The Golden Thirteen

by Dan Goldberg

  Forrestal thought democratizing the Navy amounted to a great “challenge to the white people and to the colored people” and told President Roosevelt that segregation was inefficient and bad for morale, that “Negroes resent the fact that they are not assigned to general service billets at sea, and white personnel resent the fact that Negroes have been given less hazardous assignments.”43

  He proposed using black men on large auxiliaries, the vessels that bring fuel, food, and other supplies to ships at sea. He told the president that black sailors would make up no more than 10 percent of the ship’s crew. If this worked without too much trouble, black men could be sent to other types of ships “as necessity indicates.”

  Forrestal received a two-word response: “OK, FDR.”44

  Like Knox, Forrestal wanted support from the admirals. Unlike Knox, he took the initiative.

  The new secretary met with Admiral Ernest King and said he remained unsatisfied with how the Navy was using black men.

  “I don’t think that our Navy Negro personnel are getting a square break,” Forrestal said. “I want to do something about it, but I can’t do anything about it unless the officers are with me. I want your help. What do you say?”

  King sat for a moment, looking out the office window.

  “You know, we say that we are a democracy and a democracy ought to have a democratic armed services,” he said. “It certainly ought to have a democratic Navy. I don’t think you can do it, but if you want to try, I’m behind you all the way.”45

  Admiral Jacobs told the commanding officers of twenty-five large fleet auxiliaries that black men would soon make up as much as 10 percent of the ship’s general-service ratings. Of that cohort, about 15 percent would be petty officers third class taken from shore installations around the country. The remaining men would come from Class A schools and boot camp.

  “Inasmuch as the assignment of Negroes to duty aboard ship has been limited to the steward and commissary branches, the present plan is somewhat experimental in nature in that no recent past experience is available from which to draw conclusions and to establish policies,” Jacobs wrote the commanders of the chosen ships. “Commanding officers are cautioned to check closely to assure that Negroes are given the same consideration in duty assignment, and are accorded the same opportunities for training and advancement in rating as are others. . . . It may be helpful to point out . . . that past experience has proven the desirability of thoroughly indoctrinating white personnel prior to the arrival of the Negroes. It has been the experience that when this is done and the whites thoroughly understand the commanding officer’s policy, and what is expected of them, the chance of racial friction is materially lessened.”46

  A few months later, the Bureau of Naval Personnel asked the skippers how this experiment was going.

  Captain Robert Barber Twining, of the USS Antaeus, said that black men were berthed indiscriminately, same as whites, and that “the assimilation of the general service Negro personnel aboard this ship has been remarkably successful.”47

  Forrestal had predicted as much, but word from the fleet convinced King that the experiment could proceed, and he approved a plan to integrate all auxiliary ships.

  King sent a missive to the entire Navy in which he stated that mistreatment of African Americans would not be tolerated. “It is expected of each officer assigned to the command of Negro personnel that personal attitudes inimical to the best interests of the naval service be completely suppressed.”48

  He pushed officers to have Class A graduates assigned appropriate duties. “It will be readily understood the value of training programs set up by the Bureau will be lost if individual commands are not careful to see that graduates of the training schools are placed in jobs which will enable them to use the training they have received,” King wrote.49

  Forrestal also wanted to integrate the WAVES. Knox had told Captain Mildred McAfee, director of the WAVES program, that blacks would be in the WAVES over his dead body, which turned out to be morbidly prescient.

  Forrestal had no objections to integrating the WAVES, but on this point the president demurred—at least at first. Election-year politics once again forced Roosevelt to pay attention to African American demands. The 1944 Republican nominee, Thomas Dewey, had been courting the black vote since his run for governor of New York in 1942. He had been an early supporter of the Courier’s Double V campaign. Now he was accusing the president of discriminating against black women.

  Roosevelt, one month before the election, told Forrestal to go ahead and integrate the WAVES.50

  Shortly after Roosevelt secured a fourth term, Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, visited the Pacific theater on a mission to boost morale and address grievances. Armstrong was detached from Great Lakes and assigned to act as White’s guide.

