Those Who Have Borne the Battle (18 page)

When black entertainer Lena Horne performed at a base in Arkansas, German prisoners of war attended, but African American servicemen were not permitted at the performance. On the other hand, racism in the
armed forces was institutional as much as regional. One black Mississippian who was drafted in 1942 and served in the United States and overseas stated that he “really didn't know what segregation was like” prior to serving in the army.
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Military racism was further rationalized by the results of the racist education system that most black Americans experienced. Black inductees did not generally score as well as whites on the army General Classification Test. This affirmed racist stereotypes, even though it surely reflected the inadequacies of the segregated education system at home.

Race was the dominant factor in the assignment of black soldiers. Secretary Stimson argued that black units needed white officers for leadership. General George Marshall thought their low intelligence restricted their value to the army. Similarly, General Patton concluded that they “could not think fast enough for armored warfare.”
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News releases on the war and productions of the federal Office of Wartime Information typically excluded any pictures of black troops.

Despite these stereotypes, black troops did ultimately participate in combat operations. By the fall of 1944 General Patton changed his views and requested that the 761st Tank Battalion, the first black armored unit, join his command. He spoke to the 761st in early November: “Men, you're the first Negro tankers to ever fight in the American Army. I would never have asked for you if you weren't good. I have nothing but the best in my Army. I don't care what color you are, so long as you go up there and kill those Kraut sonsabitches.”
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They did engage the enemy, serving in action for 183 days, in four major campaigns, including the Battle of the Bulge, where they halted a crucial German resupply effort. The 761st suffered 50 percent casualties and won a number of individual and unit honors, including one man, Reuben Rivers, whose Silver Star was later upgraded to a Medal of Honor.

 

 

It was ironic that black units had to press a reluctant command for combat duty while the army struggled to fill its infantry units. Early in the war, those assigned to the infantry had lower scores on the intelligence tests. They also tended to be shorter and weigh less than those who were
sent to the army air forces or to Service Forces. The Army Research Branch described the infantry as “the dumping ground for men who could pass physical standards but who need not satisfy any other test.” Infantrymen acknowledged this, and 74 percent of them agreed with this survey statement: “The Infantry gets more than its share of men who aren't good for anything else.”
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Despite this image, those who served in the infantry took pride in their role and from their sacrifices.

The need for strong combat units ended these practices. Beginning in 1943 General Marshall ordered that prime recruits were to be directed into infantry units. Of course, most of the men and all of the women who served were not in combat units but rather in service ranks. By some government estimates, of the 3 million soldiers who came into western Europe in 1944 and 1945, only one-quarter of them were in units engaged in fighting. Their logistical and support needs were complicated and demanding. And the army sought to provide the American soldiers with “something corresponding to the American standard of living,” in the words of one of the army's own studies.
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The American Army organizationally had two service personnel for every combat soldier—and effectively the ratio was often much greater than that. The German Wehrmacht, in contrast, had two combat soldiers for every soldier in service ranks. Every American soldier who landed in Europe required forty-five pounds per day of supplies, a quarter of which was petroleum products. The British soldiers had less than half of this, and the Germans often about one-tenth the US amount. “THE BEST-DRESSED, BEST-FED, BEST-EQUIPPED army in the world” was a common boast. Americans were proud that their soldiers served with support both personally and militarily at a level their opponents could not have.
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The term
GI
, for “government issue,” was used in the early 1940s to describe government-issued equipment or supplies. When first used to describe soldiers, it was pejorative, but it soon came to be adopted by the men themselves as a self-description. In many ways it reflected the absence of any sense of self-importance for these men. One scholar summarized it this way, “The naïve idealism, the noisy confidence of 1917 did not reappear, nor did the impetuosity that led the doughboys to dash forward into their own artillery barrage or to assault machine-gun nests
frontally.” These GIs had little interest in discussing a “cause” for which they were fighting, and most observers noted that Hollywood films with posturing heroes generally elicited laughter from GI audiences.
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William Manchester was recuperating in a hospital when John Wayne visited the troops there. Manchester recalled that the troops booed the movie star. “This man was a symbol of the fake machismo we had come to hate, and we weren't going to listen to him.”
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Early in the war the army was concerned when surveys indicated that men did not want to go overseas and into combat. Ernie Pyle visited one infantry company and reported, “A lot of people have morale confused with the desire to fight. I don't know of one soldier out of ten thousand who wants to fight. They certainly didn't in that company. The old-timers were sick to death of battle and the new replacements were scared to death of it. And yet the company went into battle, and it was a proud company.”
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Watching a group of infantrymen walk up a hill, he observed, “In their eyes . . . was no hatred, no excitement, no despair, no tonic of their victory—there was just the simple expression of being there as if they had been there doing that forever, and nothing else.”
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One survey of combat veterans in 1944 asked them what kept them going in combat. The most common answer, 39 percent, was “getting the task done.” Some 10 percent talked of getting home. And their regard for their “buddies” motivated 14 percent. A sense of duty and their own self-respect were marked by 9 percent, and only 5 percent talked of “idealistic” reasons. Simply getting home dominated.
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This practical approach to the war was widely recognized. In May 1943
Life
editorialized that “when you look over the U.S. as it is today it's hard to find the real purpose” for the war. And in January 1944 the magazine reported that “the bewilderment of the boys in the armed forces concerning the meaning of the war is noted by almost everyone who goes out to the front.”
Fortune
also noted that “the American does not know why we are at war and has not sought to know.” An army unit asked its soldiers to write an essay on why they were fighting. One submitted a six-word statement: “Why I'm Fighting. I was drafted.”
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The most popular song of the war was not a stirring military tune but Irving Berlin's sentimental “White Christmas.” “Don't Sit Under the
Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me” was also beloved. One critic observed that Glenn Miller's orchestra was “the greatest gift from home.” His music struck an emotional chord with many soldiers. A GI reported of a Miller memorial concert that the music played was “tied up with individual memories, girls, hopes, schools. It's a tangible tie to what we are fighting to get back to.”
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Wars are not fought and won by humming sentimental songs—or martial music, for that matter. The American troops, young and inexperienced in the early campaigns, led by young and inexperienced field officers and noncommissioned officers, learned well the horrible lessons of combat. As
Army Field Manual 100-5
put it, “Man is the fundamental instrument in war; other instruments may change but he remains relatively constant. . . . In spite of the advances in technology, the worth of the individual man is still decisive. . . . The ultimate objective of all military operations is the destruction of the enemy's armed forces in battle.”
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As one student noted, the combat soldier would sometimes “see himself as a warrior and like what he saw.”
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The idealism was “latent” rather than expressive. A marine wrote from Iwo Jima that there was among those who fought there a sense of patriotism, but it was not “the kind that is amassed in the throats of people when our national ensign is unfurled, or like as many sheep, cheer at a passing parade”; instead, it was a feeling that “lies deep and still in the hearts of” the marines.
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Sometimes purpose derived from experience. One army sergeant who liberated a Nazi death camp said, “I never was so sure before of exactly what I was fighting for.”
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In April 1945, Ohrdruf, part of the Buchenwald complex, was the first camp the US forces liberated. Generals Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley were there, and they encountered thirty-two hundred emaciated bodies thrown in a ditch. Bradley said that Eisenhower turned pale, and Patton went to a corner and vomited. Eisenhower said of these confrontations with true evil, “We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for, now at least he will know what he is fighting
against
.”
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Perhaps this was clear by the spring of 1945. There is little doubt that the memory of World War II is underlined, perhaps dominated, by a narrative of the battle against the cruelty and racism of Nazism and the genocidal megalomania of Adolf Hitler. But there is also little doubt that these factors were not really consequential motivators during the war. In fact, they were little understood, and there was no real effort to encourage such an understanding. America did pursue a Europe-first military approach, but this was a strategic military and geopolitical decision made in concert with the Allies rather than an emotional priority.

