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Coloring in Combat: Minority Participation in theU.S. Military WWI and Beyond

Heather J. Abdelnur, Ph.D.Augusta State University

Fort Gordon, Georgia December 7, 2008

(*0) First of all, let me say thank you for the invitation

to speak today. It was a welcome deviation from my normal

routine during the last days of class and finals in a Fall

semester. I also want to say thank you to all of you here who

will hopefully enjoy this photo journey that I have prepared. I

need to preface my talk this morning by stating very clearly that

I am not a military historian. I am not now, nor is any of my

family currently in the military and, other than a grandfather

who could not serve in combat in World War II due to his being

colorblind, and a Vietnam draft dodger of a step-father who fled

to Canada (incidentally, Mom divorced him, too), I have not had

much to do with soldiering of any sort. For that reason I ask

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your patience if I do not use terminology or jargon that you are

all accustomed to hearing.

Now that you are wondering just why I of all people would

have been asked to speak on a topic related to the U.S. military

and thinking perhaps I just ran in off the street after the

“real” speaker could not make it today, allow me a bit of

flexibility to explain. I am a specialist in the history of

native peoples of the Americas. I was also trained as a Latin

Americanist who focuses on underrepresented peoples, of African

as well as indigenous (as in Native American) heritage.

Essentially, I have spent my career trying to find out about all

those no one cared to remember. In the process, I have learned a

great deal, been intrigued by many of the stories, and admired

anew the struggles of various racial and ethnic groups as they

adapted to their environments and worked within the system of

majority. For me, the choice, or lack thereof, to participate in

a nation’s battles is quite interesting, especially when changes

over time can be documented. So what I intend to tell you today

is this (*1):

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At a gathering such as this, had it occurred a week and a

half ago, normally I would have greeted you with “Happy

Thanksgiving.” Then I would have admonished you to think like an

historian and remember as you dove into that turkey about what

happened to the good Native peoples that shared their food with

the starving Pilgrims—hinting at loss of lands and near

annihilation. After a short pause, I would have told you that I

was raised in Boston and before learning to carefully delete my

accent I did learn quite a bit about dry wit and sarcasm. But,

here we are a week later and, instead, I shall greet you with

Happy Kwanza, Seasons Greetings, Feliz Navidad, Happy Hunnakah,

Merry Christmas, and, since Monday is special to me, Eid Mubarak.

Hopefully I caught the majority, if not all, of you in the room

with one of those phrases. Why is this significant? Well, some

twenty years ago you would have heard about Hunnakah and

Christmas, but certainly not the others. Go back a couple more

decades and the Hunnakah greeting would have fallen on deaf ears.

American society has come quite a long way in acceptance of the

myriad of peoples that make up this nation. While some would

argue that the melting pot idea of assimilation of American

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culture is the only true and good way to make Americans, others

have chosen to accept the idea of cultural pluralism. This is

sort of stating that Americans can retain their cultural,

religious, and even linguistic heritage, but yet still be part of

the Americanization process. My point here is not to sway you to

one idea or the other, but to suggest that there has been a

change of sorts that occurred in the twentieth century with

regard to ethnic identity and race. Oftentimes, the military

establishment of the United States found itself at the front and

center of heated and violent clashes over this very topic and

often shifted or outright modernized long before other portions

of American society did. (*3) Nowadays, we expect and even

demand diversity in the military. How did we get to this point?

Historians have been writing history from time immemorial…

from the ancient Greeks, through the Medieval chroniclers, to the

modern thinkers of our revolutionary past and post-Cold War era

present. Throughout time the motto has always been, “History is

never written by the losers.” If we were to survey together

histories of the first 150 years of the United States, we would

uncover diplomatic history, military history, and political

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history. These were the standards of treaties and foreign

relations, wars, and heads of state. In the late 1800s,

Frederick Jackson Turner coined the idea of the frontier as the

defining facet of American history, one that had shaped our

rugged individualism, strength, independence, and adventurous

desires. Once we hit the early 1900s, to this mix was added

economic history as the great Charles and Mary Beard argued that

one could not understand the history of the United States without

considering its industrial past. One could argue that, for much

of the first 75 years of the 20th century, history was

essentially about dead white men of economic, military, and

political power. The primary evidence throughout was written

documentation, or, the printed word on paper.

