CHAPTER SEVEN
Relative Security in the Southwest Pacific
Perhaps nothing perplexes the outside observer more than the popular term and the popular theory of “social equality.” The term is kept vague and elusive and the theory loose and ambiguous. One moment it will be stretched to cover and justify every form of social segregation and discrimination. The next moment it will be narrowed to express only the denial of close personal intimacies and intermarriage. The very lack of precision allows the notion to rationalize the rather illogical and wavering system of color caste in America.
Gunnar Myrdal, 1944
“I am writing about a matter concerning my brother, Sergeant Samuel Hill,” began Grace Davis in a letter written to the judge advocate general in November 1945.1 On the surface, Davis’s missive appears to be quite simple: a letter expressing concern for the physical well-being of a service family member in time of war. But the nature of Davis’s inquiry and the sequence of events that it referenced carried a political subtext. On 9 January 1945, while serving with an echelon of the U.S. 93rd Infantry Division, Samuel Hill and one other soldier were arrested and charged with raping a Papuan woman in the Netherlands East Indies.2 Despite conflicting testimony rendered by prosecution witnesses during the court-martial proceedings, members of the hearing board dismissed the charges against the other GI. The 28-year-old Detroit, Michigan, resident was found guilty, however, and faced a penalty of being dishonorably discharged and the forfeiture of his benefits in addition to serving a lifetime of hard labor.3 Shortly afterward, Hill was transferred to the United States and confined to the U.S. Penitentiary in Washington State.4
Given the relationship that existed between black GIs and the American military justice system in the early twentieth century, the swiftness of the legal process should not be surprising. As recent scholars have noted, disproportionate numbers of African American soldiers in the European and Pacific theaters of operations had been tried and executed for such capital crimes prior to and during the Second World War.5 However, Samuel Hill’s case and its immediate aftermath are significant for several reasons. First, the case highlighted the degree to which the army’s relationship with black GIs in an international setting intersected with American domestic racial and sexual politics. By the time the division stepped ashore at Dutch New Guinea in the fall of 1944, the army’s employment of African Americans in the Pacific had been reconfigured to encompass notions of patriarchy and white male privilege. While dispersed throughout the Pacific, black division members faced overwhelming obstacles, working as service and support troops loading and discharging ships and providing local security for radar installations while drawing enemy fire. Southwest Pacific theater commanders also drew upon sexualized racial stereotypes of African American men as rapists to justify policies limiting the social interaction between black GIs and indigenous populations in the area. In addition, in the weeks following the Japanese surrender, most African American service personnel experienced tremendous difficulties in securing passage home owing to a demobilization system that favored front-line troops.
The case reflected the bold leadership of African American grassroots institutions that rallied to the cause of black 93rd GIs. Within weeks after news of Hill’s trial reached the United States, for instance, service relatives like Grace Davis sprang into action, firing off numerous telegrams and letters of protest to military officials, the White House, and congressional leaders, as well as to high officials within the NAACP. In the process, the drama surrounding Hill’s case graced the front pages of newspapers around the world and unveiled the sexual dimensions of the army’s racial politics for all to see. Indeed, by the time Samuel Hill had arrived in Washington to begin his laboring ordeal, the edifice of race and sex would provide a stage upon which the contradictions of American domestic reality and wartime rhetoric would be showcased.
Discipline in the Southwest Pacific
As the summer faded into the fall of 1944, the Bougainville campaign had drawn to a close, and the battle-tested echelons of the 93rd Infantry Division began to make their way northwestward toward the southern Philippine Islands. After boarding transports at Empress Augusta Bay, the division’s regimental combat teams and headquarters company arrived at the Green and Russell Islands group, where they established base security against enemy attack while undergoing refresher training programs. At the same time, men of 368th Infantry’s 2nd Battalion moved from the Russells to Vella Lavella in the New Georgia group, where they continued to perform labor details unloading ships at the port while providing security patrols on the island. Among those who participated in the intensive operations were Raymond Jenkins of Memphis; Randall Morgan of Chicago; Edgar Davis of Montclair, New Jersey; Malcolm Brown of Seattle; Julius Thompson of Norfolk, Virginia; and William “Billy” Kyle of Philadelphia. There they remained until the unit was ordered to accompany the remainder of the regiment to nearby Munda before heading to Morotai Island in April 1945.6
Other contingents of the division seem to have had the same duties as the 368th Infantry’s 2nd Battalion. Members of the 369th Infantry Regiment assumed command of the Emirau Island after arriving from Guadalcanal during the late summer months of 1944. Encountering very little opposition, the troops bolstered the island’s defenses while undergoing a strict regimen of combat training. From Munda to the Finschafen to the St. Mathias Islands group, African American servicemen with the 93rd spent endless days loading and unloading supplies at ports while providing island and base security.
The division’s defensive preparations were part and parcel of a larger Allied Pacific drive in the making. To the northwest of the New Guinea and Bismarck Archipelago, where most of the division’s units were concentrated, lay the coastal islands of Wakde and Biak, two prime airfield sites that the Southwest Pacific headquarters hoped to secure for future Allied bomber operations in the Philippines. According to historian Ronald Spector, “An added incentive to these plans was the fear that these fine airfield sites might soon be utilized by the Japanese in a counterattack unless the Allies moved quickly.”7 In a similar fashion, the Dutch New Guinea anchorage and other bases in the region were to serve as strategic supply points and staging areas from which to launch a concerted land-based aircraft attack on Japanese forces between New Guinea and Mindanao. The patrolling operations performed by the 93rd Infantry Division and other units in the Hollandia region were important because refortification of the vital airfields by the enemy would create a setback in the Allied plan to advance into the Philippines and beyond.8
But as the soldiers advanced from island to island, few failed to notice the precarious predicament of black servicemen in the Southwest Pacific theater. Albert Evans, a soldier in the 369th Infantry, recalled, “Upon leaving Munda our battalion was sent to the Admiralties. This is where we were used as stevedores completely.”9 At the same time, Julius Young, a former resident of Wilmington, Delaware, also experienced the situation firsthand when he received an order from the division headquarters to evacuate an airstrip on New Guinea. Young recalled, “I told General Eichelberger’s adjutant general that this must be a mistake to send me down here to do this because I don’t know how to do this. But when he radioed back to division headquarters, they told him that I was the man.” Undaunted, Young and his men worked day and night until they completed the task—seven days earlier than scheduled. For his distinguished performance, the young lieutenant received a commendation from 8th Army headquarters but failed to receive the Bronze Star because of a statement he had made criticizing the army’s deployment policies.10 Describing the division’s activities during the period, Claude Ferebee told a contemporary, “We are no longer under the Army you were acquainted with or mentioned. Just like a one-horse freight train—always side tracked. We are and have been as I used the term in a discussion the other day: racial prisoners of war.”11 And as Edward Soulds, a soldier assigned to the unit, put it, “We struck our blows against the enemy by throwing, stacking, un-stacking, loading and unloading supplies in warehouses. The black officers and troops began to accept their fate, knowing full well that “Mac” (MacArthur) had no intention of giving our outfit a crack at the big time. Not only that, but even if you wanted to go home and you had enough points, you were stuck.”12
What Claude Ferebee, Edward Soulds, and other 93rd GIs failed to realize, however, was that the army’s deployment policies had much more to do with the logistical problems that the Southwest Pacific area was experiencing at the time than anything else. From the fall of 1944 well into the spring and summer of 1945, the excessive retention and slow turnaround of ships and the shortage of service troops in the theater had greatly hampered the lines of communication, supplies, and equipment required for the day-to-day operations of divisions and supporting troops bound for duty in the Philippines. Because the Southwest Pacific area commander had habitually used ships in his theater as floating warehouses, the number of ships retained in the Southwest Pacific rose from seventy-one in January 1944 to well over two hundred eleven months later.13 Conversely, the ratio of combat to service troops in the Southwest Pacific area was nine to one.14 As a result, the American invasion of Luzon slated for December 1944 year was not launched until mid-January 1945.
