American History Hit - African Americans in WW2

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

The experience of African Americans in World War 2 was, to say the least, a gross double standard. While fascism was confronted in the name of liberty and justice, those same ideals were denied to African Americans, who suffered racism and segregation, at home and on the front line. As Matthew Delmont tells Don, to African Americans, what was happening in Europe and elsewhere was an ugly reminder of the prejudice and bigotry they faced in their own nation.Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's November 7, 1944. The U.S. Army's 761st tank battalion is leading an attack on the German-held town of Morville,

in northeast France. Inside the town, the lead Sherman tank, commanded by Sergeant Roy King, is knocked out by a German Penser Faust, an anti-tank rocket launcher. Two of King's crew are wounded, but are dragged to safety behind the tank. King and his remaining crew take out the soldier with the Penser Fassertain. as well as those manning and nearby anti-tank gun. Not far away, tank commander, Staff Sergeant Rubin Rivers, encounters a German roadblock. Under heavy enemy fire, he leaps out of his tank, attaches a cable to the roadblock,

jumps back in, and pulls the obstacle off the road. The tank column is able to resume its advance and eventually captures the town. King and Rivers would both be killed in action several days later. Rivers posthumously received the Silver Star for his conduct. The 761st, also known as the Black Panthers, was a segregated African-American tank battalion, just part of the one million African-Americans who served in World War II, without whose efforts the Allies would surely not have won the war, but who were forced to serve under conditions unbefitting their determined commitment,

and in many cases, extreme valor. Hello and welcome to the American History hit. I'm Don Wildman. the experience of Black America in World War II was, to say the least, a gross double standard. While the malevolent forces of global fascism and anti-Semitism were being aggressively confronted overseas in defense of liberty, justice, and simple human dignity, on our own shores, those same high ideals were being denied and defeated on a daily basis, as Black Americans suffered the atrocious bias and cruelty of segregation and institutionalized discrimination. As America mobilized to meet its enemies abroad, this hypocrisy at home was raised into stark relief. To black Americans, what was

happening in Europe and elsewhere was an ugly reminder of how deeply ingrained was the prejudice and bigotry of their own nation, of their own communities. While so many strongly endorsed and widely supported the effort to stand up to the madness of Hitler and others, this natural impulse was checked by their own unnatural reality. On the podcast today is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College, a Guggenheim fellow, an expert on the history of civil rights, and the author of a lately list of books and articles,

one of which is brand new and just about to release into the market, entitled Half American, the epic story of African Americans fighting World War II at home and abroad. Matthew Delma, welcome to American History Hit. We're lucky to have you. Thanks for having me. World War II, is credited for ushering in the modern world we live in today. It's the so-called good war,

fought by the greatest generation. So much changed as a result of the Allied victory, not least of which was ultimately the other defeat of fascism and a new world order we generally live with today. But for Black Americans, World War II would be another experience altogether. Set the stage for me, please, at this point in history, before Pearl Harbor. In the decades since World War I, where are things at for Black Americans in America? For Black Americans in the period between, between World War I and World War II, it's really a period of setbacks. For a lot of Black Americans who serve in World War I, they believe that their service in that war is going to be the thing that finally opens the door to more civil rights into actual equality in the United States. And what happens is the opposite.

There are attacks in black communities all across the country in the so-called Red Summer of 1919. And throughout the 1920s and 30s, the force of Jim Crow's segregation in the South tightens. It actually becomes stronger. And so for Black Americans, you see an increase effort to achieve actual racial equality in the least. to World War II, but it's met by a series of very significant setbacks, both in terms of policies and legislation, but also in terms of the day-to-day treatment they receive in communities, not just in the South, but across the country as well. Service in the military was really seen as a way of proving oneself in society.

