The American’s in Tetbury.

“This is merely the opening pages of the story, that’s the front Cover above.”

Introduction

Tetbury is a one of those wonderfully old fashioned Market towns you will find all over the Cotswolds beloved by tourists because the very fabric of the town oozes quintessential England of old. Yet I suspect very few of the tourists who visit have any notion of the town’s remarkable history.

Even the most casual of glances is enough to tell the tale that Tetbury is a place of great age and that in its time the town has seen both tremendous prosperity and sad decline.

In point of fact Tetbury has more than thirteen hundred years of recorded history and although nameless at the time there are signs of an Iron Age settlement that suggests that the area was occupied well before the Romans arrived in Britain over two millennia ago.

However, as fascinating as the complete history of the town is, this story is confined to more recent times and goes back a mere 70 years to look at what happened here during a few short months between December 1943 until early June 1944.

Like many places in Britain Tetbury played host to some of the thousands of American troops as they prepared for the D Day landings and the liberation of Europe from the tyranny of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi occupation.

Being that I was brought up in the peace and tranquillity of a Cotswold village I can well imagine the impact upon Tetbury as hundreds of American soldiers of the 654th Engineering Topographic Battalion arrived and virtually took over the town.

Even today many of our country roads are a struggle for heavy vehicles and the ever increasing size of modern day agricultural equipment. So I can imagine it must have been quite a shock for the locals when they saw the large American troop carrying trucks lumbering around the place.

Nor do I suppose the culture shock was all on one side. What did those young American men think of us and our quaint British countryside?
At the end of the war the 654th Battalion prepared a memorial book for themselves, in there I read this comment written by a soldier about the country.
“To most of us England was just like one big museum.”
Unfortunately not many of those privately printed journals exist today and in spite of my best Internet scouring efforts I have not been able to acquire a complete copy for myself.

However thanks to a guy named Larry Regan in the USA who responded to my plea by telling me that his father, Edward, served with 654th and had been stationed here in Tetbury. Imagine my joy to discover that Larry’s father had a copy of the missing journal and in spite of its badly worn condition Larry managed to recover many of the pages and photographs the journal contained.

Since Larry’s contribution and thanks to the present owner of Chavenge House, David Lowsley-Williams and his family, I have at least had the opportunity to hold an original copy of this book in my hands and read firsthand the story of the 654th. It is an incredible journey starting in June 1942 at Fort Custer, Michigan until the end with the surrender of Germany in May 1945.

One of the first things that struck me on looking at the pictures of Tetbury was how little the main town has changed.

I plan to demonstrate this in later pages with pictures of ‘Then and Now’ as I piece together the story of the officers and men of the 654th Engineering Topographic Battalion to whom this book is dedicated.

For the most part this is their story and the vital part they played in the preparations for the D Day landings and how their efforts add an interesting chapter to the proud history of our town.

Additionally it struck me how far technology has developed since those days and how much harder their job was back then with the equipment and resources available to them.

Little did I realise how changed things had become until speaking to a teenage school group, who with a look of bewilderment on their faces asked in all innocence, “why did they not just look at Google Maps?”

Hopefully, this book will answer that question and many more besides.

From all the data and information collected the men then had to construct a detailed scale model of the beach landing area. The model they created, here in Tetbury, was an accurate three dimensional representation of the waterfront and terrain detailing all roads, buildings and other topographic features plotted in their precise location.

Made to a Horizontal scale 1:2,500 and a Vertical scale of 1 inch to 68 feet. The model represented a ground area 6 miles long by 5 miles deep.