Have you ever heard of the term brown babies?
Brown Babies is a term used for children born to black soldiers and white women during and after the Second World War.
In January 1942, after the US had entered the war, a large number of American servicemen (known as GIs) were shipped to Britain. Over the next three years approximately 3 million GIs passed through the country, of which approximately 8% were African-American.
As of 1955, African-American soldiers had fathered about 5,000 children in the American Zone of Occupied Germany,[2] making up a significant minority of the 37,000 illegitimate children of US soldiers overall.
In Occupied Austria, estimates of children born to Austrian women and Allied soldiers ranged between 8,000 and 30,000, perhaps 500 of them biracial.
In the United Kingdom, West Indian members of the British military, as well as African-American soldiers in the US Army, fathered 2,000 children during and after the war.[6][7] A much smaller and unknown number, probably in the low hundreds, was born in the Netherlands.
Other names for the term brown babies include "war babies" and "occupation babies." In Germany they were known as Mischlingskinder ("mixed race children"), a derogatory term first used under the Nazi regime for children of mixed Jewish-German parentage. It is estimated that approximately 2,000 ‘brown babies’ were born in Britain during the war and nearly all of them were illegitimate. Brown babies’ was the term given to these children by the African-American press.
Nearly half of these babies were given up to local authorities or children’s homes, such were the difficulties and pressures facing the mothers: the stigma of having an illegitimate and ‘coloured’ child, and the fact that between a third and a half of the mothers were already married.
English and German authorities tried to discourage relationships between white British women and black troops but many romances began at dances
Black troops were not allowed to marry their pregnant white girlfriends and many of the children were given up for adoption, according to Prof Lucy Bland, from Anglia Ruskin University, who interviewed 50 of them for a book called Britain's Brown Babies.
Speaking on The Localist - Suffolk podcast, Prof Bland says: "Nearly half of these babies were put in children's homes. They were often lied to and told their fathers were dead and that their mothers didn't want them.
"They were often called names and didn't understand. Some of them didn't even realise they were a different skin colour; no-one was explaining it to them."
Very few of them were adopted. Officials said it would be impossible to place mixed-race children and the government blocked adoptions from the US, worried they would be seen as dumping them there.
The children grew up in predominately white areas — the sites where the GIs had been largely based: south and southwest England, South Wales, East Anglia and Lancashire, where they had little or no black or mixed-race role models. Most suffered racism, the stigma of illegitimacy and a confused identity.