  At Pearl Harbor, White met with the commander of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Chester Nimitz, who had been one of the more vocal proponents of segregation, and discovered that the Texan now held a more enlightened point of view.

  An attack cargo ship manned by a mixed-race crew arrived shortly after White. Nimitz called the captain and White to his office. White arrived to find the captain and his first officer waiting nervously in the anteroom, uncertain of what to expect. Nimitz beckoned them inside and asked how integration was going.

  The captain, perhaps thinking of Nimitz’s Southern upbringing, said that even though the sleeping quarters were integrated the black sailors were at one end of the room.

  “That’s bad, Captain,” Nimitz said. “If you put all the Negroes together they’ll have a chance to share grievances and to plot among themselves, and this will damage discipline and morale. If they are distributed among other members of the crew, there will be less chance of trouble. And when we say we want integration, we mean integration!”51

  The next day the segregated sections were gone.

  With Armstrong no longer at Great Lakes, Nelson and Goodwin asked his successor and former aide, Lieutenant Commander Vance Kauffold, if they could revisit the rule prohibiting them from the officers’ club. Armstrong had said the orders had come from above, so they were hoping Kauffold would intercede on their behalf. Kauffold took the request to Commodore Robert R. M. Emmet, who said he had never been aware of Armstrong’s policy and had certainly given no order of that kind.

  Emmet, who twelve years earlier railed against the idea of opening up the messman branch to black men saying then that Filipinos were “cleaner” and “more efficient,” now said black officers should avail themselves of any and all club facilities and if anyone had a problem with it, he would deal with it personally.52

  Goodwin got his privilege and then never used it. He didn’t want the club. He wanted the equality. Like Nelson, Goodwin understood that his officer status came with a responsibility to make life just a little easier for the men coming up behind him. He argued for the Navy to change its tone when recruiting black men. Recruiters, he said, were painting too rosy a picture. They focused on the glory of fighting on the high seas and the $50 monthly paycheck and glossed over all the hard work, drilling, and dangerous labor. When the rhetoric didn’t match the reality, black men were disillusioned, leading to a drop in morale. Goodwin said potential enlistees should be told they would be seamen second class in eight or nine months, that their jobs would be hard, and that many of them would handle ammunition. The Navy also had to be better at “internal public relations,” Goodwin said, so that African American sailors knew their opportunities.53

  The Navy was thinking along the same lines. Black sailors in the Pacific would soon benefit from seeing black officers.

  CHAPTER 12

  “YOU FORGET THE COLOR AND YOU REMEMBER THE RANK.”

  Jesse Arbor and Charles Lear arrived in Guam in February 1945, the first African American naval officers to reach the central Pacific.

  The marines stationed in Guam had a reputation for violence toward black sailors. Only three months before, a race riot ne
arly broke out on the island when, according to an Army orderly, “some Navy niggers got uppity.”

  Walter White visited Guam two days after Christmas, 1944, as a war correspondent and was struck by the casual racism he encountered. On account of his light skin, most soldiers and marines assumed he was white and certainly would not have guessed they were telling the executive secretary of the NAACP that “niggers [were] raising hell.”

  Guam, at the time, was a key supply base and home to Marines training for the invasion of Iwo Jima. The jungles had been cleared and in their place came roads, bridges, and airfields that could accommodate the heavy B-29 bombers that would lay waste to Japanese cities. Most of this construction was handled by black sailors, who worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week under a sun so hot “it made the earth seem like a hamburger grill.”

  As the black soldiers toiled, Marines routinely threw stones and empty beer bottles at them while screaming “niggers,” and “black sons of bitches.” Two hand grenades were hurled into the black camp.

  When black men complained to their superior officers, they were ignored. On Christmas Day, a white Marine shot and killed a black sailor, and a second black sailor was shot and critically wounded by a white sailor.1

  This was Guam in early 1945.

