The Color of War

by James Campbell

  In 1939, a colonel with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers surveyed and mapped an area from Fort Monroe, Virginia, to Fort Sumter, South Carolina, paying special interest to the coastal areas. The map caught the interest of the War and Navy departments, which were searching for a new location for an amphibious training base. In the summer of 1940 a major and his pilot surveyed by air a huge swath of country from Norfolk, Virginia, to Corpus Christi, Texas, and pinpointed the fourteen miles of beach in Onslow County, North Carolina, which the colonel had discovered two years earlier. In February 1941 President Roosevelt authorized $1,500,000 to purchase a 174-square-mile tract for the Marine Corps. The area had been occupied by whites and African Americans since the Colonial era, and seven hundred families, mostly black, had to be relocated. Landowners were compensated, but many of the poor black sharecroppers who eked out a living on tiny plots of tobacco, peanuts, and sunflowers were not. The government moved them, along with their houses, cabins, farm buildings, and stores. The government also collected records on all the cemeteries and moved the remains to new ground outside the base. On April 5, 1941, Congress authorized $14,575,000 for the base’s construction. The camp was officially activated on May 1, 1941, and the Marines used the rotting shacks, sagging tobacco barns, sheds, and privies that had been left behind as targets for artillery and mortar practice.

  After returning from Cuba, the First Division filled out its regiments at Parris Island. In need of an operational staging area, it moved into New River in September 1941. New River was a camp only in name. The First Division’s World War II historian called it “111,170 acres of water, coastal swamp, and plain, therefore inhabited largely by sand flies, ticks, chiggers, and snakes.” A Marine veteran who had been in the Nicaraguan campaigns said that New River was worse than the jungle. Officers and men lived under canvas set up over wooden decks. But New River had everything the 1st Division needed: swamps, pine barrens, and miles of beach for amphibious landing training. In December 1942 the installation was named in honor of the 13th commandant of the Marine Corps, Lieutenant General John A. Lejeune.

  In March 1943 the Marine Corps got another regiment, the 24th, which had just been organized on the West Coast. On May 1, a third regiment was added when the 24th was divided and half the men went on to form the 25th Marine regiment. The 4th Marine Division was formally activated on August 14, 1943.

  Just a year before, no one would have dared to advertise a train full of Marines. After Pearl Harbor, sabotage was still a worry, and everyone knew that “loose lips sank ships.”

  CHAPTER 6: ELEANOR ROOSEVELT’S NIGGERS

  One of the South’s most prominent papers, the Richmond, Virginia, News Leader, editorialized, “If Negro soldiers are to be drafted into the army or are to be accepted as volunteers, they must be treated as fellow-soldiers and not as vassals or as racial inferiors.”

  Letter from the fifteen black mess attendants on the Philadelphia is from the Pittsburgh Courier, October 5, 1940, page 4, and from Hayward Farrar’s book, The Baltimore Afro-American: 1892–1950.

  The quotes about the president and the “colored race” are from Secretary of War Stimson’s diaries at Yale University. Stimson’s thoughts on blacks and integration can be found in On Active Service in Peace and War, by Henry Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, and in Morris J. McGregor’s Integration of the Armed Forces.

  The quote from General George Marshall is from The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, vol. 2 (1981). For an accurate depiction of Marshall’s feelings about the integration of the Army, see also Morris J. McGregor’s Integration of the Armed Forces.

  Robert Patterson’s response to FDR is from George Flynn’s The Mess in Washington: Manpower Mobilization in World War II.

  The quote from the NAACP regarding blacks being denied democracy is from Christopher Moore’s Fighting for America: Black Soldiers—The Unsung Heroes of World War II.

  The New York Daily News carried full-page photos of the KKK and Southern sharecroppers. The caption read, “Should We Fight to Save the World … While These Things Continue at Home? Tell your president,” the paper suggested, “that you want democracy to work properly at home before you fight for it abroad.” Later that same year the Pittsburgh Courier published the results of a controversial opinion poll, showing that 90 percent of those questioned favored more-aggressive demands for integration. Another 33 percent said it was more important to defeat racism at home than it was to bring Germany or Japan to their knees.

  Presidential candidate Wendell Wilkie asked, “Are we always as alert to practice [democracy] here at home as we are to proclaim it abroad?”

  Had Marshall truly wanted change, he had to look no further than the Merchant Marine model: total integration. Merchant Marines ate in integrated mess halls and bunked in integrated barracks, and black officers enjoyed the same privileges and responsibilities as their white counterparts.

  Blacks had an impressive record in battle. In the war of 1812, General Andrew Jackson, the commander of U.S. forces on the Gulf Coast, raised an army of free black Louisiana volunteers. They fought bravely against British regulars, and Jackson commended them for their “courage and perseverance.” After the war, however, the volunteers were not allowed to remain in the army. A War Department memo insisted, “A Negro is deemed unfit to associate with the American soldier.”