I mean, this was embraced by black leadership around the World War II era. I'm thinking W.E.B. Du Bois and so forth. The idea of being in the military was a way of proving your patriotism and really lifting the race. Am I right? That's right. Military service has been one of these foundational aspects of what it means to be an American, what it means to fully belong in the citizen of this country. And that's been true for black Americans as well. Black Americans have served in every military conflict the United States has ever been a part of. And in the lead up to World War II, black leaders understand that it's important

for black Americans to be fully part of that military effort. And what frustrates them is that the military is fully segregated. And so that they see this hypocrisy that black Americans want to serve their country. They want to be fully American. Yet when they volunteer, when they're drafted, they're put into segregated units, and that's really an affront to their citizenship. This is the nugget of really what we're talking about today. On one hand, you have a society that is boot on the neck of a population within its own nation. Segregation has been going on since the collapse of reconstruction. This is a institution of racism. On the other hand, you have World War I and now World War II, which is asking for the service, especially coming up into

World War II because this is the first peacetime draft selective service in the history of the nation. Suddenly, the net is thrown out to all the population, but including African Americans, who have to ask themselves, why would I fight for a nation that is keeping me down right here at home? Exactly. There's a really powerful letter that's written by a guy named James Thompson. He was a 26-year-old from Wichita, Kansas. And shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in the September of 1941, he writes to the Pittsburgh Courier, which at that time is the largest, the most influential black newspaper in the country. And what James Thompson asks is,

should I sacrifice my life to live half American? Is the America I know worth defending? And what he's considering both on his own behalf, but for really all black Americans, is what does it mean to get drafted into a military that's racially segregated? What does it mean to be treated as a second-class citizen? And it's that phrasing,

should I sacrifice my life to live half-American? It really stuck with me. It's been sort of in my mind for these seven years I've been working on this book about Black Americans in World War II, and that's why I took half American as the title for the work. You opened the book up even with an anecdote about yourself. You went to a military school yourself and experienced some of this even in the modern day. Exactly.

So, for high school, I went to a military academy where we had a junior RRTC program. So the rhythm of the school was fully part of the sort of the military training. We had formation every morning where all 450 cadets gathered in our military uniforms, said the Pledge of Allegiance, and then marched out in unison back to our classrooms for the rest of the day. We were taught by retired Army instructors. I was one of a handful of black students at that school was a great education, tremendous experience. But the exposure I had at that stage to both the kind of early parts of military culture at the kind of junior level, but also military history. The history of World War II was woven throughout the history of our school.

We celebrated one of the alums from the school who earned the middle of honor for his courageous pilotry at the Battle of Midway. But there's hardly any exposure to the stories of black Americans who served in World War II. And once they became a professional historian, I was reflecting on all these experiences and really kind of wanted to know more deeply. What did the war look like from the black perspective? Black Americans at the time, let's say in the 30s, there's the story of Langston Hughes becoming a reporter in the Spanish Civil War. I never even knew that he did this. It's fascinating. Black America was very aware of what was happening in Europe, the rise of fascism, as indicative of what was happening even within this nation.

they were seeing, is it fair to say, a worse form or some other variation on what was going on in America in Europe? Exactly. They saw a variation of Jimco Sargation taking place in Nazi Germany. And it's important for listeners to understand that for black Americans, World War II didn't start with Pearl Harbor. It started many years earlier once the rise of fascism occurred in Europe. If you looked at a black newspaper from 1933, 1934, 1935, there was extensive coverage of the rise of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany and the really dire threat. that fascism posed not just to Europe and not just to Jews in Europe, but really to the world. Black Americans were able to identify that earlier than almost anyone else because they saw that Hitler was explicitly drawing on U.S. racial policies in the Jim Crow South. They made it really explicit parallels between the ways that Jewish people were being segregated on train cars, the way that their property is being confiscated, the way that their lives were being taken. They saw how much that echoed what was happening to black Americans at the Jim Crow South,

and they raised alarms about it. I don't know that too many Americans these days are away. of that relationship. The fact is, in Mind Kampf, Adolf Hitler cites America as an example of what German Nazism is trying to accomplish. There were Americans in Germany in the 20s and 30s talking to the Nazis about their system of segregation and how this nation, America, was an example for the world as to how races would be ordered. It's so uncomfortable to realize that. Within several generations, the Nazis were us, or as far as they considered themselves, akin to what was going on with us. That's what Black Americans, the thinkers for sure, the newspaper editors are seeing