In an attempt to alleviate the logistical situation, army chief of staff George Marshall ordered MacArthur to reduce the number of ships retained in his theater to under a hundred by mid-January. Furthermore, Marshall tried to get MacArthur to close down some of his rear bases in the theater and demanded that the commander adjust the number of operations he planned to undertake based on the shipping already available in his area. “Our global commitments cannot sustain this extraordinary tax against shipping effectiveness. Your future operations and those in other theaters are already penalized by shipping shortages,” Marshall warned, but to no avail. In February 1945, the War Department reported that of the 446 vessels within the theater, 102 were idle, waiting to load or discharge, 62 were docked for repairs, and 165 were setting sail for forwarding ports.15 By the time the first echelon of the 93rd, along with the 25th, 37th, 40th, 43rd, and Americal divisions, arrived in the Southwest Pacific area, at least 33 of the 86 non-combatant ships anchored in the Hollandia harbor needed unloading, with 33 held awaiting discharge and 24 others awaiting deployment to Leyte.16 Indeed, by the time soldiers of the 93rd Division arrived in the area, the service troop and shipping crisis that had been brewing for nearly two years in the Pacific had become an urgent issue.
Back-Channel Strategies of Resistance
While stationed on the nearby Treasury Islands, thirty-three black officers, including Walter Greene, Lorenzo Blount, Julian Dawson, George Looney, and Edward Strawther, received refresher courses in officer basic training during the summer and fall months of 1944.17 Where the reorientation course stood in the priorities of the Southwest Pacific campaign is unclear, but the purpose of the instruction remains vivid in the memory of the officers who participated in it. Once the junior officers arrived at the training facility, they realized that the return of their units to the fighting fronts of the Pacific War was not part of their superiors’ plan. Charles Lynn, a native of Peoria, Illinois, and other members of the 25th Infantry Regiment had no sooner arrived on Green Island from combat operations on Bougainville that September than he received word that he had been assigned to Stirling Island to attend a special school for division officers. When Lynn and fifteen other junior officers arrived at the isolated military outpost, they encountered endless roll calls, calisthenics sessions, and command and control problems. As Lynn recalled, “There we were to prove our efficiency and better our attitudes or be reclassified.” Shortly afterward, Lynn boarded a plane that took him to Ora Bay, New Guinea, where he stood before members of a reclassification board and was promptly discharged from the army “for conditions other than honorable.”18
For Walter Greene, a fellow 25th Infantry officer from Detroit, the retraining of black officers in the division had more to do with their standing in the army than with deficiencies exhibited on the field of battle. “The black enlisted man did not get this kind of pressure from white officers,” Greene remembers. “As a matter of fact, he could be almost decent to the dog-foot soldier, but their hostility to the black officer bordered on paranoia. A black man as their peer they could not stand and they did their damnedest to break you through humiliation and frustration.” He recalled that his troubles with his superior officers at the officer retraining facility began when he discovered that the school was operating outside the purview of the War Department—and thus illegally. “To keep it hidden from Washington, the general did not maintain a morning report. We were being carried on the morning reports of the outfits to which we belonged, like all was well.”19
When Greene realized that he could not be court-martialed for refusing direct orders at the school, he and eight other officers refused to report to formation and ignored commands to return to their previous units. By the time word of their resistive acts reached the division headquarters and before a course of disciplinary action could be carried out against them, the school ceased operations, and he and the other black officers who remained at the camp received orders transferring them to the Molucca Islands, near Morotai. Throughout the process, Greene and his fellow GIs remained undaunted. While awaiting transfer, the 25-year-old GI and other soldiers wrote letters to loved ones and friends in an attempt to draw national attention to their travails in the Southwest Pacific.
While undergoing the officer retraining program, Julian Dawson and a group of officers also penned several round-robin letters to family members and associates, informing them of the daily indignities they encountered at the hands of the senior division staff officers charged with running the facility. “We are catching hell,” the soldiers wrote, but their efforts produced little results. Much of the correspondence never made it out of the Southwest Pacific area. And for Julian Dawson, the son of a well-known surgeon, his problems were only just beginning. Within months after he was discharged from the army for “conduct unbecoming an officer,” the Chicago resident returned home only to receive a letter from his local draft board, ordering him to report for reinduction as a private.20
Throughout World War II, army intelligence personnel tended to scan such powerfully written letters by black GIs for sensitive information relating to battlefront conditions in the Southwest Pacific. Most of the time they dismissed the exchanges as typical complaints of army life in rear echelon areas. Indeed, as Samuel Stouffer and other members of the Research Branch of the army during the period and recent scholars have attested, vast numbers of soldiers spent their leisure time writing such letters during World War II.21 Black GIs were no exception. As students of the African American experience in the war have also recently documented, however, army censors often screened black soldiers’ letters for derogatory comments relating to their treatment in the segregated army.22 In the Southwest Pacific theater, censors engaged in a concerted effort to deflect public criticism away from the army’s treatment of black troops. For military intelligence officials in the 14th Corps, the slightest reference to racial injustice in black soldiers’ letters raised fears of the detrimental consequences that soldiers’ discontent with racial conditions would have for Allied forces waging war in the Pacific.23
During the month of September 1944 alone, base authorities sifted through approximately two million pieces of mail, from which they extracted large amounts of correspondence by military personnel citing the state of race relations in the army. “Many of these comments are written by colored troops,” one base censor wrote at the time. “And the majority of them are expressions of discontent with existing conditions.”24 As the division headquarters assumed control of base operations on islands scattered throughout the theater, the commanding general of the 93rd Infantry Division worked tirelessly to suppress outgoing material relating to racial attitudes within the unit, often instructing base censors to sanitize or detain all correspondence that contained derogatory statements.25
Around the same time, counterintelligence and S-2 officers also lectured division personnel endlessly about the need to abstain from divulging to their loved ones details about their situation overseas that might jeopardize security.26 And as if this were not enough, G-2 officials cracked down on what they considered to be breaches of vital military security, meting out heavy fines and punitive measures against those soldiers who violated censorship regulations. Unsurprisingly, such stringent measures clashed with the perceptions of many black GIs attached to the unit, as they perceived the regulations as yet another weapon in the arsenal of military racism. For instance, like so many other servicemen stationed overseas at the time, a black GI from Minneapolis experienced the sanctioning power of the division’s intelligence apparatus firsthand. During the period, he wrote a letter to his mother railing against the indignities that he and other soldiers encountered while serving in the area and announcing his intention to desert the army. A few days after base censors intercepted his letter, both he and his mother were visited by G-2 staff officers. The former soldier explained, “You have to remember that such repression was necessary in their eyes because they [army officials] wanted to make sure that ideas like those that I was expressing didn’t get out to the public.”27
However, many letters containing incisive commentary on the treatment of blacks both abroad and at home escaped the attention of army officials. Hoping to get their letters past the censor and avoid official persecution, black 93rd GIs and loved ones at home described race relations in the army as well as in society at large using coded language that seemed virtually indecipherable to army counterintelligence officers. Employing various neighborhood and household-specific symbols and cues, public and private correspondence often carried cryptic messages that could only be interpreted as ironic expressions of everyday life in the face of power. As his unit moved from Bougainville to Green Island in October 1944, for instance, Cleveland resident Thomas White wrote a letter to his wife in which he included a short poem titled “Somewhere in the South Pacific” that parodied the vicissitudes of black life at the front:
Somewhere in the South Pacific where the sun is like a curse,
And each long day is followed by Another . . . slightly worse
And the men dream and wish for greener, fairer lands.
Somewhere in the South Pacific where a girl is never seen,
Where the sky is never cloudy and the grass is always green.
Where the bat’s mighty howl robs a man of blessed sleep,
Where there isn’t any whiskey, and the beer is never cheap.
Somewhere in the South Pacific where the mail is always late
And a Christmas card in April is considered up to date.
Where we never have a payday and we never get a cent,
But we never miss the money because we’d never get it spent.
Somewhere in the South Pacific where the ants and buzzards play,
And a hundred fresh mosquitoes replace each one you slay,
So take me back to Frisco; let me hear the mission bell,
For this godforsaken outpost is a substitute for HELL.28
On the surface, White was describing the dense, wet, and impenetrable jungles of Guadalcanal and other islands in the South Pacific and the daily bouts of “chicken shit” tyranny that he and others encountered while in military service overseas. Yet on another level, his verses conveyed to his wife the deep sense of foreboding that he and other black soldiers felt while living and laboring in a zone of combat.
