Most Britons believe that their country became culturally and ethnically diverse after the Second World War as a result of immigration from former British colonies and, more recently, from former Communist states in Eastern Europe when they joined the European Union. This belief, buttressed by Churchillian rhetoric about a little island defending itself from foreign invasion, is today the basis of anti-immigration and anti-European Union sentiment, much of it xenophobic and racist in nature.

In fact, it was during the war that the island started to become more diverse, as several million volunteers of many nationalities arrived to serve in civil defense and in the armed forces. They came from six countries vanquished by the Nazis, like Poland, along with conscripts from the United States, and, most extraordinary of all, volunteers from colonies like Jamaica who came to fight for a democracy denied them by the British. This numerically unprecedented influx also included German and Italian prisoners of war who were put to work and who often fraternized with locals. Geographically, too, the diversity was probably unprecedented. Minorities had previously been concentrated in London and other seaports; now they were present throughout Britain, including in remote rural areas.

Mixing It is the most comprehensive study yet of this vital phase in the evolution of modern Britain. Like Wendy Webster's previous work, it is lucidly written by a scholar in command of a wide range of primary sources. She shows how the arrivals were welcomed and valued by the British people during the war, while also pinpointing the tensions and conflicts that arose from their underlying historic prejudices.

Unlike in the United States, racial segregation was never legally enforced in Britain. When over a million American troops arrived in the United Kingdom prior to the liberation of Western Europe, of whom 130,000 were black, locals were often shocked to discover that US forces were racially segregated (the first desegregated war they fought was the Korean).

To make matters worse, American military chiefs tried to enforce off-duty segregation. One wrote to a nightclub manager in Manchester asking for his “co-operation in prohibiting Negroes from attending the dances” (208–9). The manager responded with a new slogan to advertise his club: “Fit to fight, fit to mix.” A “colour bar” was widely resisted by the British, resulting in friendships, sex, marriage, and children across racial lines.

Yet Webster also shows how endemic both casual and institutional racism were in Britain. What she calls “sexual patriotism” was an officially sanctioned popular attitude that allowed racial mixing from conversation to dancing, but which forbade sexual contact with servicemen of color, whether from America or the British Empire. Known as “friendly but brief,” this policy enabled the British to maintain their self-image as a more tolerant people than Americans while policing sexual relationships in accordance with their own prejudice.

The media worked in tandem with the British government to minimize the social consequences of diversity. “Commonwealth” troops from the colonies were usually shown serving around the world but not in Britain itself. Film censors also banned representations of sex between black men and white women but not those involving white men and black women, like uniformed female volunteers from the Caribbean. This double standard pandered to the sexual hypocrisy of the British male, an historic feature of racist discourse that was apparent in a 1943 survey. As one man admitted, “I could cheerfully clout coloured men I see with white women—but must confess to a definite desire to give careful investigation to some of the very bedworthy specimens of the other sex [of] the same colour that I have seen” (215).

Webster concludes that “on interracial sex and marriage and the birth of mixed race children, the views of the American authorities, those of the British government, and much of British public opinion converged—they were beyond the pale” (215). Relationships with white foreign troops did not escape opprobrium. The possessiveness of British men towards “their” women was a patriarchal norm at a time when a woman lost her nationality if she married a foreigner (a law that changed in 1948). Whereas “our men” evoked national pride, regardless of their sex lives, women who flouted the codes of sexual patriotism lost any claim to be “our women.” “Defined by their sexuality, they disgrace the nation,” Webster concludes (205).

Surprisingly, Webster makes no mention of the pioneering work of Stephen Bourne on ethnic minorities’ contribution to the British war effort such as The Motherland Calls (2012), which has helped to alter the official view that both World Wars were waged by white people. And perhaps more analytic use could be made of earlier work by historians like Jay Winter on the memorialization of the First World War, which shows how its legends have shaped and misshaped British national identity.

These caveats aside, Webster's final chapter on the aftermath of wartime diversity is excellent. It shows how Britons regarded their new comrades as alien immigrants when peace came in 1945. The war service of foreign and Commonwealth volunteers was quickly forgotten, and tolerance turned to hostility. West Indian veterans were verbally abused, and Polish air bases were daubed with “Poles Go Home.” Despite there being an acute postwar labor shortage, British governments of left and right did all they could to encourage minorities to return to their countries of origin. In one disgraceful episode, over a thousand Chinese seamen were rounded up by police and forcibly repatriated, leaving behind their British wives and children, who never saw them again.

“Despite the many departures,” Webster concludes, “the population of Britain in the aftermath of war remained more diverse than it had been before 1939” (228). Mixing It is an excellent contribution to modern British history and should become the standard academic work on its subject. It also deserves a much wider readership in an era when the prevailing folk memory of a war for freedom, fought by white British heroes, continues to have toxic consequences in daily lives as well as foreign policy.