happen in Europe and warning their own, we need to take action. Exactly. I think it's sometimes easy to look back at the history of the United States and say, yes, racism existed, but when you actually look in detail of what that meant, the Jim Cross South was a racial apartheid system. And that was explicit. That's what the segregation of senators and politicians who ran the South, they explicitly talked about being white supremacist, that they believe that there was a racial hierarchy and that whites were the best race and that African Americans were inferior if they were even fully human. Outside of the South, other forms of racial discrimination were true in places like New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. This was the day-to-day reality for African-Americans in 1930s and then the

lead up to World War II and during World War II. And black leaders and average black citizens were clear about this. They understood what they were actually living through in the United States, and that's what made them so passionate about fighting fascism abroad. And for me, sort of going back into the archives and reading these stories, it's inspiring to understand that black Americans cared about what was happening in Europe. They cared when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935 because Ethiopia was the only independent African nation at the time, and they understood that Mussolini was a terrible dictator. They cared about the Spanish Civil War, and General Franco's fascist forces, siege in a coup against the democratically elected.

Republican government of Spain. More than 80, black Americans volunteered to fight in that Spanish Civil War, and Wings and Hughes went over to be a war correspondent to report on those black Americans. All that's happening years before Pearl Harbor, because black Americans really understand that this is a dire global threat. I noticed that you wrote a book about black newspapers in America in that era. I mean, this is a very vibrant arena of journalism, some of the best in the country was going on then. What I love about the black press is it was a fighting press.

They made no bones about the fact that they were fighting for black people, fighting for equal rights. There was no false claims of objectivity or kind of playing both sides. And when you go back and look at those editorials and just the headlines, they called racism by its name. They didn't tap dance around it and use euphemisms. When they saw white supremacy happening, when they saw black Americans being threatened, being lynched, they were explicit about that. And they fought to really defend black Americans before, during and after the war. As in the First World War, many, many Black Americans wanted to serve the cause. Some saw, as we talked about, military service as a means to improve their status in American society,

But the military was just as bad as so much of American society was at the time. It's incredible to imagine. But until 1948, after World War II ends, the United States military, every branch was fully segregated. How did a system like this even work? So at the start of World War II, the Army is completely segregated. And largely, they're only allowing Black Americans to serve and supply in logistical roles. In the Navy, Black Americans are only allowed to serve as mess attendants, where they essentially wait as servants for white officers on ships and submarines.

And the Marine Corps, the start of the war, doesn't know how black Americans serve at all. They just refuse their service. What really makes no sense about that system is that it was logistically complicated and took more effort to segregate the military. They had to do everything in duplicate. They had to create separate living facilities, separate eating facilities, separate recreation facilities. And then once they deployed these troops, they had to make sure everything was separated.

And when we say segregated, they segregated down to the blood that was given by volunteers. And there's no scientific basis for. that. It's just, it's only racism that made them take those steps. And so one of the things that's kind of crazy making as an historian is that you look back at this and you recognize that at a time when you would think that the United States was doing everything they could doing the war effort, they were wasting an inordinate amount of time and resources maintaining racial surrogation. The only reason to do that was to appease white racial prejudice. There's no tactical or strategic reason to have a surrogated military. And in fact, it's just the opposite. It was

justically laborous and they had to do everything in duplicate. What it meant, though, for black Americans who were drafted or who volunteered was that their experience of Army life was very much like their experience of Jim Crow America. At a time when they were volunteering their lives, in some cases, risking and giving their lives, they were still treated as second-class citizens. The term that they kept using was were being treated as slaves in this military. And yet they were drafted just like white Americans. Same way? Same numbers? No. Early in the war, the numbers aren't quite the same, in part because they don't yet have enough black units to be able to send black Americans to. One of the most upsetting details is to read when I

