Stories about my Father - 24
“I now have a colored boy sleeping next to me. He is very intelligent and a pretty nice sort of a fellow. He is from New York. He was set back from another class because he failed some of his work. I don’t mind it at all. Most of the boys don’t either except for a few of the more ignorant ones. Any negro who gets in here must be ten times as good as any white man. The instructors don’t seem to pick on them however. I am taking a lot of kidding about it. Someone is always asking me if my “old lady” has gotten me a date over the holidays. He was on Guadalcanal.”
The military was strictly segregated during World War II. African American men fought in separate units that were usually, led by white officers. In 1943, the US government, needing more soldiers, formed an infantry regiment from Japanese American volunteers. By then, most Japanese Americans had been rounded up and forced into internment camps. For these men, it was a way out and a way for them to prove their loyalty to their country. By the end of the war, the Japanese American 442nd Infantry Regiment had become the most decorated unit in military history.
Over two and a half million African American men registered for the draft and over the course of the war, over a million men and women of color served. Most were relegated to non-combat duties like maintenance, transportation, and food service, but some units of fighting men went into battle and helped turn the tide of the war.
Everything in the military was separate. Black and white service men did not live together, eat together, or socialize together. There were different sections of the training camps for each group of men: barracks, mess halls, bars, and movie theatres. Even their blood supply was segregated. Blood bags in combat areas were labeled and stored apart.
One of the few sections of the Army that was integrated to some extent was the Officers Candidate School. There was nothing forward-thinking about this, it was pure common-sense economics. There were not enough staff or training facilities to enable the Army to maintain two entire programs, so the OCS combined them. The Army needed the manpower, so, they made the exception. The exception, of course, then proved just how stupid the entire policy was. If you can be together under some circumstances, then, clearly, you can be together under all. The US military already had an arcane rule that no Black serviceman could ever outrank a White serviceman within a company. There were only so many White officers to go around so, hence the need for Black officers.
“Don’t worry about anybody not getting along with the colored boy in the barracks. Everybody accepted him all right. We all used to go over to the PX and drink beer together (a few at a time is all it is wise to take in OCS).”
In my high school class in Northern New Jersey, there was just one African American girl and a small handful of Asian American kids in an ocean of 1600 white students. My friend Solomon Yang lived up the street from us and we would play together all the time either by ourselves or with the others in the neighborhood. In school, though, I don’t think we hung out. We had totally different interests and strengths, so we weren’t in any classes together. Solomon’s family was from Taiwan. His dad was an architectural engineer. English was their second language so it cannot have been easy for them. As a kid, I didn’t give a thought to how difficult it must have been. Now, as an adult, it’s hard for me to think about anything else when I think about my friend and his family.
Any hard and fast conviction that gets swept blithely aside the second money is involved is something that should probably never have been in place to begin with. The ridiculousness of all of it becomes crystal clear. Over the last day or two, it’s been tragically hilarious to watch Republican Governor DeSantis of Florida come crawling to the Federal government begging for disaster aid for his state in the wake of Hurricane Ian. This, after all his vehement opposition to giving the same aid to New York years ago after Hurricane Sandy. It’s all just hypocritical nonsense that never seems to change.
“A boy who got sent to boot school from my battery at the same time I was, was up at the hospital this weekend. When he was standing in line waiting along with a bunch of characters, mostly negro, a corporal saw his OCS patch on his shirt and said, “OK Lieutenant, you go in first.”
Camp Davis, like many of the enormous Army bases set up during World War II, was in the south. In this case, in North Carolina. It was one thing keeping everybody separate on the base, but quite another thing in the towns nearby where soldiers would go to relax on their off hours. World War II began more than twenty years before the Civil Rights movement got underway. African American soldiers from the more liberal North who went off base, found themselves in the middle of the most hostile environment imaginable. As servicemen, they were not meant to be subject to civil discipline, but try telling that to a local good ol’ boy redneck cop.
“Kinston is an awfully pretty little town. It has big trees and lawns and so forth in the residential district and downtown the main street is about twice as wide as the one at home. There are a great many negros and the negro section is off limits to servicemen.”
Last night, we watched a movie called, “There’s Something About a Soldier.” It was a low-budget film put out to boost war-time morale that was shot in Camp Davis. These days, there is nothing really left of the facility, so it was interesting to see it in action. The story was basic: cocky young OCS candidate falls for a dame whose brother had been killed in combat, screws everything up, loses the dame, redeems himself, and ultimately gets the dame back. As the poster says, “It makes you swell with pride!”
Much of the action is filmed in front of footage of real soldiers training. Watching them in the background, every so often you can see a lone dark face in amongst all the white ones. That is the story I would like to see. What did those guys go through?
“Several boys from my old class were relieved last week. Most of them for “academics.” The only one I felt sorry for was Meadows the colored man whom I used to sleep next to. He just couldn’t get the studies. He had been set back before because he had flunked three subjects and he flunked two of them again this time through. It was clearly his own doing as he had had a second chance, and the academic section is not affected by any prejudices since what you do on a test is in black and white and you can look over your paper if you flunk. I hated to see him flunk out. He would have made a splendid officer. He was a wonderful athlete and gave a very good appearance. He was about my height and his shoulders were about twice as wide as mine and as straight as they could be. He had been in the National Guard in New York and was on Guadalcanal for a long time. I think he could have made a good officer because he could do the kind of thinking that you have to do in combat which is something apart from the kind you have to do to learn something out of a book. He had been out of college several years and wasn’t used to studying. It would have meant a lot to him to graduate.”
Decades after the war, my father wrote about his bunkmate, “I bunked next to him and became friendly, taking some ribbing from my white southern friends. My friendship did not extend to going into Wilmington on weekends with him. I don’t know what he did in the segregated town. He probably had a better time than I did.”
My father never thought to ask Meadows what he was going through any more than I thought to ask my friend Solomon what he was up against. “Separate but Equal,” is what the policy said, and the people on the better side of the “equal” equation rarely questioned it. It was just assumed by them that both sides were a mirror image of each other which, of course, was never the case.
In reflection, many years later, it starts to sound like my father was beginning to understand just how deep racial prejudice goes. “While there were many well-educated blacks in the army their average level of education reflected the poor schooling most blacks, especially in the South, received at that time and later. I am not sure, but the general impression I got was that the white officers assigned to them tended to be poor.”
During the Battle of the Bulge in Jenneville, Belgium, part of the all-Black 761st Tank Battalion joined up with my father and the 87th Infantry Division. “It was bitterly cold, and they would park a tank right next to a house (which would be right on the road) so that they could move from the opening at the top of the tank turret and climb through an upstairs window of the house, where they would sleep. They also kept the tanks headed towards the rear and left their engines running all night so there would be no problem starting them up quickly in the cold if they had to. “Takes too long to get ‘em in gear,” became a byword among us.”
On July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981 which stated, “There shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.”
It was a start.