(*4) With the rise of Civil Rights beginning in the mid-

1950s and struggles through the 1960s, the rise of Red Power and

the American Indian Movement, La Raza Unida movement and the

strength of Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers, and even

the feminist movement and the resultant National Organization of

Women, the effects were radical changes in American society by

the 1970s. These changes had some ripple effects in academia and

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with historians and their writings, but there was still yet a key

date to come. The Quincentennial, or 500 year anniversary, of

Columbus’ arrival in the Americas in 1992 was a major turning

point in forcing historians to re-examine just WHO becomes a part

of the historical record. Social historians began asking

questions such as, “How can any country history be written if 50+

percent of its people, as in all the women, are excluded?” Or,

“Can a true sense of a nation can be understood if groups such as

those of African, Asian, Latin American, or Native American

heritage are without a voice?” There are still some problems to

this approach as the underclass in society normally leaves behind

fewer records. If the minority groups are less educated, then

they leave less written documentation. If they are less

economically secure, they can little afford to take costly

photographs in an earlier era. If they are less likely to be

respected, then who will record their efforts and exploits? In

order to get the grandest and fullest picture of the past it is

worth the effort to hunt for this evidence. Historians now use

diaries, wills, artifacts, oral history, songs, and other non-

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traditional sources like photos, to tell the tale of those who

were not included in the official record.

What I have here for you today is a very brief journey

through time to redress some of the wrongs of historians past.

While I certainly cannot say that the U.S. government or military

was always or even usually kind in their previous dealings with

minority groups in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, those

in charge were also a product of their times and no different

than their civilian peers for the most part in their thinking and

actions. However, I CAN say that, often due to sheer necessity,

whether for desire for increased number of recruits or for

lessening of tension and violence, the U.S. government often

handed down orders to the military establishment attempting to

remove racial barriers long before those barriers were removed in

many parts of the U.S. in regular society. The hope was, as

well, that “service in the armed forces would promote the

Americanization of the nation’s immigrants” and perhaps

“civilize” those minority groups already here.1 If I were to

discuss the U.S. Revolutionary War or Civil War, of which we had

1 Henretta, Brody and Dumenil, America’s History, 6th edition, Vol. II Since 1865

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participation by all three major groups I will discuss today, or

if I continued into the conflicts of the 1990s to the present, we

could be here for an entire semester. Then I would have to

charge you student fees and you would expect a grade! As it is,

I will lead in with the first World War, heavily deal with World

War II, and briefly mention Korea and Vietnam. These are the

conflicts that saw the most change in recruiting, enlistment,

drafting, and general participation. I will not be discussing

Asian participation today largely because the U.S. had had a

Chinese exclusion policy since 1882, increased it to all of East

Asia by 1924, and then there is the legacy of Japanese-American

internment in WWII.

WORLD WAR I OR THE WAR TO END ALL WARS

(*5) For historians, the most information about minority

involvement in the U.S. military typically deals with African-

Americans. As the largest minority in the twentieth century,

this is no surprise in some ways. During WWI some “400,000 black

men served in the military, accounting for 13 percent of the

armed forces; 92 percent [of whom] were draftees…” and they were

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all “organized into rigidly segregated units” … and “assigned to

the most menial tasks, such as kitchen and clean-up detail.”2

Like the marines, “The navy barred blacks entirely [or assigned

them to mess duty3] and the segregated army confined most of the

… blacks who served in the war to supply units rather than

combat.” “The War Department made no provision for commissioning

or training black recruits as officers until protests by the

NAACP led to the establishment of one officer candidate program

in June 1917. Its graduates always worked under white

supervision. “Under capable white officers and with sufficient

training,” declared John J. Pershing, “negro soldiers have always

acquitted themselves creditably.””4 With all of this, still

“Blacks made up about 1 percent of the officer corps of an army

with 13 percent black enlisted men. When the United States

entered the war, the highest ranking black officer was Colonel

Charles Young of the Tenth Cavalry Division…[a] graduate of the

United States Military Academy…[with a] distinguished service

record in the war with Spain…Despite his record, a number of

2Ibid., p. 681.3 Gillon and Matson, The American Experiment: A History of the United States, 3rd ed. Vol II:Since 1865, p. 837.4 Gillon and Matson, The American Experiment, p. 837.