doing this research was, immediately after Pearl Harbor, there are hundreds of black Americans who want to volunteer. They go to their local recruiting branches, but dozens of them are turned away because they don't yet have enough black units to be able to staff them. And they're just left dumbfounded. They ask, what does it mean to be a black American if I can't defend my country? And the only reason they turned away is because of race. By 1942, 1933, the Army has now created enough training facilities and enough units to accommodate black Americans. And by that point, you do then start to see them being drafted at numbers that are equivalent to their percentage of the population. This situation is an opportunity. A door is open for black leadership

to pressure FDR in terms of the draft. Explain that to me. 1940 we're in, right? Yeah. Yeah, so 1940 and then going to 1941, black leaders really seize on a couple things as things that they want to press the White House on. One is the integration of the military because they want to make sure that black Americans are fully part of that war effort, and part because they understand that military service is going to be the defining aspect of who counts as an American after the war, but also because military service brings with it a host of benefits. There's job training and economic benefits that come out of military service, and they want to make sure black Americans get part of that.

The other piece of it is that they recognize that America is going to be this arsenal of democracy, as Roosevelt puts it, and that means a lot of jobs. And so they want to make sure that black Americans have access to those war jobs and defense industries. The key person who emerges as a leader here, as a guy named A. Philip Randolph, who was the union leader for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Carporters, and one of the most powerful black men of the time. He threatens to lead a march on Washington in 1941, several of 1941, to really dramatize this dire condition that black Americans are facing and really call on the White House to finally implement integration and these non-discrimination provisions.

It's essentially political brinksmanship. Historians still debate whether Randolph could ever actually have pulled off the march. He always said he could have. But it does its job. It forces Roselette to the negotiating table and forces him to pass an executive order that does put in non-discrimination provisions for the defense industries, although it doesn't yet do anything to integrate the military. This march, the march on Washington was a precursor to what comes after. I mean, we're used to this sort of thing today, but this was unprecedented at the time. This was really scaring FDR down his boots. It terrified FDR and other white politicians.

The idea that 50,000 black Americans would march in unison in Washington, D.C., was about the scariest thing that white politicians could imagine, both because they understood that it was going to be a set of images that would resonate powerfully in the United States. United States, but also internationally, it would really kind of shame the United States, but also made them worry that if black Americans could pull this off, what else was possible in terms of demonstrating their political power? And that's why it was so compelling for Randolph and the others who organized it. They thought, you know, if we can do this, even if we can threaten to do this, it demonstrates our political power. And that's the only way we're going to see anything

actually change. How much do you think FDR was aware of the hypocrisy of the situation of the day? I mean, he has racists in his own administration. That's always a tricky question to be able to answer. he's walking a real political tightrope just based on the composition of the Democratic Party. He certainly understands that black voters are going to play an increasingly important role in the future of the Democratic Party. That in several of these swing states, black voters potentially have the ability to swing the election between Democrats and Republicans. And it's important to remember at that time period that black voters were not yet a defined voting block for Democrats. They were still largely the party of Lincoln. And so it wasn't a guarantee that he was going to be able to secure those black votes in future generations.

At the same time, the other key voting block in his party is the white Jim Crow South. The entirety of Southern politicians are essentially Democrats. And so he's trying to appease two very, very different positions. One, black Americans who are demanding civil rights and equal rights now, and a set of white politicians and white citizens in the South who want to maintain Jim Crow's surrogation for decades and decades to come. We're reading through his correspondence and some of his diaries and memos, it's clear he understands at a high level this is a population. but it takes him a while, and I don't know that he ever fully feels it in the way that someone who's actually experienced actual racial discrimination would be able to. We talk about wars in terms of fronts, and America is gearing up to possibly fight on several

fronts. At least that's FDR's view. For Black American leadership, this gigantic military mobilization is a one-time chance, you know, once a generation anyway, chance to leverage influence to improve working opportunities. Tell me more about A. Philip Randolph, this whole idea of this brinkmanship that you're in the middle of. In many ways, this is the beginning of what becomes the civil rights movement in America that we more famously know as Martin Luther King's movement. So it's important about what AFO Brandoff starts to launch is

he's building already from a base of power. He's the leader of the largest black union in the country, these Brotherhood of Sleeping Carporters. These are men who work on trains who go all across the country. That gives him a basis of support that gives him a foundation from which to argue from. But it also means that he has touch points all across the country. And I think that's key for organizing

that when he announces this launch for the March on Washington, it's not just one isolated individual or not just one person speaking from New York City, but he's able to tap into a network that extends to Chicago, extends to Oakland, to Los Angeles, to Dallas, to Houston. And that's what makes this movement powerful. He's able to say that there's a nationwide movement of black Americans who are demanding their rights now.

