The Golden Thirteen

by Dan Goldberg

  Martin received a commendation for his quick thinking after one incident when a cruiser lurched as it was being filled with oil. The hose snapped and oil shot up in the air like a geyser in the Pacific. Martin was on the bridge at the time and cut off the oil flow in seconds.10

  Commendations from ashore were nice, but what Martin cherished was the respect he earned at sea. The plan for the oiler when Martin came aboard was to gradually replace the white crew with black sailors, but a white engineer said he had no desire to leave. He liked the crew and he liked the skipper. Could he stay?11

  On June 7, after only a couple months on the oiler, Martin went ashore for the evening and left a warrant officer in charge of the ship.

  “If a fueling order comes in after dark, give me a call,” Martin told him. An order came in, and the warrant officer thought he’d try to make the run himself but hit the YO-106 against the dock. To the Navy, the accident was Martin’s fault. If he hadn’t thought the warrant officer could handle the assignment, he never should have left him in charge. A letter of admonition was attached to his file, citing his “lack of proper appreciation of his duties and responsibilities.”12

  The next week, Captain Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter ordered Martin to Hollywood for a five-day assignment to participate in a propaganda film. Hillenkoetter, who would later become the first director of the CIA, was in charge of the Committee on Negro Personnel, which Forrestal had created “to assure uniform policies” across the Navy with regard to its treatment of black sailors.

  Among the efforts that emerged from his committee was a propaganda film entitled The Negro Sailor, which tells the story of Bill Johnson, a black man in the Navy. Production was supervised by Frank Capra, who directed Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, among other classics.

  The theme of the film is cooperation regardless of race, and Martin appears for a few moments as the skipper of an oiler. Ironically, one of the Navy’s first black officers appears in a film that stresses the value of the messman branch, now called the steward’s branch. Johnson is informed that stewards are every bit as important as any other member of “the team” and no black man should see that branch as mere cooks or waiters, because they may be called on to fight if the ship comes under attack. “They may pour soup between battles but in battle they pour lead with the best of them.”13

  Off the Atlantic coast, John Reagan and James Hair were assigned to operate a large harbor tugboat, the YTB-215, responsible for the waters near Connecticut, down almost to Cape May, and all around New York Harbor.14 They were stationed in Tompkinsville, Staten Island, and their tug worked around the Ambrose Channel, the only shipping channel in and out of the Port of New York and New Jersey. Reagan and Hair helped with docking and undocking larger ships, breaking up ice floes on the Hudson River, and putting out fires on ammunition piers in New Jersey.15

  It wasn’t long before Hair had a chance to prove his worth. In September, a powerful hurricane moved up the East Coast, and the tugboat was ordered to help a distressed ship. Visibility was less than five feet and the waves were crashing over the sides. For the first time since he had enlisted, Hair feared for his life. One of the crew, a fellow everyone called Shorty, came up to the pilothouse wearing just about every life jacket he could fit on his body.

  “What in the hell are you doing,” Hair screamed. “What kind of damn sailor are you? Get those damn jackets off! Get ‘em off!”

  Shorty ripped off those jackets as fast as he could.

  Hair suspected that everyone in the crew was just about as frightened as Shorty, and with good reason. He needed to demonstrate that there was nothing to fear. If the skipper wasn’t scared, then they had no reason to be. He put on a brave face for his crew, but as Shorty scampered off, Hair thought to himself he sure would like to grab a bunch of those lifejackets, before steeling himself and skillfully steering the ship to safety.16

  Captain John M. Gill, the gruff but fair base commander on Staten Island, said that Hair was the kind of sailor who’d succeed no matter what color he was: “He seems to have that little extra something that makes him click in whatever he does.”17

  The assignment allowed Reagan and Hair to spend their spare time in New York City, a sailor’s dream, for that was the “best liberty town in the world.”18 The two hung around the Hotel Theresa, known as the Waldorf of Harlem, where sailors and soldiers mingled with celebrities such as Sugar Ray Robinson and Joe Louis, the heavyweight champion. It was the perfect place to get a drink or meet a girl. One evening Hair asked a beautiful young woman to join him for dinner that night. She accepted his invitation, but when he returned to the hotel to pick her up, he ran into Joe Louis, who was there to pick up the exact same woman.

