Wellesbourne and World War Two – Part One: Ol Jim Crow

At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the village of Wellesbourne – just a few miles from Stratford-upon-Avon – seemed an insignificant village. But by the end of 1940 it was very much at the centre of things. Rumours flew around that Prime Minister Winston Churchill had a secret hideaway for himself and his cabinet, just outside the village, and that he – or his official look-alike – had been seen in the vicinity several times. We also know the Royal Family had bolt holes in the area.

In 1940 a large RAF base was built on the edge of the village, becoming one of many bases for the Royal Canadian Air Force, from which they flew the British twin-engine Wellington bombers – designed by Barnes Wallis – as part of their 6th Bomber Group. By 1941 post Dunkirk remnants of the Polish, French, Belgian, and Czech armies where also camped in the area, training to become an integral part of the British Army.

In late 1942 the American Army moved in, but not as a unified force, it was an army of two halves: Black and White.

In the words of the late American military historians, Stephen E. Ambrose:

“…the world’s greatest democracy fought the world’s greatest racist with a segregated Army.” He went on. ” It was worse than that: the Army and society conspired to degrade African-Americans in every way possible, summed up in the name Jim Crow.”

A popular World War II cartoon strip, The Sad Sack, personified the average GI as a naive, confused, lazy, bumbling private, and the worst sad sack of all, according to the strip, was a Jim Crow.

From 1942, until late in 1944, the US Army would not allow a black man to belong to a front line fighting unit (even though black units had fought bravely in the Civil War on the Unionist side, and in the trenches of the First World War), instead being relegated to service units where they either worked in field kitchens, waited on table in the officers mess, or drove supply trucks.

The term “Jim Crow” itself derives from the first white minstrel Thomas Dartmouth, known on stage as “Daddy Rice”, who blacked his face with burned cork and did a song and dance routine that always ended with him becoming the old crippled Negro slave Jim Crow, who shuffled about the stage like a wounded bird, singing his lament for lost agility and freedom:

Weel about,
And turn about, and do jis so.
Ebry time I weel about,
I jump Jim Crow, I jump Jim Crow.

Dartmouth was soon known as Ol Jim Crow, and became, during the Anti-Bellum period of the 1840s and 1850s, hugely popular across America and Europe. For generations afterwards the black American was stuck with the Jim Crow image.

For most white, middle-class, Americans in the 1920s, 1930s, and the early 1940s, the black American did not really exist as a fellow human being, until black and white encountered each other in the rapidly expanding US military; and let’s not forget that over 2.5 million black Americans volunteered, or were enlisted between 1942 and 1945.