The other thing that was important about his model was that he was radical for his time, that he wasn't interested just in negotiation or in moderation or in taking things slow, that the threats he was putting forward to the White House were that if we don't see some significant changes, we're going to do these things by a certain date or else. That way of engaging with political power was bold,

and it really set the stage for the kind of protests that happened after the war. You can really see the meeting with FDR, and those folks that are in that room, as a precursor to Martin Luther King, Jr., with LBJ, with Lyndon Bain Johnson in the 60s. I mean, it's sort of the same, but this is the beginning of it.

This is a first time kind of moment when political action is happening on that level for black leadership. After Pearl Harbor is attacked and the war is finally declared, black Americans everywhere have to consider these roles. Where do they fit into the system that still considers them second class? A movement takes hold in black communities and in the newspapers. It's called the double V campaign. Can you explain that? So the Pittsburgh Courier, the largest and most influential black newspaper, launches the double victory campaign. And what they're calling for is victory over fascism abroad and victory over.

of racism at home. And what's powerful about that is that it is really asking for the United States to achieve not only a military victory, not only to defeat Japan, Nazi Germany, and the Axis forces, but also, and I think even more importantly, to Black Americans, to actually end white supremacy and racial discrimination at home. That was powerful because it spoke to what Black Americans, what average Black Americans wanted to achieve. They absolutely wanted to win the military aspects of the war. They understood what a dire threat Nazi Germany posed, and they wanted to defeat Adolf Hitler. But they understood that that wasn't enough, that that wasn't going to be in the battle, that they needed to be able to come home and actually end Jim Coast segregation and racial discrimination in the United States. I think what's powerful that looking back at that historically is that when you start to think about it, it becomes clear that for a lot of white Americans, they were really only interested in a single victory, that all the public polling of the day and all the recollections of white citizens and veterans, almost to a person talk about wanting to go back to the way things were before the war, that they wanted to go back to this sort of more comfortable America that they knew.

That's the exact opposite of what black Americans wanted. Going back to the way things were, for black Americans, meant that they're going to go back to a second-class status. And so the double victory campaign is both powerful as a rallying cry during the war, but also looking back now historically, it really gives us a clear sense that different Americans were not in agreement about what the war was about, that black Americans had a much bolder and broader vision of what this war was actually going to be. They really did want to see freedom and democracy, not just in Europe, but in the United States as well. They're playing quite a chess game and a brilliant one. is an opportunity to change things for real, and it really does happen.

I'll be back with more from Matthew Delmont in just a moment. During the war, let's illustrate the absurdity of what's happening, the cruelty of what's happening. I mean, a black soldier in America to serve in the United States military, first step, if they get past the draft board, they then are headed to boot camp, and those boot camps are generally in the American South. What was that like for these soldiers? The stories black soldiers tell about going to these army camps in the South, particularly

those who were coming from places in the north, from New York, Chicago, other cities in the Midwest, in the West, is they would get on trains. When they got to the demarcation point in the south, Washington, D.C., or other cities, then transferred to the segregated part of the train, to the Jim Crow section of the train. When they would arrive in these southern towns, they described having to pull down the shades on the train to make sure that white towns, people wouldn't throw rocks at the train because they were so upset about black troops coming to these military bases. When they got to the bases, they were directed to the black-only section of the base, were white officers and other Muslim men, we call them racial appetites almost daily.

