What happened to the British children born to black GIs?

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What happened to the British children born to black GIs?
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Children born to black US soldiers and white British women during World War Two share their stories.

Eighty years ago, US soldiers began arriving in the UK to help in the fight against Hitler's Nazi Germany. In a small sleepy village in Suffolk, life was about to change forever.

"We definitely stood out with our curly hair," Eldridge laughs. "But we didn't have any racial problems; we were never treated differently." About 240,000 of the three million US troops, who began arriving in the UK in January 1942, were black.Martin Giles/BBCPeople living in the village of Tostock in Suffolk were very welcoming to the black US servicemen who arrived in 1943 to serve at the area's military bases

"My mother wasn't in a position to bring me up," Eldridge says. "She used to come over every Tuesday throughout her life. We never spoke about my father - it was a closed shop. Trevor was born a few years after Eldridge and the others, in 1946, after his father Paul Woods left his post in France to go back and visit Trevor's mother.

"My mother used to worry someone would come and take me away so she was ever so protective of me. She used to watch me wherever I went," he says.Unlike Trevor and Eldridge, many of the babies were put in children's homes "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."

"As a kid I wondered 'why hasn't my mum tried to find me?,'" says Leon, speaking on the phone from his home in Ohio. "She wanted to keep me but could not afford to. I smiled at her for the first time and she was really happy," he says, his voice thick with emotion. "I cried when I read that. It closed a circle for me."Leon's mother sent his father a letter saying he had smiled at her for the first time

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