war years, was often applied again in the early 1950s.Footnote ³⁷ In February 1952, the left-wing popular Sunday paper Reynolds News sent a reporter to investigate the ‘social problem’. He noted that in Warrington, for example, ‘several hundred good-time girls – including a distressingly high percentage of teenagers’ arrived every weekend from Manchester, Liverpool and other parts of Lancashire to ‘join local girls in the streets, the pubs and the dance-halls’ searching for US airmen from the nearby Burtonwood base. In other towns too, he found, ‘blatant immorality’ and ‘brazen love-making’ increased ‘illegitimacy’ and offended public feeling.Footnote ³⁸ There were those who harshly blamed the girls, or their parents; others pointed to the social and economic circumstances in Britain, still enduring post-war rationing and austerity.Footnote ³⁹ However, much British resentment was directed towards the Americans and was fully exploited by the communists. Reporting court cases of Americans found in boarding houses in bed with teenage girls, the Daily Worker protested that ‘the British people are faced with the corruption of their girls by the troops of this occupying force’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Such complaints about the US troops could be equally found in conservative circles. In November 1952, following instructions from the archbishop of Canterbury to the Church of England's Moral Welfare Council, the bishop of St Albans presided over a meeting of Anglican churchmen and USAF chaplains. The ecclesiastical authorities were troubled by complaints about professional prostitution, especially on the US forces’ payday, the use of houses near bases for prostitution, ‘promiscuous intercourse’ of airmen with young girls, ‘many under the age of consent’, and American dances ‘organised on a Hollywood style’ which caused ‘local ill feeling (especially amongst RAF personnel)’.Footnote ⁴¹

In early 1954 an ecclesiastical committee reported on the high rate of illegitimate births in Oxford. It found that US airmen ‘with money to spend’ were one cause of moral laxity, together with other factors affecting sexual activity in local society, such as easy availability of contraceptives. The committee declared that the chief cause of moral decline was ‘growing belief’ that sexual relations outside wedlock was not immoral,Footnote ⁴² a conclusion reflected in other contemporary statements on sexual morals,Footnote ⁴³ and a harbinger of widespread public discussion on ‘permissiveness’ less than a decade later.Footnote ⁴⁴ The US army authorities were pleased to reveal from their own investigations that Americans were responsible for only six illegitimate births in Oxford that year (out of around 120). Yet ‘whenever a British tabloid editor wants to flog up some circulation’, complained the American weekly Time Magazine, ‘he puts together the GIs, the girls and the illegitimacy rate and launches a crusade’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Official chaperoning of ‘good-type’ girls

The bad publicity from sexual contacts between US servicemen and British girls was a main reason for the interest of Whitehall and voluntary organisations in ‘hospitality’ plans for US servicemen. With the USAF commanders, they early on sought control of unchecked interaction in public houses and dance halls. In October 1950 the air ministry responded to a request from General Ackerman, the US air attaché, to set up information bureaus in three new US bases in the Midlands to help servicemen make the ‘best use of their time’ after hours. The air ministry planned that the WVS would run the bureaus, and provide entertainment such as dances with ‘the right people’, which, ‘as General Ackerman pointed out is an important point as the men found no difficulty in getting in touch with the wrong people’.Footnote ⁴⁶

To the British, this mostly meant the ‘wrong’ social class. Sonya Rose has pointed out that as lower-class women were long regarded as more promiscuous and sexually licentious, in designing during the war the right social surroundings in which to host the US servicemen, organisations such as the WVS ‘took class as the measure of respectability’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Lady Reading proposed now to establish again in nearby towns small ‘welcome-clubs’, similar to those run by the WVS during the war, designed for low-ranking servicemen, not officers, and consisting of a pleasant lounge ‘and a small canteen to serve coffee, snacks and cakes’.Footnote ⁴⁸ A senior Air Ministry official understood the clubs to be ‘primarily intended’ to help the Americans meet local ‘females’.Footnote ⁴⁹