  Hair figured he’d win the young lady’s favor by showing he was as tough as any boxer.

  “You’re not taking her out. She’s my date. I’m taking her out,” Hair told Louis.

  “No, you’re not.” Louis said.

  Hair pulled off his jacket and challenged Louis to a fight, right there in the hotel lounge. He guessed there was no way Louis would actually hit him, and he thought the gesture would impress the girl.

  It was brave. It was valiant. It was stupid.

  She was not impressed. She left Hair standing in the lobby holding his jacket and the prizefighter walked out with his prize.19

  The Hotel Theresa was also where Reagan came to realize that one of the greatest disappointments in his young life was really one of his luckiest breaks. Among the regular guests at the hotel were members of the Ninety-ninth Pursuit Squadron, the famed Tuskegee Airmen, the unit that Reagan had so longed to join when he dropped out of college in Montana after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  Many were broken men now, missing legs or arms. Many more had been lost forever.

  “Maybe it was for the best,” Reagan thought.20

  It was during these months that Reagan earned the dubious distinction of being the only member of the first group of black officers to lose men under his command. Hair wasn’t aboard, and Reagan was in command as the crew helped a loaded tank landing ship pull away from the dock at an ammunition pier in Bayonne, New Jersey. The tug was on the LST’s starboard side, and Reagan wanted to speed around to the port side. The current was stronger than anyone realized, and as they were swinging around at full speed, the tugboat tipped just enough for three sailors to fall overboard. Only one survived.

  “That was the worst thing that personally has ever happened with me in the Navy,” Reagan later said.21

  It was on this tug, in May 1945, that Hair caught the attention of Lieutenant Commander Norman Meyer, the skipper aboard the USS Mason, the ship that Arbor and Reagan had been so excited to join before being diverted to officer candidate school. The destroyer escort was making its way toward the Earle ammunition depot at Sandy Hook, New Jersey, not too far from New York City, and Hair’s tug was helping the Mason dock. Meyer couldn’t believe how good that tug looked. The brass on its rails sparkled, the maneuvering was flawless. “Who is in charge of that ship?” Meyer wanted to know.

  Meyer invited Hair to lunch aboard the Mason, quite an honor. Senior officers rarely requested the presence of junior officers, certainly not black junior officers.

  When Hair boarded the ship Meyer greeted him while holding a copy of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, which had been published the year before and was already considered a seminal work on race relations in the United States. Myrdal’s central argument was that white Americans were free to choose whether black men and women would be their liability or their opportunity, a theme Meyer was mulling over when he first met Hair.

  The two officers spent the next forty-five minutes discussing race relations, Myrdal’s book, and the war’s effect on black men.

  Meyer was impressed and the next day called Commander Eddie Fahy, a detailer in the Bureau of Naval Personnel. He asked for Hair to come aboard the USS Mason as the first lieutenant.

  Meyer, a Naval Academy graduate from Minnesot
a, had recently replaced the Mason’s first skipper, Lieutenant Commander William “Big Bill” Blackford.

  Before taking over command of the ship he had been warned that the Mason, on account of its black crew, was a disgrace, one of Eleanor Roosevelt’s flights of fancy. If he took this assignment, his friends said, his reputation would be ruined.

  “My reputation is back at a factory in New Jersey,” he told them. “I’m just trying to get this war over with, and that’s my aim in life—to get back to my wife and a baby I hardly know.”22

  Meyer was Christian, but because of his last name was occasionally the target of anti-Semitic attacks. He had Jewish classmates he knew to be as bright and talented as anyone else, and his sympathies for minority groups were stirred.

