My book report: At war with ourselves

 Matthew F. Delmont, Half American:  The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad, Viking, 2022

In 1941 the United States went to war with its shoelaces tied together and its pants down.  Fortunately the other major powers had created the same problem for themselves.

When the Germans invaded Ukraine they were greeted as liberators by people with fresh memories of Stalin's man-made famine and other atrocities.  They quickly learned that when Nazi racial theory described Slavs as sub-human, it meant all Slavs.  Japan could have recruited millions to its "Co-prosperity Sphere" from among Asians weary of western colonialism, but Japan chose to treat Indochinese, Koreans, Filipinos, East Indians and especially Chinese as horribly as white prisoners of war, in some cases worse.  America consigned a significant portion of its population to legally mandated apartheid and demanded they put their lives on the line for a country that saw them as half-American at best.  Astonishingly, several million did.  Even when they were denied the chance to serve in combat, putting on a uniform was an act so radical that it could still end in death.

Before I opened this book I knew about the Tuskegee Airmen.  I knew Executive Order 8802 was meant to end racial discrimination in the defense industries, and that it was only issued after A. Philip Randolph threatened a March on Washington that was postponed for twenty years.  "You can't bring 100,000 Negroes to Washington.  Somebody might get killed," President Roosevelt protested.  He signed but he didn't put enough teeth into enforcement.  I even knew about Doris Miller, who can stand for the whole Black experience.  But I didn't know his whole story.

Miller (his name was sometimes given as "Dorie" by reporters who thought "Doris" must be a mistake) was a messman on the USS West Virginia, the only rating in the Navy open to Black men.  When it was bombed at Pearl Harbor Miller, with no training, jumped to an anti-aircraft gun and shot down at least one Japanese plane as the ship sank beneath him.  For this he was awarded the Navy Cross, personally bestowed by Admiral Chester Nimitz, and became the most celebrated Black serviceman in America.  Then he went back to being a messman, serving meals and doing laundry for white officers.  Two years later Doris Miller was one of 644 crewmen who died when the USS Liscome Bay was torpedoed at the Battle of Makin.  By then he had been promoted to cook.

The reader closes the book marveling that a country so determined to get in its own way managed to defeat two formidable enemies.  How profligate we were with so much talent, patriotism, skill and courage.  For example, the completely avoidable disaster at Port Chicago ammunition depot near San Francisco, where Black sailors were put to work unloading high explosives from boxcars and loading them onto ships, with no training in the dangerous work.  On the contrary:  white officers laid bets on whose "team" could work the fastest.  The inevitable occurred on July 17, 1944, when an explosion killed 320 people and destroyed two ships and a Coast Guard barge.  The surviving enlisted men went on strike for better conditions and fifty were charged with mutiny.  Their attorney, Thurgood Marshall, was able to save their lives but they spent the rest of the war in prison.  

What about Executive Order 8802, hailed as a corollary to the Emancipation Proclamation?  Shipyards and munitions factories that grudgingly complied would only hire Black men as janitors, and when a few were promoted to higher-skilled, better-paid positions, whites often walked off the job.  Delmont writes, "These 'hate-strikes' cost war-production plants more than 2.5 million worker hours during a tense three-month period from March to May 1943."  One employee in Canton, Ohio, said, "I would rather lose the war than work with those Negroes."  Needless to say, it was worse in Mobile and other Southern cities.  And it was even worse for Black women, many of them college educated, who joined the military or sought jobs in defense plants.  

Half American tells the ugly truth about the "greatest generation" and its mission of liberating the world without first liberating itself.  That struggle would be postponed, hampered by the deliberate misrepresentation of Black fighting ability by the mainstream press, and the lies politicians like James Eastland and John Rankin spoke into the Congressional Record; by the murders of servicemen who dared return home in uniform; by the GI Bill which was left up to the states to administer, cutting most Black veterans out of opportunities for education and home ownership; by the racist attitudes of the overwhelming majority of white Americans.  It still has to be said -- racism is bad for everybody, even in peacetime.  

If that makes little white kids (or more likely their parents) feel sad and uncomfortable, so be it.  Maybe a history book is no good if it doesn't make you angry.  Half American will make you feel rage.  

Sergeant Isaac Woodard, Jr., US Army, attacked and blinded by a sheriff in Batesburg, South Carolina, as he returned home by bus in 1946.