White’s missive also alluded to their trials and tribulations in the South Pacific. At the time, he and other members of a service company of the 25th Infantry Regiment had been assigned to an atoll near Green Island, one of the central staging points for the segregated unit. Every day during a six-month period, he and his company alternated between unloading ships and conducting patrol missions before Australian forces finally relieved them. During his stint of duty on the island, heightened racial tensions strained relations between black GIs and their commanding officers. Of his experiences on Green Island, White recalls: “We had some of the worst white officers I had seen in my life. I don’t know where the hell they came from. To make matters worse, on the Green Islands, we didn’t get any mail; we didn’t get any food. The only reason we didn’t starve to death was because of them Australians when they came to those islands.” In August 1944, White enjoyed a small victory of sorts when he and another associate pilfered a case of whiskey from the tent of his commanding officer and distributed it to men in their company. He reflected years later, “I saw all this whiskey piled up there, and it was just me. I figured that I had as much right to it as my CO did, so I just took it.”29
Like Thomas White, other GIs translated their concerns of war into lyrical prose. In other instances, servicemen used apocalyptic images to convey to people at home the violent aspects of Pacific War and their meaning for soldiers and civilians alike. For example, in September 1944, Chicago resident William Couch penned the following poem, titled “To a Soldier,” in which he described the savagery of war for his fellow South-siders:
Here where the cock sounds his synchronized song
in a sunless morning
and the caravans of young move towards the
battlefronts, leaving behinded the degraded
cities wild-eyed and dim-lit like an old man
fallen …
where flowers and time accumulate to dust
and the barbarous weed grows in the
night night taller than a child’s reach
(O, brother say!)
The planted cannon replies to the
last word, living urge of flesh
that aimlessly scratched the ground with
bayonet point
or, valiant, alert, steathly [sic] moved into HELL.30
Scottsboro in the Pacific
More often than not, the oblique messages relayed by division members carried news of racial incidents that were steeped in sexual tension. On 2 June 1944, George Murphy, a field artillery officer stationed in New Guinea, wrote home to his boyhood friend and Chicago Bee columnist Abe Noel, and his words appeared in the black newspaper a few weeks later in the following manner: “Take notice, my friend, that I’m in a new location, trying to duck malaria and dengue fever. Please let my folks in Chicago know my new A.P.O. so that they can be of service to myself and other soldiers.” Murphy then went on to provide commentary on events that shaped the lives of black GIs stationed throughout the Southwest Pacific at the time. He stated, “I see that the NAACP has hold of our Scottsboro case. Remember two of the five boys condemned to die for a trollop instead of for freedom were from my old outfit? . . . We spent much time explaining to the young Australian lawyer hired to defend the men that although the men were charged with rape on the blotter, they committed an even worse crime according to the unwritten code of the American social system.”31
The cause célèbre to which George Murphy cryptically alluded had occurred in early 1944. On 15 March six black soldiers in a quartermaster amphibious truck company were accused of raping and having carnal knowledge of two white army nurses in the South Pacific. In many ways, the incident encompassed themes of sexuality, the protection of white womanhood, and political and social arrangements, issues that had historically shaped African American life in the United States. While stationed at Milne Bay, New Guinea, two white GIs, Thomas Havers and James Flanagan, along with two U.S. Army Nurse Corps officers, Ruth Irvine and Marie Weaver, were parked in a restricted shore area when six black men reportedly approached them and forced the women into a wooded area, where they were allegedly assaulted and then raped.
Accounts differed widely, however. The accused men emphatically proclaimed their innocence, insisting that the alleged victims had solicited them for sex but that they had turned them down. However, both Flanagan and Havers claimed that five members of the group threatened to kill them if the women refused to have intercourse with them. Furthermore, when questioned during the initial judge advocate general’s query into the matter, the two nurses appeared confused when asked to identify their attackers during a company formation held at the time, accusing up to nine soldiers who stood in the ranks. But when pressed further by army investigators, the two women conjured up long-standing images that cast their alleged assailants as black rapists.
As Walter Luszki, an officer who served in New Guinea at the time, points out, the evidence introduced in the court proceeding should have been treated with caution because of the disparity in the accusers’ testimonies, the poor visibility that evening, and the statements of the accused denying that they had had intercourse with the two women.32 Nonetheless, shortly afterward, military authorities arrested the six men and charged them with violating the Twenty-fourth Article of War. At their trial a few months later, court members listened to only three days of testimony before finding all six men guilty, and the judge sentenced each man to die by hanging.33 And with the approval of General Douglas MacArthur, commander in chief of the Southwest Pacific area, the men were promptly transferred 175 miles north from Milne Bay to the New Guinea Detention and Rehabilitation Center, where they awaited summary execution.34 Less than a month later, a small group of the center’s military staff watched as the soldiers’ bodies swung from the gallows.35
The motivations behind the Southwest Pacific commander’s order to execute the soldiers are unclear. In his memoirs, MacArthur failed to mention the Milne Bay case and other capital-offense cases tried in his theater of operation.36 And as his biographers have pointed out, it is difficult to determine where the Southwest Pacific theater commander stood on the subject of race and military justice.37 But it is possible that the general’s juridical policies reflected southern mores of race, place, and custom. The general kept quiet about the army’s long-standing system of racial segregation and offered virtually no leadership on issues affecting black servicemen in the theater. In fact, he adopted a laissez-faire approach toward civil-military affairs, deferring the administration and adjudication of civic issues to territorial, municipal, and colonial authorities as well as to members of his staff. As Joseph Rauh, an officer who served in MacArthur’s headquarters at the time, recalls, “You know, the military commander in the area can bar people and the general barred any Military Government troops from the States. He wanted to do it out of his own people.”38
In addition, MacArthur worked diligently with civilian authorities to impose policies restricting relations between black GIs and local women, stationing black units in isolated territories and confining them to racially segregated locales in major urban centers. After black troops arrived in Australia during the early stages of the war, for instance, MacArthur wrote to George Marshall, “I will do everything possible to prevent friction or resentment on the part of the Australian government and people with regard to the presence of colored troops . . . their policy of ‘White Australia’ is universally accepted here . . . however, by utilizing these troops in the front lines away from the great centres of population . . . I can minimize the difficulties involved.”39 And as the war continued, the general’s efforts to maintain the color line in the Pacific also dominated the thinking of white officers and enlisted men throughout the theater. Quite often, efforts made by the Southwest Pacific theater command to regulate interaction between black army personnel and civilian female populations tended to be wrapped up in stereotypical portrayals of black male bestiality and a patriarchal discourse of the protection of white womanhood. As one officer assigned to the 14th Corps at the time commented: “One must go armed on dates or MPs will send girls home because of the danger of attack by Negroes.”40
Throughout the war, cases or incidents involving black GIs accused of rape rarely appeared in major American daily newspapers. But almost a year before the Milne Bay incident, news of a rape case involving two black soldiers stationed in the South Pacific alerted African American service relatives both at home and abroad of the intense battles that black GIs faced. While serving on New Caledonia in May 1943, 19-year-old Frank Fisher and 20-year-old Edward Loury traveled from their encampment to nearby Noumea to enjoy the sights and sounds of a carnival. A few kilometers beyond their base camp, the GIs hailed a ride from two other soldiers who were also planning to attend the event. When the party reached an area described by residents as “Prostitute Hill,” Fisher and Loury alighted from the vehicle and continued their journey to the social function on foot. However, after advancing several hundred yards toward their destination, they encountered a white officer and a New Caledonian woman walking from a wooded area to a jeep parked along the side of the road.
After stopping and exchanging pleasantries, the officer asked the two GIs if they were interested in purchasing sexual favors from the local woman. The officer then addressed the woman in French, and the woman responded in kind, leaving the two black servicemen confused as to what the pair had discussed in their presence. The couple invited the two GIs to a secluded spot in the area where they were induced to engage in sexual relations with the woman, but it is unclear whether the men paid the woman. When Fisher and Loury later reappeared at their bivouac area, the two Port Company members were arrested for the alleged rape of the New Caledonian woman. Less than a month later, the two soldiers appeared before a court-martial trial board, where they were found guilty, sentenced to a dishonorable discharge and life imprisonment at the U.S. Penitentiary, and forced to forfeit their pay and benefits—even though the French penal code in New Caledonia called for a lesser sentence. In addition, the two soldiers were not allowed to appeal their convictions, and they were subjected to the “third degree” tactics of military police while confined to the stockade.