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white officers refused to serve under him. Four of them

complained to their senators, who then lobbied the secretary of

war to remove Young from his command. Shortly afterward, the

army forced Young to retire. Other black officers suffered

similar indignities. An investigator reported that at one army

camp, nearly 90 percent of the whites refused to salute black

officers.”5 Violence broke out in some camps to the point where

in 1917 after rioting, “the War Department dispersed black

recruits throughout its camps, maintaining a two-to-one ratio of

white to black trainees.”6 To make matters worse, at the war’s

close with British and French African colonial troops marching

“in the victory parade in Paris, the Wilson administration did

not allow black Americans to participate.”7 (*6) Not to make

everything seem so bleak, some diary and report entries display a

different sort of story of black soldiers in Europe. According

to one white American officer:

They are positively the most stoical and mysterious men I’ve everknown. Nothing surprises them. And we now have expert opinion. The French officers say they are entirely different from their own African troops and the Indian troops of the British, who are

5 Ibid., p. 838.6 Ibid., p. 838.7 Foner, Give me Liberty! An American History, p. 751.

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so excitable under shell fire. Of course, I have explained that my boys are public school boys, wise in their day and generation,no caste prejudice, accustomed to the terrible noises of the subway, elevated and street traffic of New York City (and would drive any desert man or Himalaya mountaineer mad) and are all Christians. Also, that while the more ignorant ones might not like to have a black cat hanging around for fear it would turn into a fish or something, they have no delusions about the Boche shells coming from any Heathen Gods. They know the d---- child-killing Germans are firing at them with pyrocellulose and they know how the breech mechanism works.8

For this period in time of 19-teens, African-American women were

not considered for military venues. They were able to organize,

such as with the Women’s National Council of Defense, to praise

other women’s contributions to the war effort, and most of their

assistance concerned “middle-class black women volunteering in

the Red Cross or Young Women’s Christian Association or raising

money for war bonds.”9

(*7) By contrast, Native Americans in WWI actually “served

in integrated combat units. Ironically, racial stereotypes about

the natural abilities of Native American men as warriors…and

camouflage experts enhanced their military reputations and meant

that officers gave them hazardous duties as advance scouts,

8 From Emmett J. Scott, Scott’s Official History of the American Negro in the World War, 1919 (p. 109).9 DuBois and Dumenil, Through Women’s Eyes: An American History with Documents, 2nd ed. Vol II: Since 1865, p. 511.

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messengers, and snipers. Approximately 13,000, or 25 percent, of

the adult male Native American population served in the military,

often with distinction.” However, some “5 percent died, compared

to 2 percent for the military as a whole.”10 (*8) Private

Edward Denomie, distinguished himself in service, but there are

few individual accolades for Native American men in WWI. There

is ever fewer evidence to prove that Native American women were

there assisting the U.S. in this time of war; hopefully more

evidence will come to light in the future. (*9) Perhaps some 14

Native American women served, though only two made it overseas.

One of whom, Charlotte Edith Monture, of the Iroquois served in

France at a hospital unit run by the Episcopal Church.11

There is too little information to be able to accurately

portray any real sense of numbers of Latino participation in

World War I. Partly this had to do with racial tensions, partly

it had to do with fluidity of definition. Just who was a Latino

seemed to be difficult to determine in the early 20th century and

there were no true and accurate records although the Secretary of

10 Henretta, Brody and Dumenil, America’s History, p. 681.11 http://www.defenselink.mil/specials/nativeamerican01/women.html

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War, John Weeks, is quoted in 1921 as estimating some 17,000

peoples of Latin American heritage enlisted. Others drop the

figure as low as 12,000. Regardless, even 12,000 is a

significant number. I do have one particularly telling quote

that suggests why these numbers are so difficult to obtain:

I’ve been thinking if they capture one of my Porto Ricans (of whom I have a few) in the uniform of a Normandy French regiment and this black man tells them in Spanish that he is an American soldier in a New York National Guard regiment, it’s going to givethe German intelligence department a headache trying to figure itout.12

THE SUGGESTION HERE IS THAT PERHAPS SWARTHY OR DARK-SKINNED LATINOS WERE SIMPLY ABSORBED AS “NEGROES” IN THE WWI ARMY, THOUGH NATIVE SPANISH SPEAKERS. COLOR, ULTIMATELY TOOK PREFERENCE OVER LANGUAGE AND NATIONAL ORIGINS.

