English War Babies Search for U.S. Fathers : Legal Action: Hundreds of British subjects born of liaisons between American GIs and British women are suing the U.S. government.

As a child in post-World War II England, Shirley McGlade clipped a picture of movie star Jeff Chandler and put it in her wallet. That was her father, she told schoolmates--a rich American who had divorced her mother and was fighting for custody of her.

“People believed me,” she said. “I lived in a fantasy world.”

But she was haunted by the ghost of her real father, a former American GI named Jack Crowley who had met her mother briefly during World War II but who never knew he had left a child behind when he went home. For 14 years, McGlade wrote to U.S. government agencies trying to find him. The answer never varied: files on Crowley were confidential.

“It’s kind of a mental torture,” she said, “to know that an official knows where your father lives or lived, and he refuses to give it to you.”

Today, that government refusal has prompted a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in federal court here. In it, hundreds of British subjects born of wartime liaisons between American GIs and British women are suing the Department of Defense, and the National Archives and Records Administration.

Their object: access to millions of boxes stored in a National Archives warehouse in St. Louis containing all that is known of the names and addresses of men who served in the U.S. armed forces in England during the war.

But to the U.S. government, the issue is privacy.

“Fatherhood of an illegitimate child during youth is at worst embarrassing and at a minimum highly personal,” said a government memorandum filed in court. Nor does it matter how much a war baby believes father wants to be reached: “Contact by any individual, particularly a long-lost illegitimate child, is clearly intrusive, whether welcome or not.”

Relying on the Privacy Act and Defense Department directives, officials at the National Personnel Records Center refuse to release any servicemen’s addresses, even those dating to the 1940s.

“Former and present Department of Defense personnel have a privacy interest in their homes, including the addresses of those homes,” says an affidavit filed in court in Washington by William T. Cavaney, director of the Defense Department’s Privacy Office. Government lawyers say the public-policy interest asserted by plaintiffs is “nonexistent.”

Joan Meier, the plaintiffs’ Washington attorney, said there’s another reason they should get the information: the separation of fathers from lovers and children was often the result of U.S. policy.

Department of Defense spokesmen deny this. There were no such written policies during World War II, according to a court affidavit of Trudi M. Turner, a researcher at the U.S. Army Center of Military History. If servicemen were transferred, she stated, it was due to “combat need.”

Contemporaneous accounts of life in wartime Britain tell a different story.

“It was American policy at this time that none of these (U.S.) Marines . . . should marry a British girl. Why, I haven’t the least idea. But I was told of the ban,” wrote British Brigadier John Durnford-Slater in his 1953 memoirs, part of which is filed in court.

Some women recall being offered 100, about $500 in wartime U.S. money, by their lovers’ commanding officers in return for signing a form promising to leave the men alone.

“Some commanding officers were not above moving a man away without warning if he had formed an unsuitable attachment or was in danger of becoming the victim of a ‘shotgun wedding,’ ” wrote historian Norman Longmate in a 1975 book, “The G.I.s: The Americans in Britain, 1942-1945.”

There is no way to know the number of British subjects who could be affected by the case.

But the plaintiffs’ complaint, filed here in December, 1988, estimates that up to 225,000 wartime babies were born to British women and American GIs, including an estimated 102,000 born out of wedlock.

Social taboos against out-of-wedlock babies were strong, and even lawful unions were not popular.

“To wish to marry an American was widely regarded as not merely foolish, but unpatriotic,” Longmate wrote. Many British then thought most women who dated GIs were loose. McGlade remembers the attitude of her schoolmates and neighbors.

“I was always told it was bad to be illegitimate, and (especially) the illegitimate daughter of a Yank,” said McGlade, who has formed a self-help group called War Babes, with about 350 members, for people in her situation. “Your mother was counted as a prostitute if she had a child by an American GI.”

For years, McGlade’s mother concealed the truth, saying the father was killed during the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Not until McGlade was a teen-ager did she realize that D-Day happened in June, 1944, 15 months before her birth, and that the story of his death was untrue.