  He didn’t think he was prejudiced against African Americans, and he had attended an integrated high school, but he knew he had lived a segregated life. Perhaps because of the Navy’s presumptions about black men or perhaps because Meyer harbored more bigotry than he cared to admit, he came aboard and almost immediately decided that the ship and crew were in bad shape. Meyer let it be known that he thought little of Blackford, who was beloved by the crew. Morale on the vessel tanked.

  Perhaps, he thought, Hair could help.

  “If the enlisted men had some doubts about this honky Meyer, he [Hair] could tell them I was sincere,” Meyer later recalled.23

  Hair, the only black officer aboard, was placed in charge of all deck operations and the topside appearance of the ship. He made sure that everything on deck was spotless—the boats, the hatches, portholes, rigging, and anchors.24

  By the time Hair arrived, the war in Europe was over and the crew figured they’d soon head to the Pacific to help with the invasion of Japan. Those orders never came. Instead, they tested depth charges that would be set off at the sound of a submarine’s propellers. It was dangerous work. One misstep and the crew could blow up the ship.25

  The crew dropped nearly 200 of these depth charges off the coast of Atlantic City, killing thousands of fish but bringing no harm to ship or crew. The next day they dropped 225 mark-14 depth charges. These caused some superficial damage to the ship but nothing too serious. The USS Mason, “Eleanor’s folly,” earned a commendation.

  The stories of the Mason were told in the pages of the black press, which was now filled with positive news about the Navy, thanks in no small part to Syl White’s work in the press shop.

  White, who had been promoted to lieutenant (junior grade) in July, did his job so well that by the end of August 1945, Rear Admiral Harold B. Miller, the Navy’s director of public information, requested that White be transferred to Washington to work in the Navy Department. White needed to be in the nation’s capital by September 20 because the Navy already had a special assignment in mind for him: he was to travel alongside Lester Granger, executive secretary of the National Urban League, who was leaving for an inspection tour of overseas naval bases on September 25.

  It was Granger’s second tour. Secretary Forrestal, who had been a classmate of Granger’s older brother at Dartmouth, had asked Granger to help improve morale among black sailors and try to ease some of the racial tensions.

  “I want you to report everything you find that is not right,” Forrestal told him. “I ask only one thing of you—if you find anything that’s wrong you report it to us and give us a chance to handle it, before you go to the public. But if in the end you’re not satisfied with the way in which the Navy has handled it, you can relieve yourself of your Navy connections and say anything you want.”26

  Granger had become Forrestal’s personal representative and during the summer of 1945 had toured shore installations to assess how integration was progressing.27

  The “Navy is so far out in front of the Army it isn’t funny,” Granger said during a press conference on July 21, 1945, following his first tour. “The Navy is now doing things which the Army insists would be bad for morale.”

  At the time of Granger’s press conference black men were still not allowed to be aviation pilots or to serve in combat posts in submarines. Some barracks remained segregated but at mess halls and on recreation fields the color line was gone.

  “I don’t think any of us is prepared to give the Navy a blank check of confidence,” Granger said. “But any reasonable person who has been around the country must give it credit for not being the same Navy so far as the Negro is concerned.”28

  The second trip would be overseas, and White’s role was press officer. They visited nine naval bases during their thirty-one-day trip. They began in San Francisco, meeting with the commandant of the Twelfth Naval District. Then they traveled to Manus Island, Espiritu Santo, Guam, Saipan, Okinawa, Nansei, Iwo Jima, and the Philippines.

  It was a bit of reunion tour for White. In Saipan he saw Reginald Goodwin and Phil Barnes. And at Eniwetok, “a little godforsaken stretch of sand less than a mile and a half long and a quarter-mile wide,” he saw Martin, Sublett, and Nelson, all members of Logistics Support Company 515.29

  The base at Eniwetok hosted five thousand men who had been preparing for the invasion of Japan. The officer in charge was Lieutenant (junior grade) George Reed, a Pennsylvanian. Sublett was his executive officer, Nelson was the personnel officer, and Martin was the athletic officer.30

  There wasn’t much to do on the base. Martin, when he wasn’t supervising men loading and unloading cargo ships, spent most of his time in the surf gathering seashells.31

  Nelson, who couldn’t stand to be idle and needed to be the best at something, boasted to anyone who cared to listen that he had the best seashell collection of any man on the island.

