Britain’s love/hate relationship with ‘foreigners’ during the Second World War

[buffnut453]

To be honest, there will be problems any time a foreign person/contingent goes into a country and starts telling the locals how they've screwed things up and how they should do things better. The nationalities involved don't really matter...it's just the nature of things. For the locals, such "well-intentioned advice" tends, in my experience, to go down like the proverbial mug of chilled vomit.

 

[stona]

To be honest, there will be problems any time a foreign person/contingent goes into a country and starts telling the locals how they've screwed things up and how they should do things better. The nationalities involved don't really matter...it's just the nature of things. For the locals, such "well-intentioned advice" tends, in my experience, to go down like the proverbial mug of chilled vomit.

That doesn't square with Marshall's view that his officers had encouraged "marked hostility and contempt for the British".

The US forces generally saw this as a serious problem and invested considerable resources in efforts to educate their men and mitigate the problem. In the 1940s Americans were definitely perceived as far more 'foreign' than men from the Dominions. There were still much stronger ties, 'kith and kin', to countries like Australia, New Zealand and South Africa than exist today. Men from such countries also had a much better understanding of British culture and customs, many of which they shared, than young Americans could aspire to, even if they attended all the lectures their commanders put on for them.
A typical Australian or New Zealand airman would be a relatively highly educated young man and the system through which he had been educated was identical in all but minor detail to that through which a similar Briton would have been educated. Again, this was not so for one of those young Americans.

Differences are even today less than one might imagine. A member of my own family was a senior policeman in our Metropolitan Police who was, a few years ago, offered a senior post in Australia's Queensland Police, the two services (and the law they enforce) still being similar enough for this to be possible.

Cheers

Steve

 

[buffnut453]

That's why I put "well-intentioned" in quotes. National pride often involves denigrating people from other nations, irrespective of one's place of origin. The problem can be exacerbated where there's "history" between the nations involved (eg US/UK, UK/Australia etc). What starts out as gentle banter can escalate...conversely, some skip the entire "gentle banter" option and adopt a more phobic attitude to one or more nationalities. Understandably, such attitudes tend to rub people up the wrong way. For American officers to land in Britain in 1942 and actively promote hostility towards their British hosts, who'd been at war for 3 years by then, was crass in the extreme...but it clearly happened. No doubt residents in Majorca and elsewhere have little good to say about many British summer exports to their shores.

 

[stona]

I think that it is dangerous to apply late 20th/early 21st century thinking to a problem from the 1940s. In this era of mass communication and cheap travel it is easy to forget just how foreign those young Americans appeared to the British and of course just how foreign Britain appeared to those men.
The vast majority of Britons had never seen or heard an American except on the big screen at the local Odeon or whatever. British ideas of America were just as distorted as American ideas about Britain. Stereotypes still exist today, but carry much less weight in the face of personal experience.

My own mother told me that a friend had pointed out an African American service man to her and told her that he had a tail. Such appalling ignorance would be much harder to explain today.

Lets not forget that less than twenty years before these hundreds of thousands of Americans arrived, Britons seeing and hearing the first 'talking pictures' claimed not to be able to understand the American accent
Now of course we are all familiar with each others accents because of the worldwide media which we enjoy today. This doesn't mean I can understand a drunk Geordie, and he only lives a couple of hundred miles away!

Cheers

Steve

 

[buffnut453]

That's ok, I couldn't understand a sober Geordie...even if you could find one!

You're absolutely right, although the Age of Empire meant that many Britons were more deeply immersed in foreign cultures than are today's package holiday crowd. Agree the man-in-the-street would have a much narrower view, though.

 

[pbehn]

That's ok, I couldn't understand a sober Geordie...even if you could find one!

Oi whats with the geordie bashing!

From what I have read Americans were seen as something exotic having accents from the movies. Most people especially women didnt travel far from where they were born so people from a different continent were fascinating. The Americans themselves were a huge group thrown together by war from cities and farms all over the USA. Todays people watchers and psychologists would have had a field day with all that "interaction" by and large I think most from all sides got on with it and made the best of what they could.

 

[buffnut453]

Sorry, pbehn, just too tempting a target. None intended...

 

[stona]

Oi whats with the geordie bashing!

I can usually understand a sober one

Cheers

Steve

 

[Airframes]

I can't, and I am one !!

 

[pbehn]

I can't, and I am one !!

If you were one you would say "I are one" I am a smoggie not a Geordie so I understand them but see no point at all in listening to them. The most impenetrable dialect in UK is from Airdrie. I stayed in a guest house in Hamilton near Glasgow and the owners son had a girlfriend from Airdrie. No one on the squad we were with could understand a word, the son convinced his mother she was going deaf, he could only understand half of what she said but said all her family spoke the same and understood each other perfectly. Not gallic or gaelic just completely atrocious English.

sorry off topic.

 

[pbehn]

Sorry, pbehn, just too tempting a target. None intended...

Curious fact about Geordies, Newcastle is the only city in UK where men's clothes shops outsell womens in volume and price, they wouldnt be seen in a gutter in anything that wasnt silk and designer label.

 

[nuuumannn]

getting ideas above their station

That's an interesting point; I also encountered this in Scotland in poorer areas; whilst they had no love for the middle/upper classes, I found that they were very critical of their own who had moved away from their roots. Back home they call this Tall Poppy Syndrome and it can be found in all layers of society; an envy of those who do better for themselves.