Unhappy Soldier

The highest ranking Negro officer in the U.S. Army, Brigadier General Benjamin O. Davis, said recently: "I am hoping to live long enough to see the time when we will have no hyphenated Americans . . . no Afro-Americans, no Negro-Americans . . . [when] all men can live together in peace and harmony."

In the U.S. last week white and black Americans lived together in the Army. But it was not an unhyphenated life. The deep-seated racial prejudices of U.S. citizens could not be put aside by the brotherhood of arms and military authority. The War Department had had some trouble and feared more from the Negro problem.

It was impossible to state in precise terms how uncomfortable the situation was. It was true that mobilization had rubbed the nation's race problem raw. Pinko agitators, self-styled liberals and other citizens of good will had plucked at the sore. The thin-skinned and irritable Negro press, which has seldom missed a report of injustice to Negro troops and has played it for all it would stand, continued to print most of the sensational and baseless yarns which flew around, from standard soldiers' gripes on up. The truth lay somewhere between such red-eyed denunciation and the bland official bunkum of some Army officers that everything was just fine.

Black Army. Before mobilization, the Army had 13,000 Negroes in its ranks. By March 1944, that handful had become an army in itself--some 664,000 Negroes, draftees mostly, who had no more liking for military discipline and the small fleabites of Army life than their white brethren. Most of them were quartered in the South.

The Army had been criticized for quartering Negro troops below the Mason & Dixon Line and the Army had a simple reason: it needed year-round open weather for training. But the results were not simple.

As a group, Southerners insisted that Negroes in uniform keep strictly to the Jim Crow laws. Crowded buses, where the races were forced to mingle, became the scene of ugly flare-ups. In some sections bus drivers toted guns. The South was prepared to back up its Jim Crow laws with force. On at least one occasion an "uppity" Negro soldier bus-rider was shot dead.

There was discrimination at every turn. Negro troops being shipped through El Paso, Texas, were barred from the Harvey House restaurant at the depot and given cold handouts. They could see German prisoners of war seated in the restaurant and fed hot food.

The attitude of Negro civilians towards Negro soldiers was frequently indifferent and sometimes as antagonistic as the whites'. In Chattanooga, Tenn., Negro rooming house owners told Negro soldiers and their families: "We've got rooms but we haven't got any for you." At Sebring, Fla., a Negro restaurant owner hung out a sign: "No soldiers wanted."

Northern Negroes had plenty of chance to observe the historical political practices of the South. Said a Negro noncom: "On D-day there was all kinds of talk about democracy. But two days later white men with guns refused to allow Negroes to vote in the Columbus (Ga.) city primary."

In Tucson, well-meaning, wealthy white women contributed no solution to the problem when they took Negro soldiers to the exclusive Old Pueblo Club. In England, where Negroes are foreigners, women had experimented without self-consciousness with that kind of democratic get together. In the U.S. it was too deep a break with tradition.

Jim Crow Army. What rankled most with the Negro soldier was the discovery that he was also in a Jim Crow Army. He was segregated in PXs, barracks, mess halls.

He soon found that he was not to get an equal chance for promotion. It was not Army policy, for obvious if strictly utilitarian reasons, to put Negro officers in command of whites. The Army has commissioned only some 5,000 Negro officers. It had the justification it sought, in the Negro's lack of pre-war military training and his lower educational level.

Proportionately few Negroes were put in combat units. The exceptions had good records: the 99th Pursuit Squadron, flying in Tunisia and Sicily (TIME, Sept. 20), the 93rd Infantry Division, fighting on Bougainville (TIME, May 29). Three weeks ago, at Fort Benning, Ga., a company of black soldiers made their first "combat" jump. They were the Army's first all-Negro parachute company. But Negro soldiers know that these are exceptions: 70% of Negroes are service troops.

Military Expediency. The Army had never wanted or hoped to solve America's race problem. That was a job for the nation, and it would take years. All the Army hoped to do was to make and keep its civilians in uniform good soldiers for the duration.

