Winner, U.S. Military History Group, 2020 Master Corporal Jan Stanislaw Jakobczak Memorial Book Award.
Winner, Holyer An Gof 2021 Nonfiction Award, Social, Cultural and Political History

This is the incredible story of a Second World War shoot-out between black and white American soldiers in a quiet Cornish town that ended up putting the ‘special relationship’ itself on trial. The subsequent court martial into what tabloids labeled a ‘wild west’ mutiny became front page news in Great Britain and the USA. Three thousand miles across the Atlantic, it mirrored and bolstered a fast-accelerating civil rights movement. At home it caused Churchill himself ‘grave anxiety’ while refracting an extraordinary truth about the real state of Anglo-American relations. For three long days the story raged before the turbulent war-torn world moved on and forgot forever amid ever-escalating D-Day preparations. This account of a shocking drama the authorities tried to hush up has been painstakingly pieced back together for the first time thanks to new archival research. When slotted into its unique context, extracted from wartime cabinet documents, secret government surveys, opinion polls, diaries, letters and newspapers as well as testimony from those who remember it, the story offers a rare and stunning window into a little-known dark side of the ‘American Invasion.’ By breathing new life into a vanished trial, it reveals a rare and surprising insight into the wider story of how Britain reacted to soldiers of the Jim Crow army when they came to stay.

"Werran's book is among the first to ask uncomfortable questions about the 'greatest generation' mythology. Sadly, it confirms the prevalence of the US military's 'baked-in' racism, especially as regards the aftereffects of the court-martial."

"...illuminates a neglected corner of the Second World War and the special relationship."

"This book offers a good look at the sorry state of race relations in the U.S. Army during World War II, and sadly it would take almost another decade after that war before the Army and the other armed forces were fully de-segregated. The author has researched her topic well... Those readers who are interested in race relations or in World War II in general will find much to enjoy in this volume."

"That this racism was allowed to play itself out on British soil is a stain on the record of Britain’s government, with its cowardly failure to protect not just British law, but also the many black British and colonial subjects who found themselves caught up in the hostile attitudes of white Americans. For a short while, such global race politics were concentrated in a town in wartime Cornwall, and this is what makes Werran’s book so fascinating."

“An astonishing, inherently fascinating, meticulously researched bit of World War II history…”