This well-researched and extremely informative book is a useful addition to a growing body of work examining Northern Ireland and the Second World War. Much of Simon Topping's account focuses on the experiences of the American troops who began to arrive in the province in January 1942, the month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Successive chapters explore justice and policing, the reaction of nationalists and armed republicans, relations with local women, Jim Crow racism, and the various attempts to revive ancestral ties between Ulster and the United States.

Four waves of US troops totalling 32,000 men were dispatched to Northern Ireland in the first half of 1942. Later in the war greater numbers arrived, as the province was used as a holding area in the run up to D-Day, and by early 1944 120,000 GIs were billeted there, a little under one in ten of the population. Tensions as well as moments of comedy arose from the resulting clash of cultures. Bringing jazz, baseball, and other exotic novelties with them, the visitors challenged some conservative shibboleths, demanding that cinemas open on Sundays. Some were bored by the sleepiness and perceived dreariness of the rural areas in which they were based: one GI quipped that the County Down village of Rostrevor was “swell, but why the hell don't they bury their dead?” (53). This territory has already been explored by David Reynolds in his magisterial Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain 1942–1945 (1995)—which, despite its title, also addresses Northern Ireland—but in focusing on the province alone Topping's account goes much further and deeper, skilfully navigating the intersections between local societal and political formations and the military, judicial, and racial hierarchies of the visitors. Topping has published a series of pioneering articles exploring African American soldiers in Northern Ireland during the war, and the chapter on their experiences is particularly impressive and intriguing. As in Britain, segregation was considered a purely American matter: official policy was to welcome African American troops but to limit their contact with local populations, where possible. Drawing on letters, morale reports, and official documents, Topping suggests that the white population in the province was for the most part hospitable to the troops; he concludes that experiencing “some respite from the systemic racism of their homeland” made many “unwilling to accept second-class citizenship quite so readily back in the States” (147).

Despite its scale, it is difficult to argue that the influx had a decisive or lasting impact on Northern Irish society. Topping notes at the outset that the troops “left Northern Ireland's people changed, but not necessarily transformed, a little less insular and conservative, perhaps, but they triggered no social revolution or lessening of communal animosities” (1). This deflationary concession sets the tone for an account which avoids overblown claims, and indeed features a series of dogs which ultimately fail to bark. The conclusion of a chapter addressing the threat posed by the IRA to US bases and personnel admits that “no recorded attacks or sabotage” (110) actually took place beyond “a couple of stones, some assaults and a few Nazi salutes” (109). An examination of romantic relations between local women and GIs produces a number of striking vignettes, such as a retired missionary leading a group of moral vigilantes patrolling the grounds of Belfast City Hall, “shining torches on canoodling couples” (125) or a group of US soldiers deployed to Armagh's parks to collect “a harvest of condoms” (126) using spiked sticks. The chapter concludes, however, that “the extent to which the war was transformative for Northern Ireland's women is debatable” (133).

Topping argues convincingly that the main significance of the presence of the Americans was to solidify the two-decade-old border and Northern Ireland's status as part of the United Kingdom. Hosting the Americans enabled the Stormont government to project “an image which emphasized its Britishness, its links with the United States and its pivotal wartime role,” thereby entrenching partition and sidelining the nationalist minority, as well as infuriating neutral Eire. But although unionism had a “‘good’ war" (1) in these respects, the book also emphasizes Stormont's ultimate inability to influence developments dictated by Washington and London.

A series of errors and misprints reflects the ongoing sad decline in standards of academic book publishing, but these do not detract from the thoroughness of this project. Nearly seventy pages of notes testify to Topping's extensive and diligent archival research: Northern Ireland, the United States and the Second World War draws on a wide range of official and personal papers held in collections in Belfast, London, and the United States. Topping's frequent reference to newspapers from the war years pays dividends, showing, for example, that the supposedly secret arrival of US technicians to work on construction of a naval base in Derry in the summer of 1941—months prior to the American entry into the war—was widely reported in the local press at the time. This book comes highly recommended not just for readers interested in the pre-Troubles social history of Northern Ireland but for all scholars and students concerned with the ever-evolving triangular political, diplomatic, social, and cultural relations between Britain, Ireland, and the United States.