  On the night Arbor arrived, he and Ensign Joe Hise, a Jewish sailor from Rome, Georgia, decided to avail themselves of the officers’ club.

  Hise was tickled by the prospect. “Man, this is going to be a party in itself,” he said.

  “What’s that, Joe?” Arbor asked.

  “A black and a Jew going to the officers’ club,” Hise said. “Neither one of us is wanted.”

  “To hell with what they want now,” Arbor said. “The war is on now. I didn’t ask to come over here. You give me a damn ticket, and I’ll leave here tomorrow. I didn’t come over here to stay. I came over here to do a job.”

  Arbor was enjoying the officers’ club when a Marine called him over.

  “What the hell has this world come to now?” the Marine asked. “After a while, they’ll have [black] marine officers.”

  The Marine took a shot of whiskey. Arbor poured himself a shot, too, and said he was every bit a man as anyone else.

  “I don’t mean no harm,” the Marine replied.

  “That’s all right,” Arbor said.

  He poured another shot, threw it back, and walked off.

  The next morning the Marine apologized.

  Arbor was congenial, saying he hoped to see him after the war. What he thought but dared not say was that he hoped to see the Marine after the war to find out if he had learned any sense.2

  What Arbor learned later was that his arrival had been preceded by a letter from Lieutenant Commander S. B. McCune in which McCune had warned other officers against showing any kind of discrimination toward black officers.

  Walter White had taken his complaints to Forrestal, and the Navy responded by trying to protect the black officers it was sending to Guam.

  “There are now attached to this depot two Negro officers,” McCune said, referring to Arbor and Lear. “Their services are sorely needed by the naval supply depot, and they were therefore requested by the supply officer in command. These officers are to be given the same respect as any other officer in the U.S. Navy. They will be quartered and messed in regular quarters and mess halls in this depot. No discrimination of any kind will be shown these officers, and they will be treated equally with all other officers. Any officer violating this order will be sternly dealt with.”3

  So Arbor and Lear were for the most part left alone, mere curiosities to most officers, many of whom had never seen a well-educated black man.

  Others weren’t as fortunate.

  Sam Barnes landed in Okinawa in June 1945, commanding a 120-man logistics company preparing for the invasion of Japan. By then, there were nearly 60 black officers in the Navy—staff officers in various bureaus and V-12 graduates.

  Most, like Barnes, were sent overseas attached to logistical support and advanced base companies, supervising stevedore work at Pearl Harbor, Eniwetok, Saipan, the Philippines, Kwajalein, and Okinawa.

  Barnes had the night shift, overseeing men as they unloaded cargo from ships from 10 p.m. until 7 a.m. the next morning. His crew, which later received a citation for effectiveness, would take the cargo from ships and place it onto trucks, then drive the cargo to another supply base on the island, where another company would unpack the crates and boxes.

  It was hard labor, made no easier by the fact that by the time Barnes finished his shift and got a bite to eat, the morning heat was so oppressive that he could hardly sleep.

  The subtropical climate contrasted with the ice-cold reception Barnes, the only black officer on the island, received from his fellow officers.

  His only friend was Lieutenant (junior grade) Steve Belichick. Barnes and Belichick had met years earlier when Barnes played football for Oberlin and Belichick, who later coached at the Naval Academy and whose son Bill would become one of the most revered and reviled coaches in the NFL, played for Western Reserve.

  The first time Barnes entered the officers’ club in Okinawa, every officer except Belichick walked out.

  Two men—one black, one white—and a bartender stood amid the awkward silence.

  “Well, Steve,” Barnes said, almost apologetically.

  “Hell, Sam, don’t even worry about it,” Belichick said. “Let’s enjoy having the club to ourselves.”4

  That scene played out again and again until the white officers grew tired of abandoning the club and decided to stay, despite the presence of a black man.