She recalled that her stepfather didn’t allow her to play with her stepsister, “in case my American badness rubbed off.”

Like McGlade, some who filed affidavits in the case think their fathers want very much to be found.

“My name is Rosemary Chapman,” begins one. “I am 44 years old. . . . I was born on Nov. 14, 1944, in Slough, England.” Adopted after her birth, she was told in 1972 by her adoptive mother that her real father was an American GI.

Using a 1975 British law giving British adoptees the right to see certain parts of their adoption records, Chapman learned her mother had lived at the home of her father’s chief medical officer before her birth.

The files also held the name of the medical officer’s wife who, found by Chapman in 1980, recalled seeing her parents “sitting on the sofa holding hands. . . . It was definitely not just a casual affair for they were very fond of each other--and I can remember that you were a neat and beautiful baby.”

For McGlade, the search took 14 years.

It began in 1972, with the official route: contacts with the U.S. Embassy in London, the American Red Cross and government agencies here.

“The more departments I wrote, the more stupid forms they sent me,” she said. “They responded to me as if I hadn’t got half a brain. ‘What rights have you got? Fill in this form. . . .’ I thought, they’re bloody mad. If I knew all this, I wouldn’t be looking for him.”

There was one clue. Her mother had always said her father grew up in the same town as Lana Turner, which she thought was Boise, Ida.

In 1984, McGlade read a biography of Lana Turner and discovered a key error: The 1940s movie star’s hometown was Wallace, Ida. That year was the 40th anniversary of D-Day, and media interest on both sides of the Atlantic was keen.

McGlade went to a local newspaper with the tale of her search. The story was picked up by Reuters, and from there by National Public Radio. An enterprising NPR reporter, starting with the Idaho tip, did some detective work.

Two days later, the reporter called McGlade with news: her father was living in Elk Grove, Calif.

“I was sitting watching TV one Sunday when the phone rang,” recalled Jack Crowley, now a retired rocket engineer. “A fellow from Washington, D.C., called me and told me that he was doing some research for some British families about GIs over in England. . . . I couldn’t figure out what in the world he was calling me for.”

Then, Crowley said, a “timid little voice” on the other end of a transatlantic call “wanted to know if I’d been in Birmingham in Christmas of 1944.”

“I called him and said I was a member of a family that knew him during the war,” McGlade said. “He answered all my questions.” She told him details about himself she had learned from her mother. They swapped photos; he sent her an old black-and-white wartime photograph of himself. Seeing it, she was certain.

“My mother-in-law thought it was my son--they look like twins,” McGlade said.

One evening a few nights later, she took her courage in her hands and placed another call.

“I made sure his wife wasn’t around,” she said. “I said, ‘I’m your daughter.’ . . . I felt sick to my stomach. I had to put the phone down.”

Crowley said, “You’re not scared of your own dad, are you?”

Crowley does not remember McGlade’s mother, who died in 1987. What convinced him that McGlade was his daughter, he said, were a dozen small things, some of which struck him on a visit she paid him in 1986.

“Mannerisms, characteristics,” he said. “I have a widow’s peak. So did she. My fingers were very short and stubby, but I have a big hand. Shirley calls them sausage fingers. Hers are identical. The shape of the eyes and expressions, too. Body language, I guess you’d call it. I could recognize my brother in her. . . . I knew it was my daughter.”

McGlade’s 14-year search would have taken only a few weeks if the government had helped. Up-to-date records on Crowley’s whereabouts were in Veteran’s Administration files. It had been paying him disability checks for a war injury for 43 years.

A recent decision by the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals has bolstered government officials’ arguments that GIs’ privacy must be maintained.

Last June, reversing earlier precedents, the court said a group of retired federal workers was not entitled to home addresses of former colleagues.

The legal issues now await a decision from U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson.

To the plaintiffs, the law is framed in the language of the heart: they want the freedom to find their fathers.