The head of the foreign office American department, commenting in May 1951 on a Daily Herald story about ‘good-time’ girls flocking to US bases in East Anglia, wrote that ‘this story touches the heart of the anxieties of those who have approached us about the welfare arrangements for US forces’.Footnote ⁵⁰ However, the first ‘welcome-clubs’ – partly provided by the air ministry, funded by USAF welfare funds and run by WVS volunteers – were not greeted enthusiastically by the Americans, who preferred to find entertainment elsewhere.Footnote ⁵¹ The foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, opened the WVS Anglo-American club in Cambridge.Footnote ⁵² But USAF commanders, always sceptical about these clubs, were mainly interested in local committees to help arrange dances and other functions where Americans and British could meet. Sir George Pirie believed that such local committees would indeed ‘provide the necessary assurances to the local mothers that they could safely allow their daughters to attend’, provided the US base commanders make certain ‘that the US airmen did not bring “unsuitable” girls to the dances!’Footnote ⁵³

The best way to ensure this was by vetting the girls invited to the highly popular dances in US bases.Footnote ⁵⁴ Pirie was satisfied that the USAF authorities, in a practice carried out by the US military in Germany too, performed their own strict vetting for these dances. Only girls sponsored by a ‘local parson or a reputable citizen’ received passes, which could be revoked for misbehaviour. The girls were collected and brought together to the dances, were not allowed to leave the dance hall or club and were returned home afterwards. However, Pirie observed that the ‘good type’ of British girl aged seventeen to twenty-one was ‘somewhat gauche’ compared with American girls of her age, who had from the age of fourteen freely danced with the opposite sex and could handle them if they got too ‘fresh’. The British girl, in contrast, ‘appears to take fright when an American gets “fresh” . . . and . . . all too often she will have no more to do with him, and in this she is supported by her parents’. Pirie concluded that

Thus the American arrangements fitted in with the prejudices of Whitehall and the middle- and upper-class voluntary organisations. In Cambridge and other places the WVS itself chaperoned ‘parties’ of ‘good-type’ girls to dances on the US bases.Footnote ⁵⁶ This social engineering also went down quite well in the popular press, although the communists lambasted the issuing of a ‘morality pass for our girls at GI dances’ which ‘would license British girls to be admitted to functions which last until the early hours, behind the barbed wire of American airfields in Britain, where no British policeman may venture’.Footnote ⁵⁷

The class-conscious regulations, however, seem to have been unpopular with some Americans, who objected to the ‘spinsterish’ attitude of the British voluntary societies and hinted that ‘their methods are often clumsy and completely disregard both American and British human nature’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The report of an extensive survey carried out in 1953 for the USAF on the welfare and recreation of its men in Britain and Germany advised that no more US funds should be put into WVS clubs. It noted that the USAF had invested $18,000 in helping to set up the WVS club in Liverpool, but its lack of popularity did not ‘justify the cost’. It was an ‘attractive little building’, but like all WVS clubs was too small, did not sell alcohol and could not provide the kind of entertainment which the Americans had on base, and the airmen resented its cold upper-class nature and a rule not allowing them to bring their girls there, ‘even though this rule has been relaxed on one evening a week’.Footnote ⁵⁹

Enforcing marriage regulations

The USAF, however, had many more rules itself, especially when such meetings threatened to become permanent through marriage. During the war the US services had to deal with the effect of marriage issues on forces’ morale around the world, not least in Britain, where tens of thousands of British women married American GIs.Footnote ⁶⁰ One complicating factor was the wish of most servicemen to bring their wives to the United States. In December 1945 the pressure resulted in the US War Brides Act. Until it expired in 1948 this act allowed special consideration for the immigration of alien wives of US servicemen. The consequence in Britain was a much-discussed subject which, especially if the marriage went wrong, occupied much of Whitehall's time.Footnote ⁶¹

During 1950, as the USAF presence in Britain increased rapidly, its headquarters in Britain issued detailed marriage regulations according to new Washington guidelines. They were less stringent than those of the US military in Germany, but necessitated a formal written request at least sixty days in advance. The commanding officer was to check that the prospective bride was not a ‘security’ risk and that ‘the proposed marriage will not bring discredit to the Air Force’. Both groom and bride had to undergo medical tests, including for syphilis, and if under the age of twenty-one, to provide parental consent. The serviceman had to prove that he had the means to marry and transport his wife to the United States and that his bride was not marrying for a comfortable allowance, or would become a ‘public charge’ in the United States. An air force chaplain would interview the bride. He could obtain a British opinion from the local vicar, doctor or the National Family Welfare Association. If she was under age, he was to speak to her parents and advise them about the ‘home conditions’ of the groom and any reason why their daughter should not marry him. After giving ‘close scrutiny to the comparative social, moral, economic and educational backgrounds’, the chaplain was to submit a confidential report giving specific reasons for approving or disapproving of the marriage.Footnote ⁶² Final approval of the marriage lay with USAF headquarters and in difficult cases with the general commander. Failed applicants were to be told why and how to secure permission, for example, by medical attention or further savings by the serviceman.Footnote ⁶³

