February 10, 2005

Stories of black WWII vets headed to national archives

By Lauren Heaton

The three World War II veterans gathered around Jim Johnson’s kitchen table last week could have talked all day about the things they saw and felt during their time in the service.

They one-upped each other with tales of giant cobras in Burma, bombs exploding like fireworks in the sky over India, trading cigarettes for clothes for Filipino children and the racial discrimination they faced from those they fought beside.

In the end, their main concern was this: When they are done telling their stories, how can they be sure that today’s children will learn about the vital role black soldiers played to help win the war?

Eight African-American veterans from Yellow Springs got a chance to set the record straight in December when they were interviewed about their wartime experiences by a group of students from Washington Senior High School in Washington Court House.

The history students of teacher Paul LaRue have been working for over a year to collect stories from WWII and Korean War veterans in the Miami Valley. Later this year the students will send transcripts of the interviews to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

The questions the students asked of the Yellow Springs veterans focused on the challenges they faced as blacks serving in the military.

A fight beyond the war

When Johnson volunteered for the U.S. military in 1941, he was rejected by his own country, which at the time did not accept blacks in combat units. Johnson said he saw himself as an American first and wanted to serve his country. But the establishment didn’t see it that way and chose to treat blacks as a group separate from whites, he said.

Johnson was drafted anyway into the Army/Air Force Signal Corps in 1942, he said, and soon learned that racism in wartime is no different from racism in peace time. African-Americans were segregated into all-black regiments and were subordinated to white officers they sometimes felt weren’t fit to command. Blacks were demoralized and made to feel inferior so that all pride of serving America was deflated, he said.

“They give you a lot to hate and seem to pride themselves, no matter how dumb they are, on ‘I’m superior to you,’ ” Johnson said. “I stopped being a soldier and went to being a pure donkey, like I was trying to do as wrong as I can to make it as right as I can.”

Nonetheless, Johnson was trained on base in California and spent nearly a year improving communications lines across Oregon before being sent overseas. He was a soldier like any other when he said goodbye to the San Francisco Bay Bridge as he headed for the South Pacific, making all kinds of promises to change his ways and be good to his neighbors in exchange for God’s favor, he said.

Harold Cordell was sent to India in 1943 with an anti-artillery unit, which no one wanted at first. It wasn’t until his crew, stationed in the mountains, shot down German bombers threatening the 10th Air Force Fighters that Cordell’s unit was invited to continue on to Burma and China. Black soldiers were not to be the heroes but were relegated to the less glorious job of the heroes’ protector.

“America’s thinking was that they were going to fight the war and we were going to pick up after them,” Cordell said.

Ted Jackson also faced discrimination in the service. His skill with the saxophone earned him a transfer in 1944 from the Army Engineers 1332 regiment into the battalion band, which always marched behind the white battalion band. Jackson’s unit was sent to England in December but stayed behind while his unit’s black sister regiment 1333 fought in the Battle of the Bulge, he said. Jackson watched from London as the Allies sent their bombers across the channel, and the Germans answered with a sea of their own.

“I was standing on a hill on Easter morning and saw 500 airplanes, the sky was nothing but planes, flying over to bomb somewhere in Germany,” he said. “To see that sight and understand the significance of it brings tears to your eyes.”

Later in the Philippines, Jackson saw the ravages of war on Filipino children, who pressed their faces against the base fence at chow time and begged for scraps from the soldiers. Johnson also was affected by the hardship of the Filipinos caught in the middle of the fight. While stationed in Manila he collected khaki shirts from the men and paid a local seamstress to sew clothes for children, who were often on the brink of starvation.

Special status for a group apart

As soldiers, the men felt the anguish of war, but as blacks in an all-black unit, they were made to feel they were fighting for something different, they said. Others, even the enemy, saw the irony of their situation, and their separateness gained them special status with the Europeans and other native peoples, they said.

When Johnson’s regiment arrived in France, he and his men were handed off to French command. As they moved with a convoy toward the German front, they ran out of gas and needed a British company to rescue them from the negligence of their own leaders. The Europeans had heard about how African-Americans were treated, and now they were seeing it firsthand, Johnson said. Many French people already resented the Americans, who took credit for fighting the war for them, and were quick to sympathize with black soldiers, he said.

Though blacks seldom got credit for fighting, the three veterans agreed that there were countless all-black regiments and units that were indispensable to the war effort. The Red Bull Express, an all-black trucking outfit that transported supplies to the front lines, served many men in the deadliest war zone. The Tuskegee Airmen, the first African-American’s to qualify as military pilots, destroyed over 1,000 German aircraft. The Buffalo Soldiers, one of the first black combat teams, fought bravely in Italy in 1944.

There were hundreds of other black infantry divisions full of unsung heroes, the men recalled. But their stories were only told in movies and novels, not in the history books most students read in school, Jackson said. Until African-Americans’ war experiences are included in mainstream history lessons, the firsthand accounts from those who were there will be the only way to preserve their perspective, he said.

A bittersweet homecoming

At the war’s end, when the glory of the battle was won, and most soldiers wanted nothing more than to go home, the military finally offered officer training opportunities for blacks. Jackson, for one, declined, knowing that he would never be afforded equal treatment in the service.

On his return through Kansas City, Johnson received little credit for his service when he and several other black soldiers stopped at a diner that refused to serve them. Johnson even had trouble getting his discharge papers after his service records were lost. When he finally secured official discharge, he was handed a 10-year membership in Uncle Sam’s Reserves, which he promptly threw in the trash, he said.

But the worst thing after fighting in the war, Cordell said, was seeing that German prisoners at home had more freedom than African-Americans did. White prisoners were allowed to eat in the officers’ dining hall, drink from white fountains and eventually even marry American girls, while blacks faced the same uphill battle they had before the war, he said.

Their only refuge was that they were not treated like Japanese-Americans. At a train station near Los Angeles, Johnson said, he saw a group of Japanese-Americans on their way to an internment camp in Idaho. The discrimination Japanese-Americans faced was just as strange as the discrimination African-Americans faced, he said.

“But I thought, boy I’m glad you Japanese are here so they’ll stop kicking our behind and start kicking yours,” Johnson said as a joke.

The soldiers’ stories carried a humor that, in spite of their challenges, spoke of their commitment to pass their experiences to the next generation. Cordell said he has always told his daughters about the war and his travels to see tiger hunters, Indian temples and the burning of the dead along the Ganges River. Johnson also has told his boys his war stories.

Telling these stories, however, is not just about remembering blacks in the service, Jackson said, it’s also about recognizing black inventors, black artists, black leaders and other African-Americans who are part of America’s history.

For these three men whose stories will become part of the national historic record, the point of the Washington Senior High project was more than just being a part of history. It was about setting the record straight, the way it should have been all along.