In the months that followed, William Hastie, chairman of the NAACP National Legal Committee, and Vito Marcantonio, president of the Communist Party–led International Labor Defense, launched a spirited campaign on their behalf, filing petitions with the secretary of war to overturn the original convictions and bringing public attention to the plight of black soldiers in the Pacific theater. Not long afterward, their efforts bore fruit. On 31 March 1944, the assistant secretary of war intervened, reducing the sentences of the two young men from life imprisonment to ten and eight years, respectively. But the overwhelming number of court-martial cases of rape brought against black GIs serving in the Pacific produced an avalanche of criticism of the army’s racial practices from stateside observers. “The petitioners are innocent of the crime of rape,” Marcantonio and Hastie complained, arguing that “there is no room in the United States Army for Scottsboro Cases.”41
Thus, by the time black servicemen arrived at their newly assigned island posts at the end of 1944, they had discovered that the racial and sexual arrangements of the Deep South intersected with the rank prerogatives of the American military throughout the Pacific theater.42 From Australia to Dutch New Guinea to the Philippine Islands, rumors of rampant interracial sexual activity and the paranoid efforts made by white officers and enlisted personnel to impose a racial color line in the Pacific sowed seeds of discontent among African American GIs stationed throughout the theater. As Philadelphia native Clifford Bell, a 23-year-old soldier serving in the Southwest Pacific, put it in a letter he wrote to his mother at the time, “I can understand the treatment that is received by us in the Southern States because it has been going on for years. But it seems just as bad over here. The white soldiers have told the Philippinos [sic] that we are no good and that we are slaves who will rape their women. As far as I can see my service in this man’s army over here has been for white supremacy.”43
Samuel Hill and the Transpacific Court of Public Opinion
Clifford Bell was not the only GI in the Southwest Pacific to experience the ways in which sexual politics underlined race relations in the theater. While serving in Dutch New Guinea during the winter of 1945, Samuel Hill witnessed its extraordinary power firsthand. After reverting to divisional control, Hill and his company had moved from Stirling Island to Hollandia, New Guinea, where they received orders to establish a security perimeter covering the supply routes along Tanahmerah Bay. On 7 January 1945, the 28-year-old noncommissioned officer and another 93rd Division member found themselves embroiled in a politically charged incident when they decided to venture beyond the base headquarters. After searching for souvenirs along the shoreline during that afternoon, the two GIs had no sooner returned to the company area than they were ordered to report to a special company formation where they were identified and charged with sexually assaulting a woman who lived in a nearby village. Although military authorities dropped the charges against the other soldier, the division provost marshal, Major Hugo Goetz, brought charges against Hill for allegedly “forcing and feloniously, against her will, having carnal knowledge” of the native woman. Hill, who insisted on his innocence, faced a sentence of death if convicted.44
The court-martial convened on 7 March 1945 at Hollandia. Samuel Jarisetou, a Depapre villager, testified that, on the day of the incident, he had encountered Hill and three other GIs in two villages located near the bay while visiting his adoptive father and his family who lived in the area. Then Jarisetou pointed out that while two of the men left the village, Hill and another soldier stayed behind, claiming that they “were looking for a woman.” He went on to contend that when his father resisted their demands, Hill drew a firearm and placed it near his head while the other serviceman forced one of the women to the ground and raped her. Meanwhile, the prosecution sought to bolster its case by producing a map depicting the trails in the area as a way of firmly establishing a link between the whereabouts of the two soldiers and the time that it would have taken them to negotiate the distance between the two villages. Finally, the prosecution produced Baroe Banondi, the alleged victim, who had pointed to ten men present at the hearing earlier as accessories to the crime. Under cross-examination, however, Banondi confessed to members of the court-martial hearing board that she could not recall ever meeting Hill even though she had identified him as the culprit two months earlier.
Banondi’s conflicting testimony reflected the precarious notions that African American GIs in the division and South Pacific Islanders held vis-à-vis each other and how their understandings of each other informed their initial encounters throughout the theater. On the one hand, the views that black GIs held of South Pacific natives were shaped by discourse on South Pacific civilization that was prominent in black newspapers during the period.45 During the early stages of the war, the African American press tended to describe Fijians, New Guineans, and other Pacific islanders as “Fussy-Wuzzies” and “headhunters.”46 And more often than not, these stereotypical images were linked to the popular images of South Seas women depicted in Hollywood films like South of Tahiti that were released just prior to the division’s arrival in the area.47 While stationed in New Guinea, the division personnel couldn’t help but draw upon these images while meeting the island women in the area. For example, after making contact with the native population that spring, Cecil Davis, an officer with a company in the 368th Infantry, wrote home to a distant relative, “As we walked through the streets of the village, I first saw the female of the species—not one, but many of them, peeping at us from doors, windows, and from behind huts.” Davis went on to add, “The women who had gone back to their jobs, were clad only in a red cloth made to resemble a skirt and worn very low on the hips. They were not as handsome as the men.”48 On the other hand, while it is difficult to pinpoint with precision the images that Pacific islanders held of American GIs, the scant evidence of their impressions of the black American GIs they encountered during this period reflects deep-seated feelings of alienation and cultural misunderstanding. For example, Peter Lait, who was 8 years old when he lived in the nearby village of Tadis, New Guinea, during the war, recalled years later, “There were some black American soldiers, probably not Papua New Guineans. They were with the white Americans. And when the Americans came, they caused confusion among us.”49
Witnesses called to the stand during Samuel Hill’s court-martial hearing presented contradictory versions of the incident. As doubts about Hill’s guilt mounted, eyewitnesses for the defense focused on two main issues: Hill’s whereabouts and the time frame in which the incident had taken place. Private Alford Edwards, a member of the company’s second squad, testified that he had accompanied Hill to an oil dump near Tanamerah Bay that morning and that the young sergeant had been with him when the alleged incident had taken place. Sergeant Jackson Meadows, the second squad commander, added that he saw the Detroit, Michigan, native that morning but did not see him again until one-thirty that afternoon. Private Sammie Oglesby told the board that he had seen Hill and Edwards standing along the waterfront at the very moment the shots rang out and that Hill was unarmed. Shortly afterward, he recalled, he was approached by Samuel Jarisetou and asked for the names of the two soldiers, to which he responded “Frankenstein” and “Count Basil.” But most important, Oglesby, along with other servicemen called to the witness stand, recalled seeing Hill in the company area between one and two-thirty that afternoon, refuting the prosecution’s contention that he had returned to the encampment much later.50
Hill’s senior officers, serving as witnesses for the defense, also refuted the evidence presented by the prosecution. For instance, the prosecution had used tire tracks from a jeep to claim that Hill was present at the village during the incident. However, Lieutenant Everett M. Porter, Company L’s executive officer, testified that both of the vehicles that were assigned to the unit were present and accounted for throughout the day in question. In addition, Captain William P. Hurd, his superior officer, took the stand on behalf of his NCO, pointing up the efficiency ratings that showed Hill to be an exemplary soldier. The lack of evidence in the case and Hill’s distinguished service record made very little difference, however. On a secret written ballot, three-fourths of the all-white court-martial board found the noncommissioned officer guilty and sentenced him to death within two days.51
The controversy surrounding Hill’s trial and the speedy conviction reached by top-ranking officers in New Guinea gripped the attention of division members stationed throughout the Southwest Pacific area. While attending the proceedings, Captain Matthew Lowe, the regiment’s ranking chaplain, and Captain S. McMaster Kerr, the base stockade chaplain, both noted the fault-ridden process that resulted in Hill’s conviction. Prior to the hearing, the black and white men of the cloth met the defendant and began raising objections about the racial constitution of officers appointed to the board. In early February, Lowe wrote a letter to 93rd Infantry Division commander, Major General Harry Johnson, requesting that he appoint black officers to the General Court. “There are many known instances in the history of American Civil Courts in which decisions involving Negroes have been revoked and new trials ordered by higher courts on the grounds that possible prejudice existed since no Negroes were chosen to sit on the jury trying the case,” Lowe argued. And although Kerr did not “personally question the integrity of any White Officer who might be chosen to constitute the court,” he informed the commanding general that “Sergeant Hill feels there is a strong possibility of prejudice.”52 Nevertheless, the requests made by the religious leaders were greeted with silence from the division’s highest-ranking officer.
