Doubts about the fighting ability of the black soldiers were not confined to the American side. Holmes remembers vividly a conversation with a German prisoner of war, a Nazi major who had been born in Chicago before returning to the fatherland. The major, stunned when he saw Holmes, a black man in uniform, said, “What are you doing here? This is a white man’s war.”
Holmes and his buddies thought otherwise. They thought it was America’s war. One of the veterans of the 761st said more than fifty years later, “When you get over there and the nation’s in trouble you ain’t got no black and white. You only got America.” A simple and profound declaration from a man who, before he went into combat, trained at bases in American communities where the water fountains and toilets said WHITES ONLY.
Holmes’s daughter, Anita Berlanga, a Chicago businesswoman, has a different set of sensibilities about discrimination, and she still finds it hard to believe what her father went through. What saddens her most is that racism probably kept him from pursuing a legal career or a career as an artist after the war. As she says, “I learned from my father . . . how ridiculously hypocritical this country is. They took good, honest men and treated them poorly before and after the war.”
They haven’t talked about it much but Berlanga says, “I don’t know what my father’s real expectations were but there was this sense of bafflement: ‘Why couldn’t I have done that?’ The war gave him a sense, for the first time, of what he could do. He was given a job to do and he did it extraordinarily well. Then to come back and find out that didn’t count—that was disappointing, but he kept going. He believed in the essential goodness of man, so coming home to racism was disheartening to him.”
In the rage of combat Holmes often made a deal with God: Get me out of this and I will be a better, decent person. God didn’t have to worry about Johnnie Holmes, but he might have spent a little more time with some of the people who were back in Chicago, far from the front lines. One of them was working at the Foot Brothers factory when Holmes went looking for work, now a twenty-five-year-old battle-scarred veteran, down to ninety-eight pounds as a result of lingering problems from injuries suffered when he was hit by shrapnel from land mines. It was Johnnie Holmes’s first stop after getting out of uniform. As soon as he entered the office, he remembers vividly to this day, the woman in charge of hiring looked up and said, “What are you doing here? We don’t hire niggers. Get outta here.”
Welcome home, Sergeant Holmes.
Shortly after that, however, he heard about a company that maybe had openings for machinists. He went early the next morning and was startled to find a black personnel director at Doehler Jarvis Corporation. Holmes had never seen a black man in a white-collar job. The personnel director said he didn’t have anything at the moment but that Holmes should leave an application and he’d get a call if a job opened up. Johnnie didn’t leave it to chance. He showed up early again the next morning and again the morning after that, politely refusing to accept the personnel man’s assurance that he would call when a job developed. When it was clear Holmes would do this until he got a job, the personnel man looked at Holmes, sighed, and said, “Okay, report here Monday morning.”
Holmes worked as a machinist until the factory closed in 1951. Then he went to work for the city of Chicago in a variety of jobs until his retirement in 1985. It was a good life, he says; he was treated well on the job.
Johnnie Holmes and his fellow black veterans, however, were still living a lot of their days as second-class citizens. Holmes married a white woman during his days at Doehler Jarvis and they stayed married for thirty-eight years, until she died in 1985. It was not always easy, being a racially mixed couple in Chicago. Johnnie can remember many occasions when he sent his wife, Louise, into a restaurant to bring the food out to the car rather than risk the wrath of some bigot who wouldn’t approve of their loving but black and white relationship.
For all of his combative ways, Johnnie decided he wouldn’t personally bow to the inherent frustration of discrimination. As he puts it today, “If I let all of the negatives intervene, I would have never achieved anything. I kept focused on what I wanted to do, which was to make money, provide for my family.”
Holmes, however, did support the civil rights movement through his church and he recalls with pride meeting Dr. Martin Luther King and joining him in his Chicago marches.
He also set out to advance his station in life his own way, as a real estate investor. His speciality was low-income rental apartments in buildings in black neighborhoods. At one time he owned as many as three buildings divided up into rental units. It was as a landlord and as a black man who had overcome so much on his own that he came to hate the welfare system that grew so fast in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. “It just killed ambition,” according to Holmes. “I had all of these tenants who in their late twenties had never worked a day in their life. They just waited around for that government check. No incentive.”
Holmes speaks of the welfare system in the same tone of voice that he uses to describe his son’s cocaine problems. Disdain. He’s plainly disgusted that his son, who makes good wages working in the oil drilling business in Louisiana, gave in to drugs, leaving behind a child in Chicago. Holmes wants nothing to do with his son; he’s no longer welcome in his home. What Holmes went through during the war and after strengthened his already tenacious character and he sees no need to compromise his standards for anyone, even family members.
Although Johnnie Holmes’s unit, the 761st Tank Battalion, was not involved in the liberation of the notorious concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau, according to its own official records it was in the area. There’s been some confusion about that over the years and it lingers to this day. The 761st did participate in freeing the fifteen thousand Jews from a branch of Mauthausen, another concentration camp in Austria.
