VII Corps in Britain

In the autumn of 1943 transports carrying thousands of American soldiers put into British ports every week. Among those arriving in October was the headquarters of the United States Army’s VII Corps – the staff that was to direct several divisions in the coming invasion of France. War chronologies record its arrival in the European Theater of Operations under 9 October. The available histories of the unit, however, give only the month, October 1943, and the exact day is not confirmed by independent sources. What is certain is that the corps arrived without troops: the divisions it was to command came over separately and were assigned to it only in the following months.

A corps from Alabama

VII Corps had existed on paper since the 1920s as a reserve formation. Its headquarters was activated at full strength on 25 November 1940 at Fort McClellan, Alabama, as the still-neutral United States expanded its army. In 1941 the corps took part in the great manoeuvres in Tennessee and Louisiana, at which American officers learned to command large formations. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 its headquarters was moved to San Jose, California, to the Western Defense Command, which feared a Japanese landing on the Pacific coast.

In May 1943 command of the corps passed to Major General Roscoe B. Woodruff, previously commander of the 77th Infantry Division and a West Point classmate (class of 1915) of Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley. It was he who brought the headquarters to England. The corps that arrived in the autumn of 1943 was thus a command with experience of manoeuvres but none of combat.

Operation Bolero

The arrival of VII Corps was part of a vast transfer operation given the code name Bolero in the spring of 1942. In June 1942 Eisenhower flew to London as commander of American forces in Europe, and planners in Washington reckoned that by the spring of 1943 about a million soldiers would be stationed in the British Isles. The landings in North Africa in November 1942 upset these plans: divisions and ships went off to the Mediterranean, and what remained in Britain was mainly the air units of the Eighth Air Force and the supply services.

The turning point came in 1943. At the Casablanca Conference in January the Combined Chiefs of Staff decided to set up a staff to plan the invasion of north-west Europe. In March the British Lieutenant General Frederick E. Morgan became its head, with the title of Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC). The supreme commander himself had not yet been named, so for many months Morgan and his Anglo-American staff worked for a superior who did not exist. The plan they drew up for a landing in Normandy was approved in August by the Quebec Conference, which gave Operation Overlord priority for the spring of 1944.

From then on Bolero picked up speed again. According to figures cited by the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, some 53,000 American soldiers arrived in the United Kingdom in July 1943, and nearly 174,000 in November. At the end of December there were just under 800,000 US Army personnel in the British Isles, and at the end of May 1944 more than one and a half million. Many of them crossed the Atlantic aboard the liners Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, converted into troopships, which thanks to their speed sailed without escort and carried well over ten thousand men at a time.

New commands for the autumn of 1943

October 1943 was the month in which the American part of the invasion began to take organisational shape. That month General Omar Bradley, commander of II Corps in Sicily, was designated commander of American ground forces in Overlord: he was to take over the First Army and at the same time organise an army group headquarters which, once the forces in Normandy had been built up, would take control of several armies. The headquarters of the First Army was moved in October from Governors Island in New York to Bristol, although it formally began operating in Britain only at the beginning of 1944. VII Corps and V Corps, which had arrived earlier, were to become its instruments: intermediate commands between the army and the divisions, responsible for specific sectors of the landing.

All American forces in Britain then came under the commander of the European Theater of Operations, General Jacob Devers. His headquarters and General John Lee’s Services of Supply dealt with the hardest part of Bolero: accommodating hundreds of thousands of men in a country that was itself overcrowded and mobilised to the limit. The Americans were quartered in tented camps and huts, in requisitioned country houses and schools, and their supply depots, vehicle parks and airfields took up a large part of southern England. Most of the ground forces were concentrated in the west and south-west of the country – in Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire – closer to the ports from which they would sail.

The “friendly invasion”

For the British the mass arrival of soldiers from across the ocean was an unprecedented experience. People spoke of a “friendly invasion”. The Americans earned several times as much as British privates, had access to cigarettes, chocolate, nylon stockings and tinned food unobtainable on the ration, and their freer manners shocked some inhabitants of small towns. A barbed saying went the rounds that the Americans were “overpaid, oversexed and over here”. The War Department in Washington issued its soldiers with a special guide to Britain, which explained British customs and warned against boasting of American wealth. Despite the friction, many acquaintances ended in marriage: according to estimates cited by the New Orleans museum, some 70,000 British women married Americans during or just after the war.

The darker side of this presence was racial segregation in the US Army. According to the same estimates, more than 130,000 Black servicemen and servicewomen passed through England during the war, serving mostly in separate supply, transport and construction units. The American military authorities carried the customs of the southern United States over to Britain, which many Britons neither understood nor accepted; according to many accounts, publicans sometimes refused to serve white soldiers who demanded that their Black comrades be thrown out. The tensions led to clashes. The most notorious broke out on the night of 24–25 June 1943 at Bamber Bridge in Lancashire, where a gunfight between soldiers of a Black transport unit and American military police cost one soldier his life. The British government tried not to interfere in the internal affairs of an allied army, but refused to let British police and British authorities enforce segregation.

From Bristol to Utah Beach

VII Corps spent the winter of 1943–1944 organising its staff and training. Its first commander, however, did not lead it into battle. In February 1944 command passed to Major General Joseph Lawton Collins, just back from the Pacific, where his 25th Infantry Division had fought on Guadalcanal and New Georgia. Bradley and Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander since December 1943, preferred to have in the first wave of the invasion a general who already knew landings and combat. Woodruff moved to XIX Corps and later to the Pacific.

In the Overlord plan VII Corps was given the westernmost landing sector, Utah Beach at the base of the Cotentin Peninsula. It was assigned the 4th Infantry Division and two airborne divisions, the 82nd and 101st, which were to land behind the beach. The preparations were not without tragedy: during Exercise Tiger in Lyme Bay at the end of April 1944, German E-boats attacked a landing convoy and more than 700 American soldiers and sailors were killed.

On 6 June 1944 VII Corps landed on Utah Beach with the lightest losses of all five invasion sectors, and at the end of the month it took Cherbourg. It went on to take part in the breakout in Normandy and in the fighting in Belgium, in the Ardennes and in Germany, until the surrender of the Third Reich in May 1945.

Significance

The arrival of a single corps headquarters in October 1943 was not something the newspapers wrote about. It was, however, a sign of the change taking place in the war in the West. For the year and a half since Eisenhower’s arrival in London, Britain had been for the Americans above all an air base and a staging post on the way to the Mediterranean. In the autumn of 1943, after the decisions taken at Quebec, it became the base for the invasion, to which no longer just individual divisions were sailing but one army and corps headquarters after another. When in the spring of 1944 the British Isles turned into one huge military camp, VII Corps was ready, as one of the two American first-wave corps, to open the front the Soviet Union had been waiting for since 1942.