  There were no incidents. Barnes had little more interest in knowing them than they had in knowing him, and that’s how the Okinawa officers’ club was integrated.

  Barnes, like his peers, knew he must keep his cool in the face of discrimination, but he also demanded respect, not just for his own sake but for the Navy’s.

  Barnes and a Marine he knew from Cincinnati were once in a jeep, stopped at an exit post in front of a petty officer third class who refused to salute.

  “Sailor, did you forget something?” Barnes asked

  “No.”

  “No, what?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Let me remind you of something you already know,” Barnes said. “You see this eagle on my cap? You see this bar on my jacket?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re not saluting me,” Barnes said. “You’re saluting that emblem of rank. Hereafter, you forget the color and you remember the rank. You forget everything except that in the future. And whenever you see one, you salute this. You don’t have to salute me as a person, but you salute that insignia as long as I have it on. I’m going to put you on report.”

  “Oh, don’t do that,” the sailor said.

  “I certainly am,” Barnes said. “This is not Navy regulations, and you know it, and I know it. You’re not saluting me because I’m colored, but that has nothing to do with Navy regulations. Maybe you ought to go back and read your Bluejacket’s Manual.”5

  Graham Martin, after he was commissioned, was a battalion commander at Great Lakes. He wanted to be aboard a ship but instead found himself running men through drills. He knew in his bones he had this assignment because the Navy could not stomach the thought of black officers commanding white men at sea. Reagan and Sublett were given similar make-work jobs at Hampton. Reagan was first made an officer in charge of the electrical school. He’d give a lecture and check in on how men were performing. Sublett instructed a company in small boat handling, seamanship, and military bearing before being sent back to Great Lakes to lecture on venereal disease.

  Fortunately for the three officers, these assignments lasted only about a month. In July, Martin and Sublett were sent to San Francisco and given command of the YP-131, a converted yacht assigned to patrol the waters off the California coast. Sublett was the skipper. Martin was second in command.

  It still fe
lt like busywork, the kind of job that probably did not require one officer, let alone two. “What the heck am I doing?” Martin thought.6 But remembering those Hoosier lessons Principal Lane had taught him all those years ago, Martin thought he had best complete these orders as well as he knew how. He was part of a team, and his job was to execute the play to the best of his ability—”because if I don’t,” he thought, “that will give them something to talk about.”

  Coast patrol may not have been the flashiest assignment, but it wasn’t all bad. San Francisco was a hospitable town, and Navy nurses were always clamoring for tours of San Francisco Bay or an up-close look at Alcatraz.7

  Dealing with bigotry was just part of a day’s work, and Martin, like his shipmate Sublett, mostly ignored the white men who crossed the street to the other side or pretended they did not see him in order to avoid saluting. But like George Cooper and Sam Barnes, Martin had a breaking point.

  On base at Treasure Island, which is connected to San Francisco by a bridge that spans the bay, a white sailor walked right by Martin as if he did not exist.

  “Hey, sailor. Would you come back here, please?”

  The sailor turned around, stared at Martin, and walked toward him.

  “Are you supposed to salute officers?” Martin asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, you didn’t salute me.”

  “No, sir.”

  “What’s the matter? Why didn’t you?”

  The sailor didn’t say a word.

  “Oh, I see what it is,” Martin said, removing his cap and holding it in front of the sailor’s face.

  “Now salute the insignia of the United States Navy.”

  The sailor snapped his hand to his cap and said, “But you understand that I’m not saluting you.”

  “I understand, but you understand that you’re supposed to salute this insignia.”8

  Martin worked yard patrol for nine months. In the spring of 1945 he was placed in charge of the YO-106, a yard oiler. It was his first assignment with a mixed-race crew and was a far more challenging detail than any of his previous tasks. His job was to take oil from a refinery off the coast of San Francisco, pull up alongside battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, and destroyers and refuel them, day and night.9 Oilers required skilled officers to help handle the ship in the currents and waves as the ship pulled alongside much larger vessels.