WORLD WAR II

Breezing through the end of WWI and through the Roaring

Twenties, Great Migration of African-Americans northward, East

Asian exclusion acts, Harlem Renaissance, and the Great

Depression is rather tough. But, by the close of the 1930s war

was imminent, as much as the United States initially tried to

12 From Emmett J. Scott, Scott’s Official History of the American Negro in the World War, 1919,(p. 111).

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remain neutral. (*10) As much as the focus initially would be

on the European theatre of the war, quite obviously the tipping

point for the United States would be the bombing of Pearl Harbor

by the Japanese that fateful Sunday morning in 1941. Just

“Twelve months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, some half-

million blacks had been inducted into a rigidly segregated army…

In 1940 the army had just five African-American officers, and

three of them were chaplains. Black soldiers had to watch the

army segregate the blood plasma of whites and blacks.”13 Not

much, apparently, had changed since WWI.

With all of this ugliness, I ask you to remember that the

1940s was a decade before Rosa Parks and long before Dr. Martin

Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech.” With that in mind,

consider that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared,

“There has never been, there isn’t now, and there never will be

any race of people on the earth fit to serve as masters over

their fellow men.”14 (*11) Perhaps that statement was not

intended to ease discrimination and segregation in the United

States, but one very outspoken critic of that policy of prejudice

13 Gillon and Matson, The American Experiment, p. 970.14 Foner, Give Me Liberty, p. 878.

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and Jim Crow was Roosevelt’s wife Eleanor. Another vocal and

influential opponent was A. Philip Randolph, a black labor leader

and founder of the Brotherhood of Sleepingcar Porters. He

threatened in 1941 to march on Washington with 100,000s of blacks

protesting defense employment that did not equally hire blacks

declaring racial discrimination “undemocratic, un-American, and

pro-Hitler.” Partly in response to this threat, “Roosevelt

signed Executive Order 8802, which decleared, “There shall be no

discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries

or government because of race, creed, color, or national

origin.””15 This, however, did not apply to sexual

discrimination. “Gradually…military leaders were forced to make

adjustments—in part because of public and political pressures,

but also because they recognized that these forms of segregation

were wasting manpower. (*12) By the end of the war, the number

of black servicemen had increased sevenfold, to 700,000; some

training camps were being at least partially integrated; blacks

were beginning to serve on ships with white sailors; and more

black units were being sent into combat. But tensions remained.

15 Gillon and Matson, The American Experiment, p. 971.

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(*13) In some of the partially integrated army bases—Fort Dix,

New Jersey, for example—riots occasionally broke out when African

Americans protested having to serve in segregated divisions.”16

But, racial tensions were actually smoothing out in comparison to

previous wars and earlier eras.

(*14) Some of the famous fellows from this period are the

Tuskegee Airmen. One such Airman, told of his story

I was born and raised in Los Angeles. I’d never been south. I had not too much experience with discrimination. I went to integrated schools…When I left school to sign up for the air force, I found out I could not go into the service with my friends…I was sent to Tuskegee, an all-segregated base, deep in the heart of Alabama.17

(*15) Another hero of the era, Dorris Miller, signified the

possibilities for change in the military.

Partly, or unfortunately, due to Nicholas Cage’s recent film

“Wind Talkers,” there is renewed interest or a fad in uncovering

the heroics of Navajo Indians and other Native Americans in WWII

combat. The famous Navajo Code Talkers “served with the marines

in the Pacific…” While in “combat, the “code talkers” handled

radio communications between units by speaking in a code in the

16 Brinkley, American History, p. 749.17 From Studs Terkel, The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two (New York: PantheonBooks, 1984), pp. 343-44.

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Navajo language.” Since it was an as yet unwritten language with

unusual rules of grammar that were unlike any other European,

Asian or African language group, they “confounded the Japanese

who intercepted the messages” and were unable to crack the code.

This similarly occurred with “other Native American tribes”

utilized in Europe.18 “Unlike their African-American

counterparts, Indian servicemen were integrated into regular

units” as in WWI and “every military branch used Indians to

encode and decipher messages…”19 All told, the estimates are that

some 25,000 American Indians served in the army, though the

“benefits under the GI Bill did not extend to Indian veterans who

returned to homes”20 in the reservations. Thus, many left the

reservations never to return. While 25,000 does not seem like a

large number, please keep in mind that even today Native

Americans are the US’s smallest recognized minority group at only

1% of the total U.S. population.