And again, the dynamic they described was that the white officers understood themselves overseers and treated the black soldiers as though they were slaves. And then when black soldiers had the sort of 24 or 48-hour passes for recreation to be able to go into these cities, these were Jim Crow bases in Jim Crow towns. And so they would go into these tiny southern towns and be cordoned off into a one-block area where they could go to a bar or a restaurant. If they went anywhere outside of that area, they were immediately harassed by white police and white sheriffs. And so the stories that get told by black soldiers that era and get reported back

to the black press and the NWACP are that black soldiers are literally fearing for their lives while they're still in the United States. They want to deploy because they think they're going to be safer in the Pacific or in Europe than in Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama at these military bases. And that's just deeply upsetting to think about that for these black soldiers who either been drafted or volunteered to serve their country feared for their own safety from their countrymen, not yet even fighting Nazis or fighting the Japanese. They feared for their own safety from attacks by white countrymen. And these are kids. I mean, these are young men, teenagers, if early 20s. And suddenly they're being sent to this place that are many of them, their parents may have been part of the great migration north. We've got to get out of this place. And suddenly they're literally being sent back into the belly of the beast. The stories they've been told of these horror stories of early times and generations past. But here they go again. Yeah, they're experiencing a form of surrogation and racism they just haven't seen before. But obviously racism,

exist outside the South. These young black men are familiar with forms of racism. But the intensity, the tenor of racism that they experienced in the Jim Crow South on these army bases was unlike anything that they'd seen. And it was deeply upsetting for them. One of the great figures who comes out of this book, and we'll talk about the war in just a moment and the service that has done abroad. But so much of this story, interestingly, happens domestically because the effect of all of this tension, of this opportunity in time, is that these other figures emerge. And I'm thinking of Thurgood Marshall comes along for anyone who doesn't know, future Supreme Court Justice of America, a pivotal individual in the 20th century. He begins his career defending those

soldiers on those bases, taking those cases to court. Exactly. So Thurgood Marshall is the head of the legal division for the NWACP during the war, and he's traveling all across the country, crisscrossing the country, investigating these cases of violence against black soldiers. At the time, the military is not really doing anything yet to consider what it means to send all these black soldiers to these gym pro bases, gym pro towns that really want nothing to do with them. And so it becomes the responsibility of Thurgood Marshall and the NWACP to ensure the safety of black soldiers. And the Marshall does an extraordinary important job of bringing these injustices to white and really fighting against military officials and the White House to finally do something

to address the violence at Black Tristan encountering. How does that go for him? He's very, very good. Thurgood Marshall is such a sort of dynamic and compelling figure. It's successful because he's, He's dogged and persistent, so traveling through all these sort of small southern towns and trying to get to the bottom of what's going on. But then also he has the ability to just to speak to so many different audiences. And so he's as comfortable talking to these poor rural communities in the Black South as he is talking to the people in power in Washington, D.C. And so he's successful because he's able to make sure that these stories, that these cases are front and center for military planners and for politicians. I can't wait to do a show on Third Road, Marshall. He cuts quite a

figure in a courtroom. The man is a giant in many ways, physically as well. And with an enormous booming voice, you describe people knowing that he's coming to town. It's okay, thorough goods coming to take care of this. He's quite a legend in those days, building up to becoming even more legendary in American history. Other legends are born out of this as well, the Tuskegee Airmen. So you have a segregated military, and slowly but surely, even within the system, the barriers are falling. Tell me how the famous Tuskegee Airmen, that whole movement is born. So one of the figures I feature in the book is a guy named Benjamin O. Davis Jr. He graduates from West Point in 1936, and at the time, he's only the fourth black American to ever graduate from West Point.

He's the first in the 20th century. When he graduates in 1936, the Army has no idea what to do with him, because Davis wants to be a pilot. At the time, the Army Air Corps is not allowing any Black Americans to be pilots. And so they end up sending him to be a teacher at a black school in the South. By 1941, 1942, through a series of protest, by the Black Press and by Black activists. Finally, the Army Air Corps is willing to establish a pilot program, a test program for Black pilots in Tuskegee, Alabama.