However, neither US nor British law could prevent a determined couple from getting married, although servicemen could face harsh disciplinary action.Footnote ⁶⁴ The marriage ceremony, according to US law, had to be performed by a British authority. After much wartime experience and renewed correspondence with the USAF, the office of the British General Registrar issued in March 1951 its own guidelines, requiring registrars to advise the couple, ‘and particularly the woman’, of possible obstacles and to check with the military authorities when a serviceman could not produce written approval from the USAF.Footnote ⁶⁵ The main concern in such cases was that he was already married.Footnote ⁶⁶

The regulations were issued to deter hasty or ‘ill-advised’ marriages, and this was made known to the national popular press. The tightening of existing measures aimed ‘to eliminate undesirable types of girls attracted to the neighbourhoods where the men are stationed’, reported the Daily Mail in April 1951: ‘Only the best British brides will be selected for them.’Footnote ⁶⁷ Nevertheless, the number of marriages increased rapidly: 1,400 in 1948–1951, 1,300 in the first nine months of 1952 and around 3,000 a year in the mid and late 1950s.Footnote ⁶⁸ Anglican churchmen complained that some of the wives ‘are not the type likely to make satisfactory marriages’ and wished for closer co-operation with the US vetting procedures.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, as during the war, social pressure apparently brought about slight relaxation of USAF marriage regulations. Proven savings of a low-ranking airman were reduced from $900 to $300, and children of a ‘GI bride’ from a former marriage could be brought to the United States more easily.Footnote ⁷⁰ The commander of the Third Air Force, General Francis Griswold, faced with a British enquiry in 1953 about ‘undesirable marriages’, replied that ‘provided the fairly stringent legal requirements were met, no more could be done’.Footnote ⁷¹

In one aspect, however, regulations were tightened even further, reflecting the cold war atmosphere of the early 1950s. This followed the controversial McCarran Immigration Act of 1952, which put in place a wide range of political screening procedures for immigrants and visitors. The USAF soon followed by stating that a marriage application would not be approved if background investigation of the ‘proposed spouse’ revealed membership of or association with ‘any foreign or domestic organisation, association, movement, group, or combination of persons’ designated in the United States ‘as totalitarian, fascist, communist, or subversive’.Footnote ⁷² Regulations for examining a GI bride's possible Nazi background, in line with US immigration law, were already implemented by the US forces in West Germany. In Britain, the focus was on a possible communist connection. However, general British dislike for American ‘McCarthyism’, and the McCarran Act in particular, required great care in dealing with the subject.Footnote ⁷³

In December 1952 the foreign office faced stories in the popular and communist press, based on an interview given by a US air-force chaplain, reporting that airmen were not allowed to marry British girls with communist sympathies or family members.Footnote ⁷⁴ Responding to enquiries from the Labour MP Tom Driberg,Footnote ⁷⁵ foreign office officials did not agree that the US regulations were ‘infringements of civil rights since the purpose of them is so clearly reasonable’, to prevent a situation in which a British wife was not allowed to follow her husband to the United States.Footnote ⁷⁶ They were thankful that Driberg had ‘fortunately’ missed the correct claim in the reports, which they did not want to acknowledge, that the British authorities had themselves made the enquiries for the Americans about the girls.Footnote ⁷⁷

Contending with ‘illegitimate’ babies

One main source of British resentment was the many relationships between servicemen and women resulting not in marriage but in illegitimate children.Footnote ⁷⁸ A moral problem turned into a social, financial and political one, when the American father denied paternity or refused to maintain the child. During the war, US (and British) servicemen were exempted from imprisonment; the final sanction was an affiliation order by a British civil court, enforced only through deduction from pay by the military. Once the GI had returned to the United States, nothing could be done other than by moral pressure, or mostly unsuccessful legal proceedings with consular, legal and financial help from the foreign office.Footnote ⁷⁹