So the 761st soldiers did have firsthand knowledge of the depravity of the Third Reich’s racial attitudes. As indefensible as America’s attitude was toward blacks, Germany’s ultimate solution took racial hatred to its darkest levels. Who better to put all that in perspective than Johnnie Holmes? So he’s always willing, when asked by Jewish organizations or schools, to speak about the horrors he saw in World War II.
In his seventies, however, he may be mellowing some. He’s much more inclined to help out at his church or take his Lincoln Town Car on long driving trips than to sit around and remember the bad old days or speak of the two-front battle he was forced to fight, Germans in front of him, racial bigots at his back.
Now he can say with pride and confidence, “I am proud of the way I live my life. I was a good soldier. I served my country. It is my country, right or wrong. I’m still waiting to find out what God really wants me to do. None of us can ever contribute enough.”
LUIS ARMIJO
“I live a good life. Not with riches or money. I love to teach. I love to help people.”
IN 1939, NEW YORK was the site of the World’s Fair, a glittering exposition in Queens, a half hour from midtown Manhattan, near where La Guardia Airport and Shea Stadium are now located. The theme was the future, and it was a dazzling exhibition of the fantastic possibilities about to be realized—including television, mass airline travel, and superhighways—spread out over 1,216 acres along a backwater of the East River. The industrial giants of the age, General Motors, Westinghouse, and General Electric, constructed elaborate exhibitions to demonstrate the possibilities of travel, electrical power, and communication. In his evocative book 1939: The Lost World of the Fair, David Gelernter makes the persuasive argument that the fair was a metaphor for a nation infused with the idea of a future full of grand possibilities. He wrote in his epilogue, “The future was a tangible, tasteable, nearly corporeal presence in your life.” For many Americans, precisely. Much of the country was living more in the past than in the future, however.
As a child in the forties I recall visiting farm families still living with kerosene lamps and outhouses. In our t
iny home on the Army base the only heat came from a coal-burning stove in the front room. Many years later we went back to the now abandoned base with our children and my parents. My father found the foundation of our home and walked it off with our youngest daughter, Sarah. She was astonished to learn that her New York bedroom was larger than the small house that was home to five of us by war’s end. And, as my mother reminds me, we were living better than many families still struggling to escape the deprivations of the Great Depression and dealing with the acute housing shortage brought on by the war.
Luis Armijo, wartime portrait
In 1940 only about 54 percent of the homes in America had complete plumbing—running water, private bath, and flush toilet. Almost a quarter of the homes had no electrical power. Economists estimate that most American homes in 1940 had only 1,000 square feet of living space. In 1998, they estimate, new single-family homes have more than double that, a little more than 2,100 square feet of living space.
In the rural American Southwest in 1940 the past and the future were joined on the same desert landscape, rudimentary and surreal forces coexisting in the sagebrush and cactus. A new age of infinitely greater power and peril than anything history had known was about to begin in a remote corner of New Mexico—the development and the detonation of the first atomic bomb, the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. The manipulation of the atom was intended to produce nuclear power, first for war, then for peace, but always in reserve for war.
Not too far from where J. Robert Oppenheimer and America’s keenest scientific minds were racing to build and test a bomb so lethal not even they could imagine the full magnitude of its power, Luis Vittorio Armijo was growing up in the traditional fashion of his family. He was the son of a Spanish Basque father and an Apache mother. The family lived on a cattle ranch originally acquired by his Apache grandmother in a government land grant. It was located in the heart of the Apache reservation in southwestern New Mexico.
Armijo had an unusual childhood, even by the standards of that time and place. His parents and both sets of grandparents lived in the big house. The children—three boys and three girls—lived in a bunkhouse. Armijo recalls how the melding of the Apache and Basque cultures made it a lively household. “We spoke Spanish, French, and Apache,” he says. “We were self-sustaining—with the cattle herd and big gardens. We went to town only about once a month.”
Armijo didn’t get his first name until he was about ten years old because first he had to perform certain Apache rites. “Grandpa took me out to kill my first deer,” he says. “I had to drink some of the blood, then get the deer home, skin it, tan the hide, and make moccasins and other things.” A family friend suggested the name Luis and his grandmother said his middle name would be Vittorio, which Armijo was told was also the name used by Geronimo as a young man.
As a young man Luis spent a lot of time with his father, who, though Spanish, identified with his wife’s Apache ways. Luis remembers now, sixty years later, how his father taught him endurance. “He said, ‘If you can walk three miles, you can walk four.’ I learned how to track animals—how to tell a buck from a doe. I learned the medications from plants. White people take aspirin. We took the bark from the wala wala tree. I rode my horse three miles to the school bus and then took the bus ten more miles to school.
“I was just following the patterns of my parents. I thought I’d continue the same life. I knew nothing of the outside. On the maps in school, Colorado was in red and Arizona was in yellow, so I really thought when I got to those states they would be those colors. But when I got to high school and traveled with the basketball team to other towns, I realized I could do other things. I didn’t have to depend on the four winds like my grandfather—the ground that gives you nutrients, the air you breathe, the sky that goes from light to dark and back, and the rain.”
In 1942, his senior year in high school, Luis received his draft card and signed up for Army Air Force cadet training. A month later he was inducted and shipped to Fort Bliss, Texas, where he had an unexpected lesson in racial stereotyping. They said they wanted to use Southwestern Indians to speak their native language, as code talkers, to pass along vital military information.
