Commentary: American Racism Probably Prolonged World War II
Date: Thursday, June 10, 2004
By: Gregory Kane, BlackAmericaWeb.com
The scene is Camp Shelby, Miss. The time is the early 1940s. America is at war with the Axis powers of Germany, Japan and Italy.
And at war with its own black soldiers.
At Camp Shelby, buses from the base sometimes transported troops into the nearby town. One day a bus driver refused to pick up some black soldiers. It seems he didn’t want to pick up “niggers.” The brothers had a prompt retort: they nearly overturned the bus.
Switch the scene a little way to the west, in Camp Claiborne, La. Black soldiers there became so incensed with drivers not picking them up that they overturned a bus, torched it and beat up escaping white soldiers.
Author David P. Colley wrote of both these incidents in his 2003 book, “Blood for Dignity: The Story of the First Integrated Combat Unit in the U.S. Army.” They were by no means the exception. Writing of another incident at Camp Claiborne, Colley revealed that the base “was the scene of a ‘disturbance’ that was reported in the Washington Times Herald in which as many as 16,000 black troops armed themselves, mutinied, beat up their white officers, broke into arms lockers and ‘shot up the works.’”
Black soldiers guarding German prisoners of war, according to Colley, “rampaged through a dining car after they had been denied service while German POWs were seated for a meal.”
No doubt you heard none of these stories when the World War II memorial was dedicated on Memorial Day. You probably didn’t hear about them at any of the past weekend’s 60th anniversary celebrations of D-Day either.
If you can’t rewrite nasty history, sometimes the only option is to ignore it.
But black Americans can’t afford to ignore it. The treatment of black soldiers — and their contribution to the victory in World War II — is something that should be foremost in our minds. That’s why Colley’s book should be in the home library of every black family in America. So
should his earlier work “The Road to Victory: The Untold Story of World War II’s Red Ball Express.”
“Brothers In Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, WWII’s Forgotten Heroes” by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anthony Walton should be added to that list, as well as Joe W. Wilson Jr.’s “The 761st ‘Black Panther’ Tank Battalion in World War II” and “Honoring Sergeant Carter:
Redeeming a Black World War II Hero’s Legacy” by Allene G. Carter and Robert L. Allen.
The men of the 761st Tank Battalion are the ones you didn’t see in the much-ballyhooed movie “Patton,” the biopic of the World War II general who commanded the “Black Panthers” as part of his Third Army. The men of the Red Ball Express — 75 percent of them black — were the ones you didn’t see in Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan.”
During a three-month period after the Allies landed at Normandy on D-Day, it was the men of the Red Ball Express who drove the trucks that kept the advancing infantry supplied with ammunition, food, gasoline for tanks and other supplies.
These men served ably and loyally despite the war waged against them by their fellow white Americans. For much of the war, American brass considered most black troops good for nothing but lowly service detail. Combat was a white guy thing.
But when the Germans launched the major counteroffensive known as “The Battle of the Bulge” in December of 1944 and inflicted major casualties on American troops, the brass suddenly had a change of heart. In March of 1945, desperately in need of replacements for infantrymen, the Army
finally decided to accept black volunteers in white units.
Of course, there was a final insult involved: any black soldier in the rank of sergeant or above had to become a private again. No blacks giving orders to white troops would be allowed.
You have to wonder by what length the war could have been shortened — and how many black and white lives saved — if America hadn’t practiced its own form of vicious racism while condemning Adolf Hitler’s.
It’s a pity no one mentioned on Memorial Day or D-Day that America defeated the Axis powers in spite of, not because of, the white guys running the war effort.
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