An increase in illegitimate births during the war and post-war years created enough social problems when the fathers were British.Footnote ⁸⁰ Despite some legislative improvement in the early 1950s, unmarried mothers had difficulty in persuading the courts to acknowledge paternity, grant affiliation orders and enforce payments. Most mothers simply did not bother.Footnote ⁸¹ In this situation, illegitimate babies by US servicemen caused a burgeoning critical debate in Whitehall, Westminster and church and welfare organisations. Following a congressional order, new Air Force regulations from Washington in 1950 precluded even deductions from servicemen's pay in paternity cases. Another amendment decreed that foreign affiliation orders would no longer justify disciplinary action. This was seemingly prompted, concluded the foreign office, by a US belief that previous regulations encouraged ‘predatory camp followers’ or ‘nationals of countries whose systems of jurisprudence favoured unscrupulous plaintiffs’.Footnote ⁸² The USAF authorities in Britain explained that this did not show lack of trust in British courts, but in legal proceedings in such countries as France, Italy and Japan.Footnote ⁸³ They noted that the British services too had no power to deduct pay from a British soldier as a result of rulings by French, West German or even US courts.Footnote ⁸⁴ All the USAF could do, and did, was to seek compliance by persuasion.Footnote ⁸⁵

In July 1953 it was claimed in the US Congress that at least 70,000 illegitimate babies had been born in Britain to US servicemen, a figure perhaps influenced by reports from West Germany and Japan.Footnote ⁸⁶ Six months later it was reiterated in a British High Court case concerning an affiliation order against a US soldier sent back to the United States – counsel even suggested that the USAF did this deliberately – and highlighted dramatically in the popular press.Footnote ⁸⁷ Numerous questions about legally forcing US servicemen to accept responsibility for illegitimate offspring had been asked in parliament for some time, expressing concern that costs would fall on British taxpayers.Footnote ⁸⁸ The government responded with USAF figures showing that the situation was much exaggerated. The USAF had received some 1,000 enquiries about ‘illegitimate children’; 300 ended in marriage and only 100 were at the time without settlement.Footnote ⁸⁹

However, one senior foreign office official thought the issue of illegitimate babies might be important enough to urge Churchill to approach President Eisenhower personally.Footnote ⁹⁰ In discussions with the USAF on the effect of the new Visiting Forces Act of 1952,Footnote ⁹¹ the Americans maintained that there might be ‘unfortunate repercussions’ in the United States if British courts could commit US servicemen to jail for non-payment.Footnote ⁹² Whitehall understood that British public opinion too would oppose a special Order-in-Council making Americans yet again immune from committal. The British authorities assured the Americans that they did not want to harm Anglo-American relations and that magistrates would be asked to approach the home office before committing a US serviceman to jail, thus enabling consultation with the Americans.Footnote ⁹³

Anyway, the new judicial powers had no authority over US servicemen who had left Britain, or the USAF, so both the British courts and the US authorities had little power to enforce affiliation. Only moral persuasion remained, or the slight threat of legal action. The foreign office dealt in the mid 1950s with sixty-six paternity cases, but not all cases may have reached Whitehall.Footnote ⁹⁴ Certainly the Church of England's Moral Welfare Council continued to believe this was a ‘serious’ problem.Footnote ⁹⁵

Preventing ‘black babies’

The plight of illegitimate children fathered by African-American airmen was especially severe. British anxieties about miscegenation and ‘half-caste’ children had emerged in the inter-war years in seaports such as Cardiff and Liverpool, where black seamen sought pleasure on shore and small colonial communities began to develop.Footnote ⁹⁶ The wartime presence across Britain of over 130,000 African-American GIs heightened British fears, not least as it resulted also in mixed-race babies whose number was estimated at between 500 and 2,000, many abandoned by their white mothers. Such was their plight that the foreign office contemplated sending them to the United States.Footnote ⁹⁷ This did not happen, but in October 1951 the foreign office protested (too late) to the US war office about the sending to Britain of an ‘all-negro anti-aircraft battalion’ to be added to those African-American soldiers already ‘scattered’ in non-segregated US air force units. The main worry was that US racial friction could be exploited by ‘anti-American’ communist propaganda, but also feared were ‘black babies in large numbers’.Footnote ⁹⁸

