Book Review - Half American - New York Times

[johnkarls]

.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/16/book ... lmont.html


The Greatest Generation - In “Half American,” Matthew F. Delmont tells the stories of the Black Americans who helped win the war abroad while battling racism at home.

Review by Cate Lineberry - the author of “Be Free or Die: The Amazing Story of Robert Smalls’ Escape From Slavery to Union Hero” and “The Secret Rescue: An Untold Story of American Nurses and Medics Behind Nazi Lines.”

Published Oct. 16, 2022Updated Dec. 29, 2022


In January of 1942, James G. Thompson, a 26-year-old Black man from Wichita, Kansas, wrote a letter to the editor of The Pittsburgh Courier, the nation’s largest Black newspaper, asking the questions that were on the minds of many men preparing for possible duty in a segregated military.

“Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?” he asked. “Will things be better for the next generation in the peace to follow? Would it be demanding too much to demand full citizenship rights in exchange for the sacrificing of my life? Is the kind of America I know worth defending?”

Playing off the “V for victory” slogan adopted by the Allies, Thompson asked Black Americans to embrace the idea of a “double victory”— to fight not just against fascism abroad but also racism at home. His letter elicited such a strong reaction from readers that The Courier launched a “Double V” campaign to help galvanize the struggle for equality. “Double V” became a rallying cry for Black Americans, even as some whites — including FBI director J. Edgar Hoover — declared it radical and seditious, a gift to enemy propagandists.

Thompson’s story opens “Half American,” Dartmouth professor Matthew F. Delmont’s poignant and unflinching account of how Black Americans helped the country defend its freedom even while regularly experiencing widespread racism, segregation, and violence at the hands of their fellow citizens. As he succinctly puts it, “there is no history of World War II without Black Americans.” In interweaving numerous meticulously researched narratives — the stories of soldiers and nurses, journalists and activists — Delmont illustrates the epic battle for racial equality on all fronts, foreign and domestic, by more than one million people. At the same time, he highlights Black Americans’ essential contribution to winning the literal war — a far more decisive victory than that at home.

“Years of movies and books focusing on D-Day and platoons in frontline combat have presented a misleading version of how the war was won,” writes Delmont. “The hypocrisy Black men and women faced in the service of their country was palpable … Even America’s allies questioned how a nation that upheld racial apartheid at home could claim to fight for a free world abroad.” Delmont relates the experiences of the men who served in combat, including the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, the 761st “Black Panther” Tank Battalion, the 92nd Infantry Division, the “Harlem Hellfighters,” and the Montford Point Marines — not only their military accomplishments, but their efforts to even be granted the privilege of fighting and dying. Though these names will be familiar to some, the grace with which Delmont weaves them into a broader narrative of contemporary Black experience sheds a harsh light on the pervasive — and often unsuccessful — struggle for fair treatment at every level of the American military.

Less well-known, but equally crucial to the war’s success, are the stories of the hundreds of thousands of Black men who served in critical support jobs. The “Black troops were engineers, quartermasters, construction, and supply troops who together formed the backbone of the U.S. military’s logistical forces,” says Delmont. The logistical forces proved essential to the war effort. “Beyond a battle of strategy and will, World War II was a battle of supply.”

These positions — unglamorous in a public mind inundated with images of Technicolor heroism — were not only essential to Allied victory, but often involved serious risk. Some 1,700 Black troops landed at Normandy on D-Day as part of the invasion that led to the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi Germany. And, as the author observes, “that these troops were not classified as combat soldiers made no difference to enemy machine gunners or snipers.”

Following the Normandy landing, thousands of additional Black troops arrived to remove mines, repair railroad tracks, and “do the backbreaking and emotionally devastating work” of burying the bodies of the 23,000 Americans who had died during the invasion. When General George Patton’s 3rd Army began movements into France, Black truck drivers delivered the supplies that allowed forces to advance. Black troops served in similarly critical and dangerous logistical roles at Iwo Jima and the Battle of the Bulge.

Those troops who served Stateside faced their own dangers. In July 1944, 320 people, mostly Black sailors, were killed in an explosion while loading an ammunition ship in Northern California. Before the Port Chicago accident, sailors had frequently complained to superiors about their lack of training — but were ignored. Following the explosion, fifty of the survivors went on strike, refusing to load munitions until they had received further instruction. They were found guilty of mutiny and spent the rest of the war in prison.

At Tuskegee Army Airfield, Black nurses cared for the pilots and ground crew while other women guided air traffic and repaired planes. “Like their male counterparts,” Delmont tells us, “Black women battled the army’s official policies of segregation, racism from white officers, and discriminatory practices that assigned them to the lowest and dirtiest jobs.” Black nurses served in Australia, Africa, and England while an all-Black Women’s Army Corps postal battalion stationed in England sorted and routed millions of letters to American troops.

“Half American” also pays tribute to those who fought racism on the home front. Thurgood Marshall, at that time the chief lawyer for the NAACP, crossed the country investigating abuse and violence toward Black soldiers, and defended the sailors of the Port Chicago disaster. A. Philip Randolph lobbied FDR and Harry Truman and organized marches on Washington, calling for integration in war industries. Ella Baker, a grass roots activist, recruited and trained hundreds of others in the domestic fight for civil rights.

These efforts — and the role of soldiers who weren’t white — were often ignored by mainstream papers, but the Black press covered them widely. Black journalists like Trezzvant Anderson, Ollie Stewart and the poet Langston Hughes (some of whom risked their lives to witness events firsthand) were critical to capturing the full picture of the war. Their coverage offered proof against the cruel stereotype that Black Americans were cowardly and disloyal; later these same writers publicized the onslaught of hostility and violence faced by these same soldiers, returning to a segregated country.

“Every day brought new evidence that [Black Americans] were fighting for a country that did not regard them as fully human,” says Delmont writes. And by understanding Black Americans’ experiences during a war so enshrined in the American psyche and mythology, we not only honor their efforts, but can perhaps “better understand and navigate the present and the future.”

The writer James Baldwin turned 19 on the night of a 1943 Harlem riot largely fired by the abuse of Black soldiers at the hands of the military. “The treatment accorded the Negro during the Second World War,” Baldwin would write later, marked a turning point in Black attitudes toward America. “To put it briefly, and somewhat too simply, a certain hope died, a certain respect for white Americans faded.” Thompson’s question remained unanswered.