Army & Navy - MORALE: Unhappy Soldier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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