The Color of War

by James Campbell

  The NAACP had pressured Secretary Forrestal to allow Thurgood Marshall to sit in on the court-martial.

  Marshall had already won a case in a Maryland county demanding equal pay for black teachers. The state, realizing that fighting the equal-pay issue on a county-by-county basis would be expensive, passed a law setting a single standard for black and white teachers.

  The one Supreme Court case, which Marshall argued with William Hastie, dealt with the constitutionality of Texas’s all-white primary elections. In April 1944, the Court ruled that white primaries were unconstitutional. If Texas allowed political parties to limit their nominees and voters to whites, the Court said, “It endorses, adopts and enforces the discrimination against Negroes.”

  The NAACP was fielding hundreds of letters from black soldiers complaining about their second-class status. Marshall wondered why the military, like the South, expended so much effort keeping rights from blacks. Surely it would be easier to integrate.

  During the trial, Joseph James, head of the NAACP’s San Francisco branch, commented on the case, emphasizing the sacrifices that blacks had made for the war effort. “Negroes as a group,” he said, “have been faithful to their country … and have received very little in return.”

  Elmer Boyer, Lieutenant Ernest Delucchi’s chief petty officer, buttressed Marshall’s argument. Boyer was the one whom Delucchi had asked to write down the names of the men who would not work. He testified, however, that at no point had he heard the lieutenant give the seamen an order to load. A Navy psychiatrist also bolstered the general defense claim that the men were seriously traumatized by the explosion. That memory—both physical and emotional—caused them to rebel against the idea of ever working with ammunition again.

  Some of the details regarding Thurgood Marshall are from Juan Williams’s excellent book Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary.

  The absurdity of trying to operate two equal navies, one black and one white, had been obvious during the war. Only total integration of the general service could serve justice and efficiency, a conclusion the civil rights advocates had long since reached. With the enlistment of the Chief of Naval Personnel in the cause, the move to an integrated general service was assured. The equal treatment and opportunity for Negroes in the Navy, however, remained an elusive goal.

  CHAPTER 38: PUNISHING THE SEAMEN

  Walter McDonald of the San Diego NAACP urged the Navy to go easy on the “mutineers.”

  CHAPTER 39: THE SINS OF A NATION

  W. E. B. Du Bois edited the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis for twenty-five years.

  FDR’s memo to Eleanor said simply, “for your information.” Eleanor Roosevelt’s letter to Secretary Forrestal was dated April 5, 1945.

  The editorial from the November 2, 1944, edition of the San Francisco Chronicle was reprinted in the December 2, 1944, edition of the Pittsburgh Courier with the headline CALIFORNIA DAILY DISAPPROVES SENTENCES OF 50 NEGRO SEAMEN. It pointed out that forty-four out of fifty of the mutineers had perfect conduct ratings of 4.0.

  Instead of handing out severe punishments to Percy Robinson and the other 207 men, the Navy had chosen to treat them with compassion, sentencing them to ninety days’ hard labor (of which they had already served seventy-one days) and fining each of them half a year’s pay. A seaman first class made sixty-four dollars a month, and a seaman second class made fifty-four dollars a month.

  The Chronicle’s story on “Nimitz’s Secret Weapon” quoted Captain Edward Pare, a staff member for the Service Squadron for the Pacific Fleet. Pare boasted that the Saipan invasion alone had demanded more fuel (and more of everything else) than the entire Pacific Fleet had used in 1943.

  In an article dated October 21, 1944, the Chicago Defender’s John Robert Badger called the mutiny trial a “hot potato.” The title of the article was PORT CHICAGO MUTINY TRIAL OF 50 BECOMING HOT POTATO FOR NAVY.

  On August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender. The announcement was a recorded radio address.

  The following month the Navy acted, reducing all the mutineers’ sentences by one year. William Fechteler, the assistant chief of Naval Personnel, wrote the letter, confirming the reduction, to Secretary Forrestal on September 8, 1945.

  EPILOGUE

  In the period between July 9 and the evacuation of the 27th Division on October 4, the army killed nearly two thousand more enemy soldiers who were hiding in various places across the island.

  Herbert Bix (Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan) and Harold Goldberg (D-Day in the Pacific) say the date was July 18, Japanese time, which would be July 17, U.S. time.

  In his book The Port Chicago Mutiny, Robert Allen asserts that the blast was “on the same order of magnitude as the atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima just over a year later.”

  In New Guinea and the Marianas, Samuel Eliot Morison describes in detail what the word “colossal” means: during Operation Forager, the Fleet alone used 6,378 rounds of fourteen- and sixteen-inch shells; 19,230 rounds of six- and eight-inch shells; and 140,000 rounds of five-inch shells. According to Morison, “The fighting lasted so long and naval gunfire was in such demand by ground forces” that ammunition ships could barely keep up. The captured diary of a Japanese soldier on Saipan underscores Morison’s argument. “The greatest single factor in the American’s success,” the diary read, “was naval gunfire.”