Why the division high command elected to take such a noncommittal stance remains unclear. A career officer with the Texas National Guard, Johnson had been selected by 6th Army commander Lieutenant General Walter Krueger to assume command of the division in August 1944 after leaving North Africa, where he led the recently disbanded 2nd Cavalry Division.53 For the Southwest Pacific field commander, Johnson’s assignment to the segregated unit was ideal, for the Houston native had long enjoyed a reputation as a highly professional officer who stressed moderation on questions of race. But more important, Johnson had ably displayed the ability to lead African American troops, a talent that made him uniquely qualified in the eyes of his superiors for service in the Southwest Pacific theater area. “I’ve served with colored troops for many years and I think I know them as well as any white man ever could,” Johnson once claimed.54 Press correspondent Charles Loeb of the National Negro Press Association also admired the general and observed while touring Hollandia that “the men are crazy about the general. They’d go to hell for him.”55 However, critics argued that Johnson’s reluctance to use his influence to eliminate racial prejudice in the units he led only aggravated the plight of the men who served under him.
After Hill’s conviction and throughout his appeal of the case, Chaplains Kerr and Lowe conducted their own investigation into the case, upon which they discovered the patchwork aspects of the evidence presented by the prosecution, casting further doubt on the legitimacy of the whole trial. In the weeks following the trial, the two clergymen again wrote a joint letter to the 93rd commander, raising questions regarding the victim and the eyewitnesses who failed to identify Hill as the assailant during the trial. They also charged that while one of the prosecution’s main witnesses claimed that he had seen Hill in the village that day, he was not present when the alleged act had taken place. They also pointed to the fact that a medical report, completed prior to the trial, found no physical evidence of rape in the case. Moreover, when the priests visited the stockade during the trial, two GIs approached them and confessed to committing all the actions attributed to Hill in the case except the actual rape.
After they failed to elicit an adequate response from the division high command, Lowe and Kerr sought assistance from the area Judge Advocate General’s Office in Australia to plead their case. Pointing up the pervasive nature of racial prejudice in the military’s prosecution of the case, the religious ministers told the assistant judge advocate general, “The hostility of the court was in evidence throughout the trial and the law members displayed a bias attitude toward the accused by frequently restricting the counsel in question and explanations.” “The facts of the this case and trial will undoubtedly be brought to the attention of the American public and especially those organizations (White, Negro, and mixed) and individuals who are manifesting a deep interest in Negroes in the armed forces and particularly in the Ninety-third Infantry division,” they warned.56
Even as the two chaplains spoke, word of Hill’s case and the plight of the 93rd Infantry Division members serving in the Netherlands East Indies area raced across the Pacific Ocean into the homes of black service families and neighborhoods, producing a rippling effect throughout the African American community. While confined to the area stockade, Hill dispatched a letter through Chaplain Lowe to his brother Theodore and sister Grace Davis, informing them of his predicament. He then went on to ask them to request a transcript of his court-martial hearing from the Judge Advocate General’s Office in Washington, D.C., and upon receiving the copies, to forward them on to the NAACP national headquarters. “I’m writing this letter so that you know that I’m still overseas and in a great deal of trouble,” Hill told his siblings.57 As an active member in the local Detroit branch, Theodore turned first to the NAACP national office to seek his brother’s release. The 36-year-old Detroit machinist ended his letter by stating emphatically, “I am a member of the NAACP. Can you help us?”58
As the controversy surrounding Hill’s arrest, trial, and incarceration began to surface, local NAACP branches in towns and cities across the United States mobilized into action. In Hill’s hometown of Detroit, branch members launched a vigorous campaign on his behalf, staging rallies and speaking engagements at the Exhor Temple.59 In the District of Columbia, more than three hundred members representing the local NAACP branch and an array of local church, civic, political, and fraternal organizations held a series of discussions before drafting a resolution calling for an army inquiry into the number of court-martial proceedings brought against black soldiers in the Pacific. In addition, conferees drafted a petition demanding that Congress pass permanent fair employment practices legislation. Among the 93rd Infantry Division relatives and friends who attended the meetings were Thomasina Johnson, Pauline Redmond Coggs, Minnie Wrenn, and Mordecai Johnson.60 And in Philadelphia, more than two hundred people packed St. Matthews Church, where they listened to Walter White and other NAACP officials discuss Hill’s case and the Pacific theater activities of soldiers who were members of their congregation. After the two-hour session, they adopted a resolution demanding that the War Department investigate the merits of the case.61
Once the local calls for Hill’s clemency quickened, members of the national office of the NAACP and the black press followed suit. Immediately upon returning from the Pacific in early April, NAACP executive secretary Walter White met with Undersecretary of War Robert P. Patterson. Among the items the two men discussed were Samuel Hill and the disproportionate numbers of cases brought against black servicemen stationed in the Southwest Pacific.62 And former 93rd Division serviceman and assistant special counsel Franklin H. Williams and other officials at the national NAACP headquarters in New York collected sworn statements from Chaplains Lowe and Kerr that they attached to a brief filed with the secretary of war, demanding clemency on Hill’s behalf. “It is our belief that Samuel Hill is innocent of the crime of which he has been convicted and we hope that the enclosed material will be given full and favorable consideration by the Clemency board when his case comes before that board for review,” Williams stated.63
Hill’s case combined with the public’s growing awareness of African American contribution in the Southwest Pacific may have bolstered the number of NAACP memberships among division servicemen. Within the unit, memberships grew slowly. In February 1944, only 93 troops joined the NAACP.64 But between November of that year and March 1945, the number of membership applications filed by black division soldiers and officers stationed throughout the Southwest Pacific jumped from 3,600 to well over 5,000.65 Primary recruiters during the membership drives included African American clergy led by Oscar Holder, Andrew Johnson, Everett Hewlett, John Bowman, and Harlee Little, most of whom ministered to the men at the regimental level.66 Of the growing number of division personnel flocking to the organization, executive secretary Walter White remarked after returning from the Pacific, “We are going to have a great reservoir of support in the postwar years from the men out there who seem to be deeply grateful for our interest in their welfare.”67
As Samuel Hill’s case attests, the actions taken by spokespeople and organizations within the African American community to safeguard the interests of black division servicemen stationed throughout the Southwest Pacific were prompted by the GIs’ abilities to resist and transcend the racial prejudice of and mistreatment by the military authorities in the theater and their close relationships with their families and communities. Once African Americans stateside learned of the travails faced by black uniformed personnel in the Pacific, they often decided to take active roles, demanding that army authorities remedy the abuses that black soldiers faced in the region. The potential for a relationship between black military families and the black elite was partly based on the ability of prominent organizations and leaders to mobilize their resources in ways that assisted the families’ efforts. Although both parties expressed grave concern over the well-being of black division members, the events in the Southwest Pacific would present new challenges to that relationship. Indeed, as the division progressed toward the Philippines, the fluid conditions of the Asian-Pacific war and the continuous physical and psychological strain of fighting in the island jungles would soon precipitate strategies and tactics to which traditional modes of protest would hardly apply.