The War Department set about that job with a troubled but determined mind.

It set up an Advisory Committee on Special Troops Policies. Among committee members: Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, Brigadier General Davis.

Another member, William Henry Hastie, Negro ex-U.S. district judge, now dean of Howard University School of Law, resigned because he said the War Department failed to live up to its promises to give Negroes more vital jobs to perform, especially in the Air Forces. He charged that General "Hap" Arnold would have busted all Negroes out of the Army Air Forces if War Secretary Stimson had not intervened.

A not-so-insistent Negro, Truman K.

Gibson Jr., ex-attorney, took Hastie's place. Much of the Army's official policy on Negroes has come down from this body. The Army early rejected the idea that it was possible to give "equal" (i.e., nonsegregated) treatment to soldiers of both races.

Negro draftees came to the Army with inferior training, fewer skills than whites, a fact decisively established by classification tests. The Army has recently tried to improve chances for Negro officer promotions, while it continued segregation for "military expediency." But the Army officially accepted "no doctrine of racial superiority or inferiority." Said an Army directive to officers": "All people seem to be endowed . . . with whatever it takes to fight a good war, if they want to and have learned how." The Army admitted that it must depend in the end on individual commanding officers. On this point Dean Hastie said angrily: "If the Army says it has difficulty in making its orders stick, then I say: 1) it's a hell of a poor army which can't enforce its own orders; 2) how many commanders who have been lax have been shifted to other posts? Mighty few." Bad to Better. As of last week, the situation was better than it had been, but still bad. The surprising thing was that there had not been more disorder. There had been brawls, sporadic outbursts.

At Duck Hill, Miss, (where two Negro civilians were lynched several years ago), Negro troops gathered along the railroad tracks one night and peppered the town with a barrage of rifle shots. No one was hurt. A few weeks ago Negro soldiers rode through Duck Hill firing blanks, frightening the whites out of their wits. Recently at Brookley Field, Ala. Negro troops fired on M.P. s who came into their barracks looking for a man supposed to have assaulted a bootlegger. Their white general quelled the uproar, mainly by diplomatic handling of his angry troops.

But such incidents were isolated and exceptional. The usual troubles are unremarkable. Some Negroes strut, like some white soldiers, and get into trouble with their own M.P.s. Some get drunk. Some get into fights with colored civilians over local girls. Some go A.W.O.L.

A large part of the Negro 92nd Infantry Division trained for almost a year at Fort McClellan, Ala., with no serious trouble. San Diego reported a lower percentage of rape cases among Negroes than among white servicemen. Tucson's Chief of Police reported: "Conditions excellent, due to exceptionally good, behavior."

To the credit of efficient soldiers and .intelligent civilians, tension in Negro troop areas has recently been relieved rather than increased. The Army has provided better housing and recreation and segregation is less of an irritant. Even extremists might agree that the situation is better now than a year ago.

Better to Worse. But the Army knew well what kind of a dragon it had by the tail. Army officials could recall the days after World War I when brooding Negroes came back from overseas. Then there had been race riots all around the country; in Washington 2,000 troops had to be called out to restore order. The Negro soldier today, called upon to fight and on occasion to die for a democracy he is not fully allowed to enjoy, is still an unhappy and embittered man.

Back from the Mediterranean Theater, where he has been flying and fighting with the 99th, Captain Lemuel R. Curtis, a Howard graduate, declared: "Negroes in far-flung corners of the earth are getting a new slant on things. When they come home they expect to get some of the things they've been hearing about and fighting for. I believe they will be both aggressive and progressive about it all."

Curtis spoke for many another Negro serviceman, who will be a powerful force in Negro society after the war. But it seemed unlikely that mellow old (67) Ben Davis, a regular of 43 years of service and the only Negro ever to wear a U.S. general officer's star, would live to see the time that he and many another good American hoped for.

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