“The Most Contented GIs in Europe”: October ‘99 American History Feature

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The Most Contented GIs in Europe

As World War II drew to a close, American soldiers in Europe traded their weapons for textbooks and prepared for return to civilian life.

By Hervie Haufler

In the summer of 1945, I was one of more than two-and-a-half million United States soldiers whose main task had ended with the victory in Europe. Once the shooting stopped, I was lucky to become part of an ambitious army project–the creation from scratch of two full-fledged, American-style universities on European soil. Incredibly, they were operating within weeks of V-E Day (May 8, 1945). The army’s reasoning was clear: if GIs couldn’t get to U.S. universities, then the army would bring them to us.

Long before the war ended, U.S. government officials had been thinking about soldiers’ education. In late 1943 President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to the post-war education program for American GIs in Europe that had been proposed by the army’s Information and Education Division. “Nothing will be more conducive to the maintenance of high morale in our troops than the knowledge that steps are being taken to give them education and training when the fighting is over,” the president wrote.

In September 1944 the War Department issued Readjustment Regulation 1-4, a move designed to provide academic, vocational, and orientation courses for every U.S. soldier serving in Europe when the war ended. The president gave General Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander of the European Theater of Operations (ETO), responsibility for carrying out the operation.

Each university would enroll at least 4,000 students for two-month terms and offer a choice of eight major fields of study: agriculture, commerce, education, engineering, fine arts, journalism, liberal arts, and science. Each school would make more than 250 courses available. Faculty at each location would number 250 to 300, while necessary support services would require cadres of more than 1,000 troops.

Early in 1945, with victory in Europe in sight, search teams started to survey possible locations in the United Kingdom and on the Continent. The team sent to England settled on Shrivenham Barracks, a military post about 70 miles northwest of London. The British had used the barracks as a training school until the U.S. Army took it over in 1942. On the Continent, surveyors came up with what seemed at first a bizarre recommendation: take over the hotels, villas, casinos, and other buildings in Biarritz, a resort town on France’s southwestern coast, and convert them into a learning center.

In April Eisenhower appointed Brigadier General Claude M. Thiele to head the Shrivenham establishment and Brigadier General Samuel L. McCroskey to take charge in Biarritz. Thiele was a Cornell graduate in civil engineering who had fought in World War I and had risen through the ranks to become the commanding general of anti-aircraft forces in Europe. McCroskey’s wartime command had been the 55th Anti-Aircraft Battalion. The two generals were ordered to have their universities up and running within 60 days after V-E Day. They came close, with Shrivenham American University (SAU) opening its doors on August 1 and Biarritz American University (BAU) on August 20.

Those intervening weeks tested the energy and ingenuity of everyone involved. To help refurbish the old Shrivenham barracks, General Thiele had the good fortune of gaining command of 782 prisoners of war (many POWs did not leave Britain until the late 1940s), as soon as his crew built a stockade for them. Geneva Convention rules said the POWs couldn’t make the beds of students or clean up the quarters, but they did take on many other support roles. At BAU, General McCroskey found that the local people, many of them idled by the wartime lack of tourism, were willing to pitch in and help prepare and operate 40 hotels and nearly 100 villas.

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