  After Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, 180,000 black volunteers served in racially segregated combat units of the federal army known as the “United States Colored Troops.” They displayed their courage at Port Hudson, Louisiana, on May 27, 1863, when they stormed the entrenched city and fought hand-to-hand with Confederate soldiers. One union officer wrote, “They were exposed to a terrible fire and were dreadfully slaughtered … all who witnessed their charges agree that their conduct was such as would do honor to any soldiers.” By the end of the Civil War blacks made up 10 percent of the Union forces. Their death rate was proportionally much higher than that among white troops because they were often used as assault troops and given inferior medical care. Major General David Hunter wrote to Secretary of War William Stanton, “I find the colored regiments hardy, generous, temperate, strictly obedient, possessing remarkable aptitude for military training.… I am happy to announce to you that the prejudices of certain of our white soldiers against these indispensable allies are rapidly softening or fading out.”

  Union General Benjamin F. Butler, who was initially skeptical of black soldiers, wrote this commendation after the Battle of New Market in October 1864: “The colored soldiers by coolness, steadiness, determined courage and dash, have silenced every cavil of the doubters of their soldierly capacity.” A decade later in a speech to Congress on the granting of civil rights to the Negro, Butler said that after that battle, “I swore to myself a solemn oath: ‘May my right hand forget its cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if ever I fail to defend the rights of the men who have given their blood for me and my country this day and for their race forever.’ And, God helping me, I will keep that oath.”

  Many blacks also became Indian fighters. General William Tecumseh Sherman, who was commanding general of the Army in 1877, was so impressed with their fighting skills that he recommended that the Army integrate its units just as the Navy had done.

  In Cuba, black soldiers of the 10th Cavalry saved Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. The 10th drew Spanish fire and then drove them into retreat. Shortly after the battle, Roosevelt complimented the black soldiers of the 9th and 10th cavalries for their bravery, saying that no Rough Rider would ever forget them. A white captain of the 10th Cavalry said, “I am perfectly satisfied that if they were called upon to march through the gates of Hades they would do so in the same jaunty manner in which they went up San Juan Hill.” Newspapers across the country carried a poem called “The Charge of the Nigger Ninth.” West Point Colonel James A. Moss, who also fought in Cuba, wrote later, “I do not hesitate to make the assertion that if properly trained and instructed, the Ne
gro will make as good a soldier as the world has ever seen.… Anyone who says the Negro will not fight, does not of course, know what he is talking about.”

  When given the opportunity to perform more-challenging tasks, black units like the 345th Quartermasters made the 1,000-mile run from the Persian Gulf through Iran to the Russian border, transporting crucial war supplies to the Russians who were struggling to stop the German offensive. Blacks also served as engineers. Sixty percent of the men that hacked the rugged, 271-mile Ledo Road across India, Burma, and China were black. In 1942, three of the seven regiments building the “Pioneer Road” across Alaska and Canada were black. In early March 1943, Allied land-based bombers destroyed a Japanese convoy in the Bismarck Sea. The all-black 96th Engineer Battalion built the bases from which the American bombers took off and landed.

  In 1936 Frank Knox was widely considered the best prospect within the Republican Party to run for president. At the Republican National Convention, however, Alf Landon had been announced as the nominee. On the drive home from the convention, Knox and his wife learned from a radio broadcast that Knox was the party’s choice for vice president. Though he and Landon lost the election to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who carried every state but two, Knox gained admiration from the president and was named secretary of the Navy in 1940. In a bid for national unity, FDR also named another former Republican, Henry Stimson, secretary of war.

  Walter White, secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was one sixty-fourth black. White’s fair-skinned father died in excruciating pain when surgeons at the white wing of an Atlanta hospital, where he had been mistakenly taken for an emergency operation, refused to treat him.

  The Selective Service and Training Act provided in its preamble that “(b) The Congress further declares that in a free society the obligations and privileges of military training and service should be shared generally in accordance with a fair and just system of selective compulsory military training and service.” The third proviso of Section 3(a) gave practical application to this declared policy: “[A]ny person, regardless of race or color, between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, shall be afforded an opportunity to volunteer for induction into the land and naval forces of the United States for the training and service prescribed in subsection (b).” And the first proviso of Section 4(a) stated the obligation of the armed forces toward all men taken into service: “[I]n the selection and training of men under this Act, and in the interpretation and execution of the provisions of this Act, there shall be no discrimination against any person on account of race or color.” A third position, however, gave the War Department final authority in deciding who would or would not be accepted into the military. Blacks volunteered for induction in record numbers, but many were turned away by the War Department and the new law provided them with no means of redress.

  Just prior to draft registration day, President Roosevelt’s press secretary, Stephen Early, announced a follow-up to the Selective Training and Service Act, a seven-point plan for the “fair and equitable utilization of blacks” in the military. As further evidence of Roosevelt’s commitment to change, “Negroes will be drafted in proportion to their population ratio—about one to every eleven men; [t]hey will be used in every branch of service; Negro reserve officers will serve with outfits which already have Negro officers; [t]hey will be given a chance to earn reserve commissions when officers’ schools are set up; [t]hey will be trained as pilots and aviation mechanics; Negro civilians will have an equal chance with whites for jobs at arsenals and army posts; Negro and white soldiers will not serve in the same regiments.”