Race across the Southwest Pacific
In April 1945, the 93rd Infantry Division reassembled at Morotai Island. After arriving on the island’s forward area, the unit relieved the U.S. 31st Infantry Division as the principal force in the area. The division’s mission was to operate the supply points as the chief administrative army organization in the area. Yet as soon as 93rd servicemen reported to the area, they found themselves working feverishly alongside the Australian dock crews, most of whom had been overwhelmed by the backlogged supplies and equipment waiting to be shipped to Allied troops staging for the Australian invasion of Borneo. Within a two-month period, the men in the division had unloaded nearly 320,000 tons of supplies and equipment and had managed to obtain an average tonnage output per hatch per man higher than that of any other organization in the theater.68 For their efforts, members of the division received a special commendation from 8th Army Headquarters in July 1945.69
In the minds of most 93rd Division soldiers, their survival strategies and job performances were inextricably tied together. As he inspected the unit in May 1945, medical officer Captain Robert Bennett noted: “Despite their adversities, they are doing their utmost by their accomplishments to continue to prove that they are the best outfit from every point in this theater. Despite the types of missions assigned to them, they have performed each time in a superior manner, as evidenced by the commendations that have piled high upon them. Yet they continue to be by-passed and unnoticed.”70 Likewise, Captain George Leighton witnessed the important duties carried out by black servicemen in the Moluccas. While visiting bases where division members were stationed, he remarked, “I have seen Negro engineers building roads over which important supplies have gone from depot to ships. I have seen Negro quartermaster battalions organize and operate depots that supplied frontline troops in contact with the enemy thousand miles away. But I have also seen Negro stevedores with units in Finschafen with sweat on their faces and their rifles nearby to fight off the Japs. With numerous Negro troops performing work in this manner, that would make any group proud.”71
As they served in these administrative functions, many black 93rd GIs encountered racism in the Southwest Pacific theater. Some of the incidents occurred between black and white GIs, and they often nearly came to blows. For example, upon landing at the southernmost tip of Morotai in April 1945, several members of the 369th Infantry clashed with military policemen of the 31st Infantry Division after they were physically and verbally assaulted while visiting a nearby hospital. Only after the 93rd Division’s commanding officer replaced the all-white military policemen with those from his unit and the 31st Division departed for the invasion of the Philippines was the deadly situation diffused.72
This was not the last time that the two organizations would exchange unpleasantries, however. Later that year, a shootout nearly occurred between soldiers in the 93rd’s 368th Infantry Regiment and members of the 31st Division after twenty black GIs had attempted to employ several Filipino women as domestic servants. When it was all over, the commanding generals of both divisions reprimanded the officers and NCOs who were involved, but they issued a directive restricting only the black soldiers from using the recreation areas.73 John Howard had vivid memories of the 31st Division: “Many of these soldiers were from the Deep South and brought to their experience their built-in feelings about black people. They tried to avoid our unit as much as possible.”74 Julius Becton expressed a somewhat different view: “The fact that the 93rd Division and the 31st Division shared several islands showed a lack of sensitivity to the racial issue by General MacArthur and his commanders.”75 Conversely, theater censors quoted an unnamed officer with the 31st Division who wrote home describing the roles that the National Guard outfit had envisioned for themselves and where they stood in relation to all-black units stationed throughout the area at the time: “This division is more or less famed for its ability to ‘handle’ the niggers. Race hatred is actually encouraged by both Battalion and Regimental Commanders.”76
Even so, some black 93rd GIs and their white comrades developed a better appreciation of each other after making close contact on occasion. For example, while guarding two Japanese officers in June 1945, Edward Quinn, a white U.S. 7th Division infantryman from Rome, New York, and John Simpson, a soldier from Birmingham, Alabama, flew to Tacloban, Leyte, where they spent three days with members of the 369th Infantry. Quinn recalled, “We were hosted by 369th Infantry Regiment that was based north of Puerto Princess. Our prisoners were also guarded by a squad from the U.S. 93rd Infantry Division. We shared the tents, food, and lives of the men of the 93rd and were treated royally. I remember they even shared their beer rations with us. The soldier who accompanied me was out of his element, however, because he later told me that he only thought of colored people as ‘niggers.’ Although this experience only lasted three or four days, it left me with a favorable, lasting impression about the men of the Ninety-third Division.”77
The hopes of interracial cooperation that some black division members and white servicemen shared while serving together in the Pacific were soon dashed by racial hatred spewed by policymakers back in Washington, D.C., however. On 29 June 1945, Mississippi congressman James O. Eastland stood on the Senate floor and delivered a blistering speech, disparaging the performance of black troops in Europe. Questioning the suitability of permanent fair employment practices legislation, the junior senator from the Magnolia State argued that the agency granted an unfair advantage to returning black soldiers, who in his estimation were “an utter and dismal failure in combat in Europe.” Citing the activities of troops serving with the U.S. 92nd Infantry Division in Italy, Eastland claimed, “The soldiers had no initiative, no sense of responsibility, very low intelligence, and were a failure. . . . It was a mistake to send them to Europe, they should be returned from Europe and sent to the Pacific, where there are races of color. . . . Why are we being asked to set an unfair preference against the white soldier for the benefit of the returning Negro veteran, solely because he is a member of a minority group which sells its votes to the highest bidder in political campaigns?” Eastland queried.78
The Mississippi statesman soon had an answer to his question. Two weeks later, Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson vehemently denied Eastland’s charges against the 92nd Infantry Division during a press conference and claimed that the senator had misrepresented the views of the American commanders in Europe. Pointing to remarks made by generals Dwight D. Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, and Ira Eaker, Patterson went on to chronicle the favorable reports that the Inspector General’s Office had received regarding the performance of black troops in European and Pacific theaters. “The statements of the commanders in the field do not support the conclusions drawn by Senator Eastland,” he argued.79
In the Southwest Pacific, officers of the 93rd Division fashioned their own collective response to the Mississippi congressman. A few weeks after Eastland made his remarks, Lieutenant Edward D. Smith-Green and other officers were flabbergasted when they received a copy of the Pittsburgh Courier and read the senator’s diatribe against black servicemen. Angry and embittered, the 25-year-old Brooklyn, New York, native and fifteen other officers dashed off an open letter to the Courier, arguing that, “as appointed leaders of men, the plight and embarrassment of our soldier, all soldiers, who read such speeches, concerns us. Out here we have learned to work together, play together, fight and suffer together—not as white or Negro soldiers—just soldiers. White soldiers, Negro soldiers, soldiers of Jewish, Italian, German, and Japanese extraction, soldiers of every race, color, and creed who are real Americans will make their combined will quite evident to all concerned when they can once more speak and act for themselves.” “With the exception of our families, no one who has not been in this inferno is qualified to speak a word against us,” they insisted.80
Meanwhile, service families in the United States translated Green’s call into action. About three weeks after Eastland’s speech, 93rd Division officer Judson Williams’s mother, Marie, decided to act on behalf of her son and others who wore the nation’s uniform. In late July, the Philadelphia native wrote the Mississippi senator, demanding that he apologize for his impugning statements regarding the performance of black servicemen in the war. A few days later, the elderly black woman, along with twenty-five hundred division relatives from the New Jersey cities of Patterson, Princeton, and Newark, spearheaded a letter-writing campaign, demanding that the army chief of staff publicly repudiate Senator Eastland’s attack on the integrity of African Americans serving in Europe and Asia. “The senator’s unwarranted attacks hit colored soldiers fighting at the battlefront below the belt,” she argued. When later asked about her actions, Williams replied, “I keep up with the news and follow important commentators. What I don’t agree with, I try to take in stride but I could not take Senator Eastland’s unfair, untruthful, and hateful attack.”81
By the end of July, division troops had barely reported to duty in the Southwest Pacific when they discovered that the danger of serving on Morotai was heightened considerably by the threat that the remaining 500 Japanese troops on the island and 35,000 enemy forces on nearby Halmahera posed to its main perimeter. To counter the possibility of enemy reinforcement, 93rd Division patrols were sent out daily to stop all Japanese island movement during the spring and summer months of 1945. Negotiating the lush green jungle in the Libano and Tijoe areas, squad patrols led by Glen Allen, Arnett Hartsfield, John Sarazen, and George Shuffer engaged in extensive operations between the Radja and Bobo rivers.