  A Marine document confirms Morison’s conclusion. It reads, “Certainly the four major artillery units performed a vital function at Saipan. There were 291,459 rounds fired during the operation. This figure cannot tell the whole story; time and time again the 75’s, 105’s, and 155’s brought timely, effective fire on the enemy points of resistance.”

  After the disturbance in Detroit, the Jackson, Mississippi, Daily News blamed Eleanor Roosevelt. “It is blood upon your hands, Mrs. Roosevelt,” the paper intoned. “You have been … proclaiming and practicing social equality.… In Detroit, a city noted for the growing impudence and insolence of its Negro population, an attempt was made to put preachments into practice.”

  Thurgood Marshall saw the mutiny charge and sentence as a “frame-up” and accused the Navy of charging the men “solely because of their race and color.” Civil rights leaders had been warning about it for years; black servicemen historically received inordinately severe sentences for acts of insubordination.

  Black numbers aboard ships were limited to 10 percent of the crew, and on August 9, 1944, King informed the commanding officers of twenty-five large fleet auxiliaries that Negroes would be assigned to in the near future.

  Forrestal was convinced that in order to succeed, racial reform must first be accepted by the men already in uniform; integration, if quietly and gradually put into effect, would soon demonstrate its efficiency and make the change acceptable to all members of the service. In August 1945 the Navy had some 165,000 Negroes, almost 5.5 percent of its total strength. Sixty-four of them, including six women, were commissioned officers, and black sailors were being trained in almost all naval ratings and were serving throughout the fleet, on planes and in submarines, working and living with whites.

  Lester Granger reported that Forrestal said to King, “I’m not satisfied with the situation here. I don’t think that our Navy Negro personnel are getting a square break. I want to do something about it, but I can’t do anything about it unless the officers are behind me. I want your help. What do you say?” Admiral King sat for a moment and looked out the window and then said reflectively, “You know, we say that we are a democracy and a democracy 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.”

  The executive order allowed Truman to bypass Congress. Otherwise, representatives of the “Solid South,” all white Democrats, would likely have stonewalled legislation.

  An August headline in the Chicago Defender jubilantly proclaimed, MR. TRUMAN MAKES HISTORY. The Pittsburgh Courier, however, questioned the president’s si
ncerity. It was politically expedient for him to affect an ostensibly vigorous civil rights stance while keeping his language vague. A. Philip Randolph responded to the order by canceling his call for a boycott of the draft.

  Responding to Congressman Miller, the Navy said that there was “nothing unfair or unjust in the final outcome of any of the Port Chicago courts-martial.”

  The B-29 was a marvel. The United States government, which began development on it shortly after Pearl Harbor, invested more in it than it did in the Manhattan Project. It was money well spent. The B-29 carried the biggest bomb load of any plane ever built—four tons more than the B-17—and had a range of 3,800 miles. It could fly more than sixteen hours nonstop. Its compartments were pressurized so that even at 40,000 feet, crews could fly without oxygen masks or heated flying suits. Initially the plane was plagued with mechanical problems. Engines overheated, the planes caught fire, and pilots and crews were killed. Hap Arnold wanted the best bomber pilot sent back from the ETO to make the B-29 operational. That man was Paul Tibbets, “Mr. B-29.”

  The Japanese ridiculed the “precision bombing” as “blind bombing.” In Nagoya, the Mitsubishi Aircraft Engine Works was the target. The rest of Ciardi’s quote is “That meant women and old people, children.”

  Napalm was developed by Standard Oil and Du Pont.

  The March 9, 1945, bomber attack on Tokyo would have killed more than 100,000 people, had 1.5 million not already evacuated the city.

  By March 1945, the ethical line that the mass killing of civilians represented had already been crossed. In late July 1943, the British Royal Air Force launched a succession of night raids against Hamburg, Germany, killing 45,000 people and leaving 400,000 homeless. In ten days the RAF killed more civilians than Great Britain lost to German bombs during the entire war. In Dresden, Germany, the RAF and the American 8th Air Force launched four bombing raids that ignited a firestorm that engulfed a portion of the city, killing 40,000 civilians, most of them refugees fleeing the Soviet Red Army.

  Japan’s fourth-largest city, the imperial capital of Kyoto, was spared.

  The uranium core, along with the plutonium core for the second bomb, nicknamed “Fat Man,” arrived on Tinian shortly after “Little Boy” was brought ashore. Named after Churchill, it was bigger and more powerful than “Little Boy.”

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  SAIPAN

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