  In an interview with correspondent Clark Lee, General Masaharu Homma boasted that Japan was prepared to sacrifice a generation of young men, if it came to war. Lee captured the general’s haunting words in Collier’s magazine. “We are prepared to lose ten million men in our war with America,” Homma said. “How many are you prepared to lose?”

  At the time Homma posed the question, the bigger uncertainty for the American military was, where would it get its men if war broke out? In December 1941, more than a year after President Roosevelt signed the controversial Selective Training and Service Act, every branch of service, especially the Navy, was still undermanned.

  Another pressing question was whether or not young American men were ready to meet the trials of war. In the summer of 1941 the Army, in particular, was in disarray. Morale among soldiers was dangerously low. Men who had welcomed mobilization in 1940 and looked forward to their release in the fall of 1941 were forced to contend with the possibility that Congress, responding to President Roosevelt’s request, would extend their period of service by eighteen months.

  The Selective Training and Service Act, the piece of legislation with which President Roosevelt, on September 16, 1940, established the first peacetime draft in American history, was enormously controversial. The War Department, which had been studying conscription strategies for years, knew it would be. Some people considered it the act of a government betraying its fascist tendencies. On the Capitol grounds, protesters of the act burned in effigy the bill’s champions. Six women, dressed as mourning widows, took up a silent vigil in the galleries of the Senate and then the House. The discussions in Congress regarding the bill turned tense. At one point in early September, not long before the vote, a fistfight broke out on the floor of the House.

  In August 1941 the new bill’s opponents (many Republicans and some Democrats) insisted that prolonging the service of soldiers represented a breach of contract; men had signed up with the belief that the act obligated them to serve for just one year. General Marshall lamented the language of the original bill, and the need for the extension, but insisted that “the battle worthiness of nearly every American division” was at stake. On August 12, 1941, the new bill came before the House of Representatives and passed by a single vote, when the speaker of the House abruptly shut down voting. Republicans fumed. House rules, they maintained, allowed those who wanted to change their vote time to approach the speaker before he announced the official tally.

  Army camps across the country were already rife with discontent. The previous fall, after France had fallen and as the Luftwaffe bombed England, millions of citizen-soldiers had taken up the urgent call for national service. When a Gallup poll study, conducted among men ages sixteen to twenty-four, was published in the October 1940 issue of Reader’s Digest, Selective Service officials took heart. “American youth,” the article said, “is tough-fibered, loyal, and hopeful. The young people believe this is a good country, worth working and fighting for. They have faith in the future.” Seventy-six percent of men surveyed did not object to one year of military service.

  By the summer of 1941, however, the crisis had dimmed; because few people thought the United States was in imminent danger, soldiers no longer felt they had a purpose. They viewed their training as old-fashioned and inadequate. They also felt the sting of being ignored, and often avoided, by everyday citizens. Many felt that they were treated as “outcasts,” “shunned” and neglected by the “nice girls.” Servicemen across the country were looking forward to getting out and returning home to their families. As the debate over the new bill raged, Life magazine published a bombshell exposé on the mood of America’s GIs. For the article, a Life reporter interviewed four hundred privates from five different regiments, from an unspecified division. Morale, the reporter concluded, had reached alarmingly low levels. “As far as the men can see,” he wrote, “the Army has no goal. It does not know whether it is going to fight, or when or where.” Writing in Harper’s magazine, Mortimer Adler added his voice to the controversy. “Whether they go to war or not,” he warned, “irreparable harm has been done to the young men of this generation.” Adler implied that young men had become “cynical and immune to appeals of patriotism.”

  Debate in Congress over the unpopular bill fanned the flames of rebellion in Army camps across the country and soldiers talked openly of what they c
alled “OHIO.” They would stage a massive desertion, going “Over the Hill in October.” Soldiers scrawled the code name OHIO on the inside of latrines, scratched it into sand paths, painted it on the hoods of trucks, on barracks walls, and on fieldpieces.

  Deeply disturbed by the Life report, A. H. Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, asked the War Department and Brigadier General Alexander Surles, its director of the Bureau of Public Relations, if his paper could investigate the reliability of the report. To the amazement of some inside the military establishment, the War Department agreed to give the New York Times unfettered access to its army installations. In return Sulzberger pledged not to publish the paper’s findings if he felt that they would not be in the nation’s best interests.

  Sulzberger assigned to the story Hilton H. Railey, a member of the Times staff, a field representative of the War and Navy departments during World War I, and a reserve officer in the Office of Naval Intelligence. Skeptical of the Life report, the patriotic Railey traveled 8,000 miles and interviewed thousands of officers and enlisted men. Working from Railey’s notes, Sulzberger and Railey put together a confidential, two-hundred-page report titled “Morale in the U.S. Army.” Railey’s discoveries—low morale (resembling the morale of the country in general, and its lack of interest in the international situation), drunkenness, insubordination, fraternization between officers and enlisted men—alarmed the General Staff. Perhaps Railey’s most disturbing observation, however, was that modern-day soldiers were a “different breed of cat” than World War I servicemen, and “bereft of national unity.” He added that “little is sacred to these young men.… They do not feel like fighting for what they have because they don’t know what they have.” Railey continued, “The present breed is questioning everything from God Almighty to themselves.”