Sergeant Joseph Care was one of the first American soldiers to arrive in the Tewkesbury area. “From our embarkation point in Bristol there was total blackout,” he recalled in a letter written in 1994. He was “one of the volunteers who drove the many troop carriers that were awaiting our arrival. Blind driving was an instant learning experience!”

Their destination was the cold Baptist Alley Sunday School room. To greet them there were “inviting bunk beds with straw mattresses.” Lacking firewood, they survived by wearing long underwear for two weeks. despite suffering from ticks: “we didn’t freeze and the ticks got on with their feast.”4

The Baptist Sunday School room soon became “our home away from home with a little Yankee ingenuity”. They dried out clothes on gravestones, installed a shower in a shed by “placing 50 gallons water storage drums atop (he shed”. The establishment was embellished by sticking news cuttings to walls or blackout curtain. “The Baptist Church facility was by far the best” (billet in town)!’

Other billets were in the former Cheltenham and Gloucester Building Society (then T.B.S.), Tolsey House (former H.Q. of the 2nd. Tewkesbury Rover Scouts), Royal Hop Hotel, above the King’s Head bar room while a store opposite the roundabout housed the Company Command Post.

Onwards