Americans in Northern Ireland

On 26 January 1942 two transports carrying American soldiers berthed at the Dufferin Quay in the port of Belfast. Some four thousand men of the US Army’s 34th Infantry Division came ashore. They were the first American ground troops to set foot in Europe since the United States had entered the war, and the first echelon of the forces that over the next two and a half years would turn the British Isles into a springboard for the invasion of the Continent. The next day the Irish Prime Minister, Éamon de Valera, protested against their arrival.

It has become customary to say that on this day “the first American forces arrived in Europe”. This needs qualifying. A brigade of US Marines had been stationed in Iceland since July 1941, and a small group of American military observers under General James Chaney had been working in London since May 1941. The contingent of 26 January was, however, the first US Army combat unit sent to Europe during the war.

The Arcadia decision

The move had been agreed in Washington by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Arcadia Conference, and was given the code name Magnet. The American divisions were to take over from the British the defence of Northern Ireland against a possible German landing, which might also come by way of neutral Ireland, and so free British units to fight elsewhere. At the same time they were to train in European conditions and show the British, and the Germans too, that the “Germany first” principle was no empty declaration. In his State of the Union address of 6 January Roosevelt announced publicly that American land, air and sea forces would take up positions in the British Isles.

The plan eventually provided for the transfer of four divisions – three infantry and one armoured – together with support units, some 105,000 men in all. It soon proved too ambitious. Ships were needed in the Pacific, where Australia and the islands on the route to it had to be reinforced, and German U-boats were just beginning their offensive off the American coast. The first echelons had to be cut back, and troops were sent over in instalments as shipping became available.

The convoy from Brooklyn

The 34th Infantry Division, nicknamed the “Red Bull” after its insignia of a red bull’s skull, was a National Guard division from Minnesota, Iowa and North and South Dakota, called into federal service in February 1941. The convoy sailed from Brooklyn, New York, on 15 January. The troops were carried by the American transport Chateau Thierry and the British liner Strathaird. Figures for the number of men vary from source to source: the most commonly cited is 4,058, mainly from the 133rd Infantry Regiment and the 151st Field Artillery Regiment, while some accounts speak of more than four and a half thousand. The winter crossing of the North Atlantic was rough, but the convoy arrived without loss.

On 24 January, two days before the arrival, the creation of a command for American troops in Northern Ireland (United States Army Northern Ireland Force) was announced. It was given to Major General Russell P. Hartle, commander of the 34th Division, who was the first man ashore. At the quayside the soldiers were welcomed by the Governor of Northern Ireland, the Duke of Abercorn, the province’s Prime Minister John Miller Andrews, and the British Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, who greeted them on behalf of the British government in a short speech. According to accounts, a band played the Civil War march “Marching Through Georgia”.

The press announced that the first American soldier to set foot on British soil was Private Milburn H. Henke of Hutchinson, Minnesota. Pictures of a smiling Henke coming down the gangway went round newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. In reality it was a piece of propaganda: according to those who were there, several hundred soldiers had come ashore before him, and he had been picked at random to pose for the photographers. The people of Belfast, which had endured German air raids in April and May 1941, gave the Americans a warm welcome, although in time the well-known saying also appeared that they were “overpaid, oversexed and over here”.

De Valera’s protest

In the south of the island they were received differently. De Valera, who had pursued a policy of neutrality since the outbreak of war and in November 1940 had refused the British the use of Irish ports, regarded the arrival of foreign troops in a part of Ireland that he considered to have been unlawfully severed from the country as a violation of the sovereignty of the Irish nation. On 27 January he declared that his government had not been consulted on the matter, and likened the continued partition of the island to aggression against small nations in other parts of the world.

The protest was largely political and formal. De Valera did not break off contacts with Washington, nor did he pursue the matter through diplomatic channels in a way that might have sharpened the dispute. The American Minister in Dublin, David Gray, reported to Secretary of State Cordell Hull on 28 January that the statement was probably the result of pressure from the radical wing and of domestic political considerations, and said that unless instructed otherwise he would officially ignore it. He also observed that few Irish people realised how American public opinion would react to a protest against soldiers who had come to fight in their defence too. The American press sharply criticised Dublin. The quarrel was not new: after the attack on Pearl Harbor Churchill had hinted to de Valera that entering the war might open the way to the unification of the island, but de Valera had refused, and Washington, despite the strong influence of Irish Americans, had sided with London on the question. In Dublin’s eyes the presence of American troops in the north entrenched the partition of Ireland; in the eyes of London and Washington it was simply part of the defence of the British Isles. Among nationalists in Northern Ireland the mood was much as in the south: according to their MP Patrick Maxwell, the Americans were as welcome there as the Germans were in Norway.

Place in the war

A second echelon of some 7,000 men arrived on 2 March, and a third and fourth in May, including tank crews of the 1st Armored Division. By May 1942 more than 32,000 American soldiers were stationed in Northern Ireland. In the summer of 1942 the 1st Ranger Battalion was formed there from volunteers of the 34th Division and the 1st Armored Division, and several dozen of its men took part in the Dieppe Raid. Airmen also appeared in the British Isles: on 20 February Brigadier General Ira Eaker flew into England to organise the bomber command of the Eighth Air Force. On 8 June a headquarters for US forces in the European Theater of Operations was set up, and on 17 August American B-17 heavy bombers from England carried out their first raid on occupied France.

The 34th Division and the 1st Armored Division left Northern Ireland in the autumn of 1942 and in November took part in Operation Torch in French North Africa. In February 1943 both suffered heavy losses at the Battle of the Kasserine Pass, and the 34th Division then fought for almost two years in Italy. By various estimates some 300,000 American soldiers, sailors and airmen passed through Northern Ireland during the war. An American naval base was established in Londonderry, important for the escort of Atlantic convoys; American civilian workers had begun building it as early as 1941, before the United States entered the war. In the spring of 1944 units preparing for the Normandy landings trained in the province. The ships from Brooklyn that berthed in Belfast on 26 January 1942 opened a route along which some one and a half million Americans passed through Britain by May 1945.