Because of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the mood of anger and of vengeance was directed toward the Japanese and seldom toward the Germans. These moods and attitudes had been conditioned by a long-standing American racist view of the Japanese—and of Asians. After Pearl Harbor the word most commonly used to characterize the Japanese was
treacherous
.

Time,
in covering the Pearl Harbor attack, asked the question, “What would the people, the 132,000,000, say in the face of the mightiest event of their time? What they said—tens of thousands of them—was: ‘Why, the yellow bastards!'” Even the
New Yorker
referred to “yellow monkeys.”
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And Admiral William Halsey, soon to be commander of the South Pacific Force, promised after the Pearl Harbor attack that by the time the United States was finished, Japanese would be spoken only in hell, and he rallied troops with the slogan “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs.” US Marines picked up the slogan: “Remember Pearl Harbor—keep'em dying.”
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Americans had heard reports of Japanese atrocities in China and the Philippines as well as in the early accounts of American engagement with Japanese troops at places such as Bataan and Guadalcanal. These stories of Japanese cruelty were largely true. An estimated 35 percent of American servicemen who were imprisoned by the Japanese died in captivity compared to 1 percent of those held by Germans. The average prisoner held in a German prisoner of war camp lost thirty-eight pounds during captivity; his counterpart in a Japanese camp lost sixty-one pounds. (It is relevant to note that the average term for American prisoners in Japanese camps was thirty-eight months, while in German camps it was ten months.)
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Japanese war conduct was indeed marked by horrible stories of treatment of civilians and of prisoners. In most cases, they were true; in all cases, Americans readily accepted them as true, enhancing the already-negative stereotypes. But equally true were accounts of Germans executing prisoners, destroying villages and their inhabitants, and raising anti-Semitism from discriminatory conduct to systematic genocide. Few people in the West thought of these incidents as defining of the German character. John Dower points out that German crimes and atrocities were considered “Nazi” crimes, while Japanese crimes and atrocities were “Jap” behavior.
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Life
's “picture of the week” on May 22, 1944, showed a woman with a Japanese skull that her boyfriend had sent her. It was autographed by him and thirteen others, inscribed, “This is a good Jap—a dead one picked up on the New Guinea beach.” If the Japanese carried out their side of the war with cruelty and brutality, this seldom provides a moral rationale for reciprocating in kind. Except in this case, some argued that it did.
Colliers
editorialized in 1945, “The barbarism of your enemy is never an excuse for descending to barbarism yourself—though of course our men in the Pacific have to fight the Japanese devils with fire.”
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John Dower frames the proposition that has no ready rebuttal: “It is virtually inconceivable, however, that teeth, ears, and skulls could have been collected from German or Italian war dead and publicized in the Anglo-American countries without provoking an uproar; and in this we have yet another inkling of the racial dimensions of the war.”
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At the end of the war, the distinguished historian Allan Nevins wrote about the hatred that Americans had expressed toward the Japanese. “Probably in all our history, no foe has been so detested as were the Japanese.” He believed this was the result of the nature of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the reports of Japanese atrocities as well as the way they fought in the Pacific, and, he said, “emotions forgotten since our most savage Indian wars were reawakened by the ferocities of Japanese commanders.”
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With no sense of irony, he linked this war with a historical analogy of truly racist contempt and cruelty.