In early August, a nine-man patrol led by Stanley Nakanishi and Alfonzia Dillon maneuvered along the Tijoe River, where they encountered and captured Colonel Muisu Ouchi, commander of all Japanese troops on Morotai and the highest-ranking Japanese officer captured during the war. Around the same time, elements of 369th Infantry Regiment’s Company L advanced along the tributaries of the Libano River, where they drew fierce gunfire from a large enemy command post. After subduing the threat, they captured several members of Ouchi’s high command.82 After the elements of the division moved on to the Jolo area of the Philippine Islands during the closing phases of the war, troops of the 368th Infantry under the command of Alamanca Williams of Crawfordville, Indiana, and Ricardo Santioga of New York City endured numerous enemy attacks as they conducted steady reconnaissance of Japanese positions. Negotiating the nearly impenetrable jungles and mountainous terrain, division troops worked diligently to drive out and destroy enemy forces commanded by Major General Tetsuzo Suzuki. Among those who participated in the action were William Ray, Dunbar Gibson, Robert McDaniel, John Blalark, John Coghlan, Raymond Jenkins, and James Whittico.83
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Wallace Gant and GIs attached to the 25th Infantry and the 369th Infantry had just completed their patrolling missions on Morotai and Jolo when they learned that hostilities had ceased on 10 August.84 Expressing a deep sense of relief, Nelson Peery may have voiced what was on the mind of many of the men when he wrote from the front at end of the war: “Our job has been to hold the island, theirs to retake it. It’s really nasty business hunting them down like dogs and killing them but of course they have also killed some of us. But most of all we paid an exceedingly small price of our victory.”85 According to Edwin Lee, “It was sort of like a cops and robbers comedy because there must have been fifteen thousand men in our division and we were holding the perimeter, so to speak.”86 Julius Becton, a young lieutenant from Pennsylvania, remembered: “For me, the hardest part about patrolling was during the clean up operations when we tried to convince the Japanese in the hills that the war was over.”87 By the end of the fall of 1945, the men who had survived the jungle patrols of Bougainville and Morotai began to process and evacuate all Japanese prisoners of war while division members in the 368th were held responsible for supply points at Agusan, Davao, and Zamboanga.88
Yet while division troops began to cast their eyes homeward, they found themselves at the heart of several demobilization issues. As the war began to wind down in Europe in September 1944, the War Department issued a statement outlining the army’s plan for the redeployment and demobilization of military personnel after the defeat of Germany. Under its plan, service forces were to be promptly transported from Europe to the Pacific, and enlisted personnel received credit for the number of months served since 1940, the number of months served overseas, battle participation record, and number of dependent children. Each GI with an initial adjusted service rating score of at least 85 was eligible for discharge.89 One’s eligibility for discharge, however, was contingent upon whether replacements from Europe could be obtained and the availability of shipping in the theater of operations. These factors had a tremendous impact on the War Department’s demobilization plans, for the discharge rate of African American servicemen in the segregated units failed approach that in white outfits owing to the overwhelming number of troops in noncombatant roles and the army’s difficulties in procuring replacements for them. After the German collapse in Europe five months later, for instance, less than 1 percent of the three hundred thousand troops qualified to return home from the Pacific theater came from all-black outfits.90
As the contradictions in the army’s discharge policies became more apparent, prominent black leaders quickly pointed out the discriminatory aspects of the point system as they railed against the War Department’s demobilization policies. In May 1945, Edgar Brown, director of the National Negro Council, argued that the “point system represented the rankest kind of discrimination against Negro troops because most were segregated in work and non-combat units and could not receive points for combat work.” “Negroes in overseas armies will be last to return home,” Brown predicted.91 A month later, Walter White wrote a letter to the War Department proposing that a special point system be installed for the discharge of black service troops. Criticizing the army’s partial demobilization plans, the NAACP executive secretary declared that “a grave injustice is being inflicted on these men who, in most instances, have absolutely no control over their being assigned to service duty which deprives them opportunities for combat. As a result, they will return to the United States or be discharged from the army at a much later date than white soldiers,” White claimed. Throughout much of the spring and summer of 1945, black newspapers, notably the Michigan Chronicle, the Houston Informer and Texas Freeman, the Philadelphia Tribune, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the New York Amsterdam News carried editorials castigating the army’s plan for partial demobilization, and their reporters penned feature articles discussing the fairness and logic of the point system.92
While the debate over the demobilization of black troops heated up in the United States, the soldiers of the U.S. 93rd Division expressed their own thoughts about returning stateside. In the words of one division soldier, “We seemed stuck in the Pacific theater. The seesaw effect of preparing to unload and stack shipments of supplies and clear jungles with no possible chance of going home had a negative effect on us. Our morale, which was already low, was disintegrating into anger and resentment.”93 After learning of the army’s readjustment policy while stationed in the Pacific, 24-year-old Private Robert Johnson wrote home to his mother in Louisiana, “It is unfair to us that we are not able to earn discharge credits with combat stars—five points each—because we are non-combat duty. I tell you mother, there shall be no world peace until the white man sees the fact that Negroes and all darker races are human beings too. Why don’t they send us home or treat us like human beings?”94 In a similar vein, Houston native Charles C. Qualls, an officer with the division, offered the following remarks in a letter home at the time: “In an officers’ meeting today, the die was cast. The white officers of the division have been transferred to the Thirty-first (Dixie Division) manned by men from Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, in order to get them home. Colored officers will be left behind, even though many of us have 90 or more points because if we travel with a white outfit there may be friction.”95
The friction that Qualls mentioned in his correspondence reflected the pressures of the Asia-Pacific war. In late 1945, the southern Philippine Islands had become a racial pressure cooker. Black and white servicemen quarreled over money, liquor, and—above all else—women. As Baltimore Afro-American correspondent Julius Merritt noted in early 1946, sexual tension lay at the heart of the fracases between black and white servicemen in Manila. Merritt wrote that “not infrequently frictions and fistic brawls over women have occurred in the streets and quite often they have marred town social functions where white and colored soldiers have come together for a good time.”96
The color line existed throughout the area. Along the pathways and sidewalks of southern Philippine island towns and cities, the men encountered USO clubs and YMCA buildings signs designating “colored” and “white” patrons and segregated swimming pools. American Red Cross installations located near the work and lodging areas were segregated.97 The situation that black division members faced in Manila elicited the following response from a GI: “There was a dance to which we were all invited, white and Negro alike. However, when we asked Filipino girls to dance, a white captain was standing nearby and said in a very loud voice, ‘you niggers are not going to dance with the Filipino girls.’ This is one of the causes of constant friction between white and Negro men in the armed forces. We are all fighting together for the preservation of all that we know and love, but behind the scenes, the Negro is still the goat so far as white America is concerned.”98
To make matters worse, as division troops moved through the remote areas of the southern Philippine Islands, they learned that they were the subjects of vicious racist notions perpetuated by white enlisted men and officers. Black men, it was suggested over and over again, were poor fighters, exhibited apelike qualities, and possessed tails.99 As one soldier recalled, “Stories like that were told by white soldiers to render us in the sight of others as an inferior group. We had to remember, of course, that many of the innocent believers had never seen a Negro unit until we arrived in the area. Instead of being discouraged, I, myself, and other soldiers in the unit became strongly filled with the ambition to prove to the white race that it took more than consistent tales to block our fight against racial prejudice and discrimination.”100 Likewise, in a letter to his minister back home, Roosevelt Jones, a soldier assigned to the division, lamented the way race and rumor structured relations between black servicemen and Leyte populations living in the battle zone areas: “We are not allowed to even the leave the area. The white soldiers are permitted to do anything. We have to do all of the dirty work, and our food is different from that served to white troops. And worst of all, the white officers and soldiers are teaching the people in the Philippines that the Negro soldier has a tail like a dog that comes out at night and goes back in during the day.” “I hope that you will publish this letter so our families can see how much trouble we are catching over here,” the Washington, D.C., resident exclaimed.101
At the receiving end of Jones’s plea was a clergyman of tremendous consequence. A minister at Washington, D.C.’s Mount Carmel Baptist Church, the Reverend William Jernagin received an invitation from Secretary of War Henry Stimson through the chief of chaplains in November 1944 to visit servicemen fighting on the battle fronts of the Pacific area as a representative of the Fraternal Council of Negro Churches in America. After accepting Stimson’s request and overcoming bureaucratic red tape, the venerable 76-year-old church leader, along with an army chaplain, left the United States on 1 October aboard a commercial airplane bound for Honolulu. After stopping briefly in the Hawaiian Islands, the two men continued on to Manila, where Jernagin met with port battalion troops and chaplains ministering to the needs of servicemen stationed in the area.