And Benjamin O'Davis is part of the first cohort of five pilots who get trained at Tuskegee. What's interesting about that is that it really takes nearly two years for them to go through training and to build up a large enough group of pilots before they can finally deploy, so that they first have to break the barriers to get the training facility established.

then they have to prove themselves through endless and endless training exercises in Alabama, whereas white pilots are being deployed after six or eight weeks of training, some of these Fiskegee pilots had trained for more than a year before they were finally deployed to the Mediterranean. Once they're deployed, then they also have to navigate some of their white commanders who really still don't think black pilots should be part of the military. And so after some of their first combat missions in the Mediterranean, some other white commanders intentionally try to undercut them. They write after action reports that suggest that the Skiyerman were actually

not good pilots, that they didn't do a good job in combat and try to get them assigned back to shore patrol, essentially. This blows up as a media issue. We have sort of time and newsweek reporting on what these white officers are saying, and then the black press trying to defend the Tuskegee Airmen. And it's only after subsequent combat exploits and a number of Tuskegee pilots shooting down Nazi pilots that finally, the combat bravery and successes of the Tuskegee pilots finally come to fruition and people finally start to recognize what they've done. What's amazing about seeing that story in its entirety is that it's easy to say that Tuskegee airmen broke barriers and they were immediately successful. But when you actually kind of follow it month by month, day by day, it was harrowing for them.

The experience, like for other black troops of being on this base in Tuskegee, Benjamin O. Davis and others describe it as living in hell being in Tuskegee. Because it was, again, a Jim Crow base in Jim Crow town. The other ground personnel who were there, there were hundreds of black nurses and there were meteorologists and ground mechanics. they experienced the same thing. They were doing everything they could try to use their skills to help prepare these pilots for the war effort while still encountering racism in town. There was one black nurse who was beaten by a police officer when she went shopping in town in Alabama. And this was just the day-to-day reality for black Americans at that base in Tuskegee. We're making this conversation a very male-oriented conversation, but this whole struggle

happens also for women, for black women in America. On two particular fronts, I'm talking about the black, in quotation marks, black rosy the riveters, and also the women air core. Talk to me, was that the same phenomenon for black women as happened for white American women in terms of the standard Rosie of the River archetype? There were a number of similarities. So there were more than a million black Americans who participated in defense industry jobs, and more than 600,000 of them were black women. The similar parts for what was experienced by white women was that this opened up job opportunities that just weren't possible before the war. The difference, though, for black women is that before the war, their job possibilities were even more restricted.

That by and large, black women were restricted to domestic work, large in in white people's homes prior to the war. And the story that a lot of black women who became these black rosy riveters who took on defensive industry jobs was that the war was really what it took to get them out of white people's kitchens. And so for them, the jumps they were able to make during the war in terms of opportunities were even more vast than what was available to white women. Eventually, how many black Americans take part in the war? Is there a go-to number here? Yeah, more than a million in military service and then more than a million in the defense industry jobs. That level of participation plants the seeds for so much that happens in the next generation.

All of what they're talking about in terms of military service and even domestic factory jobs and so forth, it's a ramp up in American society for black Americans that couldn't have happened without this kind of global military effort, supercharged by World War II. Eventually, you have black Americans, soldiers, and so forth, landing on the shores of Normandy, certainly all the way through Italy, the Tuskegee Airmen are fighting out. The war could not have been won without Black American troops, making it possible. That's an argument that I didn't know I was going to be making when I started this book. I was aware of the double victory campaign. I knew about the Tuskegee Airmen, but the importance of the supply and logistical roles that Black Americans played in the war was not something I appreciate the depth of when I started this research.

Taking D-Day as an example, there were 1,700 Black Americans who were part of the D-Dade. Day invasion. They played an important role in terms of transporting supplies to the beaches, and they manned a series of barrage balloons that helped to make sure that Nazi planes couldn't stray flow over the beach. But in those weeks and months after D. Day, that D. Day, of course, just stood for Day of the invasion. There were still D. Day plus one, D. Day plus two, and weeks and months thereafter, it was in that period, those weeks and months after DDA that Black Americans really helped to win the war, because they were the backbone. They were the foundation of America and the Allies' spy efforts. It was black troops across the channel who were still voting,

