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Hundreds of babies born to British women and African-American GIs were placed into care.

A wedding ring and a photograph are all Leon Lomax has left to remember his mother by, a woman he has longed to know his whole life.

Leon's white British mother met his African-American GI father during World War II, when he was stationed at RAF Birch, an airbase in Essex, southeast England.

When Leon was born in December 1945, his mother, who was unmarried, left him in a children's home. He has a "distant memory" of what he thinks was the last time he saw her -- and remembers "standing in the corner of a crib and crying real hard."

Leon, now 73, is still haunted by the choice his mother made. For decades, he has wondered: Did she want to give him up, or was she forced to?

"I just want to know what conditions she was under," he tells CNN, from his home in Ohio. "I always thought about trying to find her."

He's not alone. Historian Lucy Bland estimates that around 2,000 mixed-race children were born in the UK to British women and African-American servicemen between 1943 and 1946.

The US Army refused permission for black GIs to marry their pregnant white girlfriends and so the babies they gave birth to were branded "illegitimate."

Read more here.

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