During his visit in the Southwest Pacific, the pastor traveled to Tacloban, Leyte, and DelMonte, Mindanao, where he met with the enlisted men and officers of the 93rd Infantry Division. During his brief stay, Jernagin was struck by the low morale of the division and the frustrations that servicemen expressed over the discriminatory practices they encountered as well as the promotion and transfer policies within the unit. Observing the differences between the men of the all-black unit and troops of the 31st Division, which was also stationed on the island, he noted, “On this island there was a division of white troops for which there was a distinct command operating differently from that of the 93rd Division. This white division had had no more overseas duty than the 93rd but at the time of my visit they were loading for the return trip home while the Negro outfit was waiting for the shipping pressure to be relieved so that they could come home.” When Jernagin later asked division commander General Leonard Boyd about the division’s predicament, he responded, “The Thirty-first was a Dixie Division and it was not possible to send Negro officers back in command of White troops.” Witnessing the dispirited attitudes expressed by division members, Jernagin tried to placate the GIs by arguing that “their country has been proud of their work as soldiers during this war” and that the nation “must likewise be proud of them as citizens during the peace.” But upon leaving the division command post the next day, the church leader recalled “feeling a sense of sadness for the Negro division seemingly so defeated.” “I knew that there was and is only one answer. This world must become a Brotherhood.”102
Jernagin’s remarks to the troops rang hollow for division troops who listened to him that day, however. Of Jernagin’s experiences in the Philippines, Sergeant Lee Merriwether noted, “It appears that in a large measure our present leadership has failed. I’m sure that they can be replaced with new and young blood; individuals who are more qualified who will sacrifice themselves to reach the goal that we all so desire.”103 However, a Houston native was more caustic in his assessment of the religious sage. In a letter to the editor of his hometown newspaper in November 1945, he observed, “Now I see that we can not beat army Jim Crow. Dr. Jernajan [sic] spoke to the men of the regiment yesterday and to sum up his speech in a few words you get this statement: ‘Remember you are Negroes and stay in your place when you return home.’” Reflecting on the public clamor for the repatriation of troops from the Pacific, the soldier went on to state, “We, too, are soldiers and we feel that our plight should be a matter for the attention of the people of our race. Our wives, sweethearts, parents and friends can aid us by writing the War Department, NAACP, Urban League, congressmen, CIO and other organizations.”104
Soon the potentially explosive situation gave way to a season of violence. In the suburbs of Manila, soldiers with the 369th Infantry exchanged blows with white MPs when a black soldier was shot and killed by a white guard at the quartermaster depot after he was accused of stealing a bundle of clothing. The incident ended with black MPs restoring order in the city and the troops receiving orders from division staff headquarters to return to their company compound.105 While laboring along the docks of Tacloban, Leyte, division members clashed with white MPs on 11 August after ten soldiers were physically assaulted by groups of white GIs.106
On 1 September Pittsburgh Courier war correspondent William “Billy” Rowe and Philippines Red Cross director James Smith were touring a section of Manila where a series of clashes had just taken place between black and white servicemen when three MPs approached them and demanded that they produce identification. After they protested against the officers’ requests, the military policemen drew their firearms and pointed them toward the pair before firing a round of shots in their direction. Luckily, Rowe and Smith escaped unharmed, but the incident left an indelible impression in the minds of the two men. “The acts committed against us were done solely because some members of our race and military police had indulged in a melee, causing one or more persons to lose their lives. All attempts to settle our differences were lost with the heated desire of those we encountered attempting to solve a situation outside of the law,” Smith observed.107 Indeed, the situation between black division troops and white soldiers in the area was so volatile that the 93rd Division commander commented, “[The] recent instances of racial disorders give me grave concern as to the adequacy of preparations which have been made to prevent such incidents.” “The commanding officer of the staging area must maintain adequate supervision over all troop units at all times,” he stated.108
Meanwhile, the near riots sparked renewed calls for the shipment of black troops from the Pacific to the United States. In Washington, reports on the Tacloban incident were filtered through the chief of the War Department’s Intelligence and Security Division to General Marshall, Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, transportation chief Major General Charles Gross, and civilian aide Truman Gibson.109 After receiving the report, Gibson warned Secretary McCloy, “The priority of return for colored troops to the United States has to be greatly advanced.”110 Shortly afterward, assistant personnel chief of staff Major General S. G. Henry and assistant operations chief of staff Major General I. H. Edwards appeared before the Military Affairs Committee; they discussed a range of issues, from the Intelligence and Security Division’s findings regarding the racial situation among black troops stationed in the Pacific to various aspects of the War Department’s partial demobilization plan. During the opening stages of their discussion, congressmen heard the two men state that there had been a change in War Department policy in that the critical scores of enlisted personnel and officers in the Pacific would be reduced from 85 to 80. “These scores will be further reduced as fast as practicable,” they advised.111
Around the same time, the Office of the Chief of Transportation made plans for the repatriation of black troops. In early September, representatives of the chief of transportation met with sixty army port commanders in San Francisco. Among the chief topics discussed was the racial situation among black troops in the Philippines, the problem of shipping capacity, and the scheduling, reporting, and employment of troop transports. After two days of discussions, conferees resolved to convert 210 Liberty ships into troop transport fleets, of which 27 were to be used to repatriate army personnel stationed at bases throughout the Pacific. Among those converted to make the trip to the Southwest Pacific were the USAT David Shanks and the USS Tailfair Stockton, whose hulls would be used to transport members of the U.S. 93rd Infantry Division home.112
The Journey Home
In January 1946, many of the 93rd servicemen with enough points to be discharged from the service prepared to board ships heading to redeployment camps located at Agusan, Mindanao, and Tacloban, Leyte, where they were processed for the final trip home. As they trudged along the various gangplanks to their debarkation points where they boarded the USAT David Shanks and the USS Tailfair Stockton, one can only imagine what must have occupied their thoughts. Many of them who had entered the army at Fort Huachuca as teenagers from all parts of the country now returned home as seasoned war veterans with a better sense of themselves and American society. Although all were relieved that the ordeal of war was finally over and yearned for the comfort of home, some pondered the ways in which their lives were altered. “For four years I had been molded by the army and the war. Socially disoriented, and as unsure of civilian life as I had been of army life four years before, I was going back to try and weave 1946 to 1942,” Nelson Peery recalled.113 Edwin Lee expressed similar sentiments: “When I boarded that troop transport ship, I experienced a number of emotions; exhilaration that we were going home but a sense of bewilderment because I didn’t know how my family was going to receive me after all that time.”114 Frank Little noted, “I tried to adjust myself to be comfortable anywhere without being a foreigner, but going home was perhaps the strangest feeling of all because we had been through so much.”115
But many of them realized that, despite the war, Jim Crow racism and discrimination in American society remained unchanged and a new battle would soon begin. One soldier wrote home while aboard the David Shanks, “Ma, I have been through a lot with this war for freedom and all and I am ready to claim what’s mine. There are some things that I will see stopped when I get home.”116 Perhaps Chaplain Charles Watkins summed up what was on the minds of many of the soldiers when he told the men of the 369th Infantry, “Men, we have finished our course. The men of the 369th lived and fought like soldiers but the fight is not over. Don’t be satisfied with the way things were. Don’t ever let anyone ever again tell you that you are inferior because you are black. We fought on the side of the Lord. Don’t desert Him when you get home.”117
Meanwhile, back in the United States, one division soldier was beginning to realize that the battles that black GIs had waged to secure freedom had taken a new turn. After leaving the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks in Kentucky, Samuel Hill reentered the army as an enlisted man reduced in rank. Assigned to the U.S. 24th Infantry Regiment, he served a short stint of duty in Japan before receiving a discharge in 1949. Shortly afterward, he returned to the United States and settled in Denver, Colorado, where he hoped to find work and resume his life. When Hill reported to his local Veterans Administration office, however, the former Detroit native was told that the in-between nature of his discharge made him ineligible for educational funding, employment preferences, unemployment compensation, and housing and small business loans under the GI Bill of Rights. After several fruitless months of appealing the Veterans Administration ruling in his case and searching for employment, he left Colorado and traveled to New York City, where he worked a series of temporary jobs until the late 1950s. It is at this point that Hill and his whereabouts disappear completely from the historical record. But just as Hill was negotiating his postwar travails, relatives associated with the division gave new meaning to his military service by requesting copies of his service record and petitioning the Veterans Administration to reexamine the nature of the discharge given to the former GI. In 1961, Hill’s brother-in-law, William Hurd, wrote a letter to the judge advocate general in which he stated, “It is my firm belief that I have a legitimate interest in the general court-martial of Samuel Hill because the charge against him has had an adverse influence upon my family.” Thus, for Hurd and other service family members, the reclamation and revision of the institutional memory surrounding Hill’s wartime record served as a means to carve out a new sense of dignity and self-determination as well as to articulate aspirations for postwar freedoms that were now both immediate and non-negotiable.118
And it was from this collective sense of awkwardness and determined hope to realize real progress in American society that black 93rd GIs and their families began to prepare for the soldiers’ journey home. While many of them were leaving the jurisdiction of the armed forces, the relationship between themselves, sectors of the African American community, and the federal government would now take a different turn, from one of wartime consent and conflict to one of postwar struggle and estrangement.
Buy This Book in Print