Some that saw combat became famous, such as Ira Hayes for

his participation as “one of the men who memorably raised the

18 Conlin, The American Past: A Survey of American History, Vol. II, 8th Ed. , p. 725.19 Tindall and Shi, p. 1101.20 Foner, Give Me Liberty, p. 676.

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American flag at Iwo Ima.”21 Other Native Americans who did not

serve, still participated in the war effort working in war plants

making the machinery, tools, and weapons for those overseas. All

of this is miraculous change considering that, until The Indian

Citizenship Act of 1924, there was some question about just who

was an American. Other questionable Americans included those of

Spanish-speaking heritage.

Having just re-emerged from the Great Depression of the

1930s when many “Mexican-Americans had been “voluntarily”

repatriated by local authorities in the Southwest”22 and those

that stayed shut off from debt relief and government job

opportunities, WWII offered great changes for Latinos. In the

1930s, the chief investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief

Administration, Lorena Hickok, used typical racial prejudice of

the time stating that Mexicans were the Negroes West of the

Mississippi.23 Even while fighting and rioting broke out in Los

Angeles between Mexican-American gangs, police, and Anglo-

soldiers, one activist complained, “Our Latin American boys are

21 Brinkley, American History: A Survey, Vol. II: Since 1865, p. 749.22 Foner, Give Me Liberty, p. 876.23 Fernlund, Documents to Accompany America’s History, 5th ed., Vol. 2: Since 1865, p. 273.

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not segregated at the front line…They are dying that democracy

may live.” Yet when they return home… “they are not considered

good enough to go into a café.”24 Again, the writings of Latinos

who participated in World War II are just now emerging, though

the evidence is certainly there. And, much like with Native

Americans, those that did not go to war still found many factory

jobs and in farming because of wartime labor shortages. For

certain, “Mexican Americans fought in the war with great valor,

earning seventeen Congressional Medals of Honor…”25

In many ways we can consider women to be another minority.

Women found it challenging to break into the male dominated world

of the military establishment, and women of color found it doubly

so. Black American women were able to increase their numbers in

their military efforts of WWII, but not without some hardships.

“Black women experienced racial discrimination at the hands of

the federal government’s segregated military establishment.

Because the navy prohibited African American men from serving in

any but menial positions, it also refused to incorporate black

women into its ranks until 1944, almost at the end of the war.

24 Foner, Give Me Liberty, p. 676.25 Tindall & Shi, America: A Narrative History, 7th ed., Vol II, p. 1100.

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Black nurses were commissioned in the army, and 10 percent of

Women’s Army Corps were African American, but they lived and

worked in segregated units and had less access to training and

skilled jobs …Black nurses were allowed to attend only to African

Americans or prisoners of war, and they were often assigned to

menial, not skilled, patient services.”26 “This 1943 photograph

features a group of African American nurses drilling at the first

Women’s Army Corps Training Center in Fort Des Moines, Iowa.

Leading the group is Charity Adams, a former teacher from South

Carolina who rose to the rank of major in the Women’s Army Corps

(WACs). Her autobiography details pride in her accomplishments

and the women who served with her, but also unstinting criticism

of the segregation she and other black women experienced.”27

In WWII, “Drawing on an eager applicant pool of over 25,000

women, the air force accepted 1, 074 as Women Airforce Service

Pilots (WASPs), all of whom had pilot’s licenses and experience…

Of these, two were Mexican American, two Chinese American, and

one Native American. The lone African American who applied was

urged to withdraw her application by WASP direction Jacqueline

26 Dubois and Dumenil, Through Women’s Eyes, p. 546.27 DuBois and Dumenil, Through Women’s Eyes, caption p. 547.

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Cochran, who explained that she wanted to avoid controversy…”

Throughout the war, “WASP pilots ferried and tested planes and

participated in maneuvers and training. Although they did not

participate in combat, thirty-eight women lost their lives on

duty. The WASPs performed invaluable services, but they were

disbanded in December 1944, before the end of the war, because of

pressure from civilian male pilots and veterans groups…WASPs were

not eligible for veterans benefits until a congressional act

passed in 1977 finally gave them partial recognition for what

they had accomplished.”28

28 Ibid., p. 548.