  The peacock had arrived a few months before, after having finally worn out his welcome at Great Lakes. The final straw occurred on a very cold morning with the wind whipping off Lake Michigan. Nelson, driving his blue Mercury convertible and looking as dapper as ever, spotted an attractive young white woman walking alone on the main road and stopped to offer her a ride.

  It was Mrs. Gumz, the wife of Commander Donald G. Gumz, who was a bomber pilot serving in the Pacific.

  Per usual, the top was down, so everyone saw a handsome black officer giving the commander’s wife a ride. Shortly after, Nelson was shipped out to Kwajalein. He turned right around and wrote the staff at Great Lakes a nice letter, thanking them for sending him to such a lovely part of the Marshall Islands.

  Sublett found his time on the island depressing. He wanted to be aboard a ship. What was the point of being commissioned if he couldn’t see some action? But the opportunity never came, and Sublett resented his token status for the rest of his life, feeling he had been denied the opportunity to prove his worth in battle.32

  Granger’s second report was less positive. He found that the farther you got from Washington, DC, the less impact Secretary Forrestal’s words had, and the farther down the ranks of command the policy descended the less likely it was to be enforced.33 He told Forrestal that while progress had been made, the Navy was not where it needed to be.

  “The final answer to a Democratic and completely efficient Navy,” Granger said, “is going to be found in the abolition of all types of segregation.”34

  White performed admirably during the trip, and Rear Admiral Miller, in charge of assigning photographers and correspondents to battlefronts, said White “has at all times been a credit to his race and the Navy. He has handled his assignments with tact, foresight and sound judgement. It can be said he contributed in large portion to a better understanding between the Navy and the Negro public.”35

  Miller recommended to White that he meet with William Hastie, who was in line to be the next governor of the US Virgin Islands. Hastie’s appointment would entitle him to a naval aide, and if White was selected, he’d earn a promotion to lieutenant commander.

  White liked the idea, but Hastie did not.

  “If I do have a naval aide the one thing I don’t need is another lawyer,” Hastie told White. “So I wouldn’t be interested
in appointing you to the task.”

  That conversation effectively ended White’s service, as he decided to return to his job at the US attorney’s office.36

  With the war now over, the hustle and bustle that defined Camp Robert Smalls slowed. Fewer than 2,000 black men remained at Great Lakes, down from the 13,550 who had been training there fifteen months earlier.

  Black men had performed ably as quartermasters, gunner’s mates, shipfitters, radiomen—even as officers in the US Navy. The discrimination justified so steadfastly in 1942 was by 1945 considered a terrible mistake, and Armstrong was singled out for blame.

  “Armstrong was an evil influence,” said Captain K. E. Bond, who led the technical training schools at Great Lakes. “Segregation was an egregious error. It was un-American and inefficient.”37

  Bond asked Commodore Emmet to integrate the aviation metalsmiths school with a similar school in Norman, Oklahoma. Emmet agreed and further recommended integrating the literacy training program.

  “We are making every effort to give more than lip service to the principles of democracy in the treatment of the Negro and we are trying to do it with the minimum of commotion,” Forrestal told Marshall Field III, the publisher of PM, founder of the Chicago Sun, and owner of the publishing house Simon & Schuster. “There is still a long road to travel but I am confident we have made a start.”38

  Commander William Turek, the officer in charge of recruit training, had always been uneasy with integration, but in June 1945 he was relieved of his position and replaced by Captain Richard Penny, who was eager to carry out the new directives. Goodwin thought that Turek was “too much aware of imaginary problems.” He assumed black men would make poor sailors so he took every opportunity to try to prove himself right. Penny had no such predispositions. When asked what allowances he was going to make for the supposed inferiority of black men, he said, “None.”