ships and getting them across the channel. And it was black troops who were unloading those ships and putting the goods on trucks. There was a fleet of black truck drivers called the Red Ball Express who transported supplies across Europe to keep up with General Patton and other forces as they were pushing into Nazi Germany. Without those truck drivers, without that supply effort, it really was impossible for the allies to stay supplied. These truck drivers, they transported 400,000 tons of ammunition, gasoline and food and other supplies to troops. And that when you need to, take a step back and look at it. World War II wasn't just a battle of strategy and will. It was really a battle of supply, and that almost all of those goods passed through the hands of at least one

black American. The reality is the allies couldn't have moved, shot, or eaten without the role of the black Americans played in supply and just clever. In Europe and in the Pacific, I mean, we're really focusing here on the Europe side of thing, but this happened on both fronts for sure. We haven't even You talked about Doris Miller, the famous man in Pearl Harbor who takes the machine gun shooting for the first time in his life. It's an inspiring story. It is bittersweet, of course, because so much of the bravery and courage demonstrated was happening in patriotic support of a nation still mired in its own racism, which is now going to go on for decades afterwards. You know, it's not like because you desegregated the military in 1948, everything's peachy, you know, keen after that. No.

In fact, what comes after that is the civil rights struggle that we know. from the 50s and 60s, which is still continuing today. There is a tremendous amnesia around all of this, obviously, which is what your book targets so effectively. The fundamental role of African Americans played in the United States military. The media has really whitewashed this story. We know the big movies, great movies, private Ryan, et cetera, et cetera. But rarely do you see the stories of black Americans the way it really happened.

That aspect of how the story is told starts to happen immediately after the war. And the war correspondents who go over flag newspapers recognize it happening. So in 1945, as the war is ending, as the United States and the Allies achieve victory over Japan and Germany, these black war corresponds are writing talking about the really important and vital roles that black Americans played, but also how they're worried about how black Americans are going to be written out of the story. Immediately after the war, Wife publishes this massive pictorial history of the war. Colliers, another major magazine, published a similar one. There are more than a thousand pictures in those two books.

only a single image of Black Americans. That ends up setting the stage for the dozens and dozens of films and documentaries that take place in the decades after the war, going up to and past saving Private Ryan. And in part, it's about the perspective from which we choose to tell the history of World War II, that if you focus only on frontline combat troops, that by and large, black Americans weren't enabled to participate in combat. We have a number of examples of units who participated very bravely in combat, but by and large, it was African-Americans playing supply and logistical roles. But if you only focus on the troops who

storm the beaches, you're going to tell a predominantly white story of the war. But if you actually tell the story of how the war was won, how the Allies fought and won in global war, you have to take a broader, larger perspective that takes the important supply routes and supply rules into consideration. And if you take that perspective, then it becomes crystal clear that African-Americans played a vital role in helping win the military aspect of war. And I think if you frame it in it, in terms of American history more broadly, the military aspect was only part of much larger struggle. I think that's why the double victory campaign is so important for us to think about, is that for World War II to have been successful, black Americans knew that it couldn't just be

the military battlefields, that it had to actually be freedom of democracy at home as well. I think that's the aspect of that story that is really still being fought today, that black Americans wanted an end racial discrimination, they wanted actual racial equality, and they continued to fight for it in the years after the war, and I think we still see activists fighting for it in the streets today. Did they change the American society as a result? Because so much follows from that. I absolutely think black Americans who served in the war and who fought on the home front in defense industries and as civil rights activists absolutely changed America. In part because they articulated a vision for what America could be that was so bold and so ahead of its time that in many ways

our country is still trying to catch up to it. That generation of black veterans went from fighting the Nazis and came home and kept fighting for civil rights at home. The way they described it was They went from the European Theater Operations to the Southern Theater operations. And I think that belief in what America can be, the belief in sort of these core American values that we want to be true for our country, that was a profound, profound vision that I think one has to find inspiring. Thank you, Matthew Delmont, for joining me today. The book is Half American, the epic story of African Americans fighting World War II

at home and abroad order it today at your local bookstore. My God, it's a good book. Thank you very much, Matthew. Thanks so much, John. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time.

This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.