The foreign office hoped that in the future the Americans would keep the promise the air ministry had been given in 1950 by the US ambassador, Lewis Douglas, that African-Americans sent to Britain would comprise no more than 7 per cent of non-segregated air force units.Footnote ⁹⁹ These units were formed following the integration initiated in the US forces by President Truman's Executive Order in 1948. By November 1951 there were about 1,000 African-American soldiers in Britain and sixteen officers (out of a total of 30,746 servicemen).Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Tensions around USAF bases in Britain were less acute than in West Germany, where racial strife in army units was much greater and where a very harsh attitude was taken by the US military and the local population towards mixed-race relationships.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The early post-war presence in Britain of African-American airmen brought a re-emergence of goodwill but also of social and racial problems evident during the war, many of them concerning women. While the US services had been mostly desegregated by 1953, many US states were not, and this was taken into account in air force marriage regulations.Footnote ¹⁰² Furthermore, US (and British) social segregation could not be abolished by presidential order. The air ministry confidentially reported that some white servicemen would not dance with British girls who had danced with coloured airmen in social events on US bases. While some British girls protested by dancing only with African-Americans, the majority accepted the white American attitude and ‘ignore the coloured American servicemen’.Footnote ¹⁰³

Not all British attitudes were the result of cues taken from the Americans. In an editorial in 1955, the Labour-supporting popular Daily Herald regretted ‘the impression of nastiness in Britain’ created by young ‘English’ girls who would not dance with black US servicemen. This followed a report that dances at the Bentwaters USAF base near Ipswich were suspended after some girls, one the daughter of a local rector, ‘signed a petition’ appealing against what they said were attempts ‘to make them dance with coloured airmen’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Such negative local attitudes towards African-Americans could not be detached from those displayed towards black colonial communities, whose numbers increased dramatically after the start of the decade. By the mid-1950s what was seen as the threat of miscegenation was habitually presented by the popular press.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The main problem concerning Afro-American servicemen, however, was mixed-race babies, who though relatively small in number were conspicuous in appearance, or in the imagination. One canon protested to his MP about the numerous illegitimate black babies in Boston, Lincolnshire, but the US ambassador, Winthrop Aldrich, found on investigation that not even one had been born there.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The illegitimate mixed-race babies were an even greater problem when deserted by their mothers. Despite efforts by adoption societies, few British couples were prepared to adopt them. Many African-American service families were, but British law forbade adoption by ‘foreigners’ not permanently domiciled in Britain.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Launching the community relations programme

Problems arising from relationships between US airmen and British women occasioned constant discussions and activity in Whitehall. To widen positive contacts so that the Americans would see ‘the best of England’, Pirie and the air ministry encouraged the local British ‘hospitality’ committees, including representatives of voluntary organisations, to co-ordinate invitations for airmen to British homes and to promote a host of joint activities such as tea parties for the wives of airmen, games for children and adults, and dances on Sunday afternoons in the town hall.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In Cheltenham the local committee also operated a ‘hostesses committee’ which chaperoned parties of girls to dances at Brize Norton and Fairford bases.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In October 1953 Pirie told a NATO conference in Paris on ‘Military Community Relations Problems’ of the willing efforts of the ESU and WVS to provide ‘well-brought-up’ and ‘suitable’ girls to dances at US bases, adding that more than a quarter of the 200 British girls who married US servicemen every month ‘meet their future husbands in this way’.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Yet the various voluntary ‘hospitality’ activities were not deemed enough and an ESU plan was promoted, employing young British women full-time to operate information centres in the US bases. In 1954 the treasury authorised the employment of three ‘ladies’ for a six-month trial and they were selected by a board including representatives from the air ministry and the USAF, chaired by Lady Alexander of Tunis, a prominent member of the ESU and the wife of the famous general, more recently minister of defence.Footnote ¹¹¹

The ‘community relations officers’, as they were called, worked under the chairs of the local voluntary committees and co-ordinated their ‘hospitality’ activities with the USAF. Pirie's successor at the air ministry, Air Chief Marshal (retired) Sir John Whitworth Jones, soon reported that they also usefully held off the ‘mass of undesirable “gold diggers” and worse which haunt the boundaries of US bases’ and helped the ESU and the WVS ‘to mobilise teams of decent British girls who attend American social functions and thus enable the American service men to meet the best of the young women in the British community’.Footnote ¹¹² They were also credited with spotting the need of African-American servicemen for dancing partners and initiated ‘very successful’ action in a few bases. Arrangements were made ‘for a quota of properly chaperoned coloured girls to attend the dances’, from among the ‘commonwealth coloured community’ in Cardiff, and in another case ‘Jamaican nurses under training at a local hospital’.Footnote ¹¹³

