European Archives

Black GIs arrive in Britain

by History Guild | Nov 29, 2023 | Advocacy, Military History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 13 minutes
In this blog post I’m going to draw on the Cabinet Papers to explore the British Government’s response to the arrival of Black GIs in Britain during the Second World War. I refer to government records and other primary sources of the time which use terminology which we now consider offensive, for example, ‘coloured troops’ and ‘negroes’.

Several years ago I recall hearing a story about villagers in the West Country during the Second World War refusing to go along with a local US Army segregation order that Black GIs were excluded from the local pub and that only white American troops could use it – the villagers protested and effectively overturned this order. I’m pretty certain that it was the singer-songwriter and activist Billy Bragg that related this story to me, when I had the pleasure to meet him some years back. The story made a big impression on me and I thought, one day, I must follow this thread up. Now I have, and here are the fruits of my research so far.

African-American GIs of WWII: Fighting for democracy abroad and at home

by History Guild | Nov 9, 2023 | Military History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 7 minutes
Until the 21st century, the contributions of African-American soldiers in World War II barely registered in America’s collective memory of that war. The “tan soldiers,” as the Black press affectionately called them, were also for the most part left out of the triumphant narrative of America’s “Greatest Generation.” In order to tell their story of helping defeat Nazi Germany in my 2010 book, “Breath of Freedom,” I had to conduct research in more than 40 different archives in the U.S. and Germany.

Black soldiers and the Red Ball Express during World War II

by History Guild | Oct 23, 2023 | Advocacy, Military History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower had a problem. In June 1944, Allied forces had landed on Normandy Beach in France and were moving east toward Nazi Germany at a clip of sometimes 75 miles (121 kilometers) per day.
With most of the French rail system in ruins, the Allies had to find a way to transport supplies to the advancing soldiers. “Our spearheads … were moving swiftly,” Eisenhower later recalled. “The supply service had to catch these with loaded trucks. Every mile doubled the difficulty because the supply truck had always to make a two-way run to the beaches and back, in order to deliver another load to the marching troops.”

The solution to this logistics problem was the creation of the Red Ball Express, a massive fleet of nearly 6,000 2½-ton General Motors cargo trucks. The term Red Ball came from a railway tradition whereby railmen marked priority cars with a red dot.

Ukraine war: how Gorbachev’s 1987 INF missile treaty has limited the arsenal available to Putin

by History Guild | Sep 27, 2023 | Military History | 0

Reading time: 4 minutes
Thanks to the final Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who has died aged 91, a disarmament treaty has denied Vladimir Putin thousands more missiles which he could have ordered to be used against Ukraine. Russian forces attacking Ukraine have not been able to use land-based missiles with ranges of between 500km and 5,500km because this entire category of weapons was scrapped under the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which the former Soviet leader was instrumental in establishing.

How the Gunpowder Treason was discovered

by History Guild | Sep 25, 2023 | Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 9 minutes
On the night of 4 November 1605, a man calling himself John Johnson was found in the vaults beneath the House of Lords with 36 barrels of gunpowder. Under questioning, Johnson – whose real name was Guy Fawkes – admitted that he and his co-conspirators planned to use the gunpowder to blow up the House during the State Opening of Parliament on 5 November. If successful, this plot – which became known as the Gunpowder Treason, or Gunpowder Plot – would have killed not only King James I (and VI) but members of his family, his chief ministers, and the Members of Parliament in attendance at the state opening. This was treason on an unprecedented scale – an attempt to destroy both the king and his government.

Maths swayed the Battle of Jutland – and helped Britain keep control of the seas

by History Guild | Sep 21, 2023 | Military History | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
If you’re about to fight a battle, would you rather have a larger fleet, or a smaller but more advanced one? One hundred years ago, on May 31 1916, the British Royal Navy was about to find out if its choice of a larger fleet was the correct one. At the Battle of Jutland – as the major naval battle of World War I is known in English – these choices were unusually influenced by mathematics.

The story of HMT Empire Windrush (1930–1954)

by History Guild | Sep 18, 2023 | Military History, Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
This june will mark the 75th anniversary of the arrival of HMT Empire Windrush at Tilbury Harbour, carrying on board some 800 passengers who gave their last country of residence as somewhere in the West Indies, and many of whom would migrate as workers and would settle in Britain and help steer its economic recovery after the Second World War. But this was only one journey in the vessel’s history and this article examines its colourful, chequered, and varied life since its maiden voyage was made in 1931 to its sinking in 1954.

Vikings were never the pure-bred master race white supremacists like to portray

by History Guild | Sep 7, 2023 | Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
In contemporary culture, the word Viking is generally synonymous with Scandinavians from the ninth to the 11th centuries. We often hear terms such as “Viking blood”, “Viking DNA” and “Viking ancestors” – but the medieval term meant something quite different to modern usage. Instead it defined an activity: “Going a-Viking”. Akin to the modern word pirate, Vikings were defined by their mobility and this did not include the bulk of the Scandinavian population who stayed at home.

Volcanoes, plague, famine and endless winter: Welcome to 536, what historians and scientists believe was the ‘worst year to be alive’

by History Guild | Aug 24, 2023 | History News, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
536 is the current consensus candidate for worst year in human history. A volcanic eruption, or possibly more than one, somewhere in the northern hemisphere would seem to have been the trigger. Wherever it was, the eruption precipitated a decade-long “volcanic winter”, in which China suffered summer snows and average temperatures in Europe dropped by 2.5℃. Crops failed. People starved. Then they took up arms against each other.

Spain’s Civil War and the Americans who fought in it: a convoluted legacy

by History Guild | Jul 17, 2023 | Military History, Political and Economic History | 0

Reading time: 9 minutes
Though the Spanish war did pit Spaniard against Spaniard, the conflict quickly became international. Within days of the onset of the coup, Hitler and Mussolini intervened on the side of the insurgent generals. Before long, the Soviet Union would come to the aid of the Loyalists, also known as the Republican forces, who supported the government.

The Roman ‘Brexit’: how life in Britain changed after 409AD

by History Guild | Jun 14, 2023 | Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
Leaving a major political body is nothing new for mainland Britain. In 409AD, more than 350 years after the Roman conquest of 43AD, the island slipped from the control of the Roman Empire. Much like the present Brexit, the process of this secession and its practical impacts on Britain’s population in the early years of the 5th century remain ill-defined.

Spain’s new memory law dredges up a painful chapter of Spain’s often forgotten ties to Nazis

by History Guild | Jun 12, 2023 | History News, Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
In October 2022, Spain’s current progressive government approved a new law – called the Democratic Memory Law – that recognizes Spaniards who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis.

Among other measures, the law will create a census and a national DNA bank to help people identify the thousands of Spaniards who were killed during World War II.

Tag: European