“They called my name and I said, ‘I’m not a full-blooded Indian; I can talk the language but you can find better people—I’m supposed to be a pilot.’ The guy said to me, ‘Hey, Apaches don’t become pilots. They’re not smart enough.’ ” Armijo says people think that American Indians aren’t smart because they don’t talk a lot. But, he says, Indians are always thinking.
In the 1940s, Native Americans were an invisible population for most of the nation. It was thirty years before they began to demand—through AIM, the American Indian Movement—more autonomy from the federal government’s paternalistic system. When the war broke out, they were still largely confined to their reservations or the fringes of their native lands throughout the American West—but they were prepared to be warriors again. Moot Nelson, a Lakota Sioux, was working as a clerk in a western South Dakota draft board when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor. Recalling the morning after, he said, “Here was a line of them already at eight A.M., Indian boys, twenty of them.” His supervisor told him, “Get ready, Moot, the boys are fighting mad.” That was true at reservations across the country.
Luis Armijo, wartime, in restored Japanese car
Life-saving leaflet dropped over Japan
In the Southwest, Armijo was sent to infantry basic training in California, but in the final week he heard about another test for the air cadet program and signed up again. He passed and was assigned to Truax Field, in Wisconsin, to train in ground communications. He wasn’t going to be a pilot, but he wasn’t disappointed. “I was just happy to be going places. I had never been on an elevator before, and here I had been in Texas, California, Wisconsin, and Illinois in a few months. I saw sailboats on a lake! I went to my first big basketball game. I couldn’t wait to go to the towns and see the people, the lawns, the churches. If I heard a siren, man, that was really something.”
At Chanute Field in Illinois, Armijo began an intense course in aviation electronics and communications. He learned navigation and, especially, how to guide a plane in when it was foggy. “We didn’t know it then,” he says, “but we were being trained to guide B-29s that would be landing on Pacific islands after bombing Japan.”
He became a member of General Curtis LeMay’s 20th Air Force, and early in 1945 he left San Francisco for a tiny island a little less than six hours by bomber from the heart of Japan. “We were a team of sixteen communications specialists. Our job was to tell the pilots how to land in the foggy conditions.”
As the summer wore on, Armijo and his friends began to suspect something big was up. A plane called the Enola Gay was practicing landings and takeoffs with two other planes following it. It finally took off with two other B-29s early in the morning of August 6, 1945, and arrived over Hiroshima at 31,600 feet at 8:15 A.M. Nuclear warfare was born in an enormous explosion that unleashed a towering mushroom cloud and triggered a firestorm that destroyed Japan’s eighth-largest city and killed more than eighty thousand of its residents. Back on Tinian Island, Armijo and his friends heard about the mission as Colonel Tibbets headed home. Armijo remembers, “As they were returning, the Enola Gay radioed it had been a success. Word quickly got around what they were talking about.”
Luis Armijo
Luis Armijo, who three years earlier had been riding a horse to a school bus, was there for the beginning of this moment that, more than any other during the war, defined the perils of the future. He had no qualms about the attack on Japan, however, citing the ferocity with which Japan had waged war and the forecasts of hundreds of thousands of American dead, if not a million or more, if an invasion of the mainland became necessary.
For Armijo, the moment had a certain symmetry. His family was a little more than an hour’s drive north of the White Sands testing range where America’s newest weapons were exploded, some of th
em blowing out the windows in the family home.
About two weeks later a typhoon hit Tinian, taking Armijo’s tent and throwing him hard onto the ground. He cracked four vertebrae and had to be shipped home for treatment. The war was over, and Luis Armijo was eager to begin a new life.
Despite his service, however, when he returned it was “back to the same old thing.” Racism. “Before the war,” he says, “we were treated as bad as black southerners. We couldn’t have a business in town. The movie theater was segregated—minorities sat on one side, the whites on the other.
“During the war it was different. You signed papers and the Army didn’t say you were Hispanic or an Indian. The papers just said, ‘Hey, you’re an American soldier.’ If we got captured, we were just Americans. We were in a war.
“Once you got back,” he says, “you went back into the same old hole. I thought, ‘Hey, how can I make them understand me?’ ” A Veterans Administration counselor suggested a sitting job because of his back condition, so Armijo signed up for accounting courses at a New Mexico state teacher’s college. While there, the ways of his family awakened another interest: teaching. “Being the eldest in the family, whenever I learned something I was expected to teach my siblings. That was my grandfather’s way. So I got a degree in education with specialties in business and physical education.”
Armijo was hired immediately by the high school in Socorro, New Mexico, to teach typing, shorthand, business, and accounting. “I could see how eager these kids were to learn. To them, I knew more about the outside world than anyone. I said to them, ‘You don’t have to finish high school and go right back to the ranch. You can become a doctor, a nurse, a typist.’ ” That same message was heard in high schools across America. Returning veterans who went into the classroom brought a new worldliness and sense of adventure to the small-town kids they were standing before.
Tom Brokaw Page 18