The ‘hospitality’ scheme as whole was regarded a success by the British and the US military command and it drew good publicity on both sides of the Atlantic.Footnote ¹¹⁴ By 1956 the employment of fifteen community relations officers was approved. Britain, it emerged, was the only host nation in Western Europe with such an ‘officially sponsored scheme’ for furthering good relations with its guest NATO (i.e. US) forces. The US high command in Europe hoped to develop something similar in other countries.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Many of the tensions and mutual complaints nevertheless remained unsolved by the programme. A report by its co-ordinator at the air ministry noted that by 1959 there were still ‘far too many illegitimate children by white and coloured Americans’ and that helping ‘these young Americans’ find ‘other and more healthy pursuits’ provided a challenge to the local committees and air ministry programme as a whole. He also pointed out that marriage with African-American servicemen was ‘still frequent’, although USAF base commanders ‘do all they can to prevent these “mixed” marriages’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ However, the commander of the Third Air Force, General J. H. Ives, in 1961 praised the community relations officers and suggested that the ‘very high’ overall marriage rate was a positive sign ‘in favour’ of the US servicemen.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Conclusion

Most of the problems created by relationships between US airmen and British women in the first post-war decade, and the official attempts to resolve and regulate them, echoed those that had been encountered in Britain on a large scale during the Second World War. They were viewed as the outcome of the higher US standard of living, the generally greater experience of young Americans in gender relations,Footnote ¹¹⁸ the difficulty in enforcing different legal systems and military regulations across national borders, and common Anglo-American racial fears about the social effects of miscegenation. During the war and again in the early 1950s, the US servicemen in Britain became, as in West Germany, a focus for the mixture of fascination and resentment with which Europeans viewed US power and influence in all its forms.

However, while there were similarities in the social aspects of the relationship between the war and post-war years, the political circumstances were different. Unlike the relatively shorter wartime experience, the post-war US bases became a long-term, politically contested cold war phenomenon. While most opponents of the bases on the British left carefully distinguished between criticising the bases and the servicemen stationed there, the communists tried to exploit popular resentment of American ‘off-duty’ behaviour, such as the alleged ‘corruption’ of British girls, to generate public rejection of both the bases and the Anglo-American alliance.

Political threats to the alliance were the main reason for the urgency with which Whitehall treated the subject. US isolationism, which had troubled Whitehall since the early years of the Second World War, was still a force in the first post-war decade. It was feared that British communist hostility or negative reports in the British popular press could harm Britain's standing in the United States and lessen the commitment to the Atlantic alliance in Britain itself. So Whitehall laboured even harder to solve housing needs around US bases, work out legal and practical solutions for illegitimate children of US servicemen and avoid potential racial tensions involving African-American soldiers. This was most consistently manifested in the evolvement between 1950 and 1956 of ‘hospitality’ plans, which had a precedent during the war years, but now had the time to develop into a carefully arranged scheme operated by paid workers and volunteer organisations, predominantly middle- and upper-class, one of whose main objects was to control the contacts between US servicemen and British women.

The ‘community relations programme’, as it became called, was expanded slightly in the late 1950s and ran throughout the 1960s.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Yet the considerable efforts to regulate the social, sexual and nuptial relationships between US servicemen and British women weakened considerably after the beginning of that decade. US air force marriage regulations changed little, if at all,Footnote ¹²⁰ but less interest in the subject was apparent on the British side. In part this may have been because the US bases had become a regular part of British life during the cold war, in part because Whitehall seemed to be less nervous about US public opinion and isolationism, and partly because of the reduction by one third of the number of USAF airmen stationed in Britain.Footnote ¹²¹ Another, possibly major, influence was that official attempts at ‘matchmaking’ between US servicemen and British women, reflecting the conservatism of the dominant forces in British society in the 1950s, became out of touch with the changing cultural attitudes to sex and marriage in Britain in the 1960s and after. Those changes were reflected also in a dramatic rise in the number of births outside marriage, to which any potential US ‘contribution’ to paternity would be insignificant. Above all, it seems that advances in the standard of living in Britain, as in West Germany, eventually made US servicemen less of an attractive, or irritating, symbol of US wealth and hegemony.Footnote ¹²² Although political criticism directed at the US bases remained until the end of the cold war and beyond, the diminished numbers of US servicemen became ever less ‘visible’ in the British countryside. With that, so did the interest of the British authorities in ensuring that they mixed with ‘only the best’ British women.