Race and Social Justice (RSJ)
Mexican-Americans in World War 2The United States has long been the most diverse country on earth — our slogan?E Pluribus Unum?proclaims that out of many people we are one nation. But we have frequently had trouble living up to this ideal.The Second World War provided an unprecedented chance for African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Filipinos, Chinese Americans, Jewish Americans, Japanese Americans, and other minorities, to break the restraints and limitations of the past, and for the first time participate fully in American life.Early on in the war, African Americans adopted the concept of a “Double Victory” — the idea of winning the war abroad while at the same time fighting for civil rights at home. The “Double V” could just as well have applied to a wide range of other ethnic groups that filled the ranks of the American military. Japanese Americans and African Americans were in the unique position of being forced to serve only in segregated units. But other minorities also confronted prejudice, both at home and in the military itself.“I think it was little Texas in the Marine Corps and as you know Texans and Mexicans ... weren’t exactly bosom buddies in those days,” Mexican-American MarineBill Lansford?remembered. “As the war advanced and we went on through, these southern guys began seeing that we weren’t what they thought we were. And we began seeing that they weren’t what we thought they were. And being Marines was kind of a melting pot, and we all got together. It was like a mini-United States, you know, where you got Jews, you got Italians, you got Indians — and they all learn to live together.”Mexican Americans and other Latinos volunteered for the military in great numbers. But because they were incorporated into the general military population, the armed forces did not keep a separate count of their enlistment, and we will never know the exact number of Latinos who served. Like so many of their fellow Americans serving in the war, Latinos more than proved their courage and dedication in battle.Pete Arias, who earned a promotion in Carlson’s Raiders, went from following others to leading troops into combat. “These guys I used to lead, they didn’t know that I was as scared as much as they were. But you don't show it. You can’t. Otherwise, nobody will follow ya.”Among the many Latino heroes of the war was private Guy Louis Gabaldon. A Mexican American raised in East Los Angeles, Gabaldon had been adopted by a Japanese-American family at the age of twelve and became conversant in Japanese. When the war came and his foster family was sent off to an internment camp, Gabaldon, just 17, joined the Marines. He was sent to the Pacific and saw action on Saipan.In his first test of combat, Gabaldon killed thirty-three Japanese soldiers, and then single-handedly tried to convince many of the other surrounded Japanese soldiers on the island to surrender. Through a combination of quick thinking and a basic command of the Japanese language, Gabaldon managed to capture eight hundred Japanese prisoners, saving not only the lives of the Japanese soldiers themselves, but also those of countless Americans who would have confronted them in battle.Like Guy Gabaldon, Latinos served in integrated units, fighting side-by-side with people from many different ethnic groups. But the armed forces did include a few predominantly Hispanic units, including the 65th Infantry Regiment from Puerto Rico, which served in North Africa and Europe. Another Army unit, the 158th Regimental Combat Team, was made up largely of Mexican Americans and Native Americans from Arizona. The 158th — known as the Bushmasters — distinguished themselves in battle throughout the Pacific Theater, participating in fierce fighting in New Guinea and the Philippines. When the war ended, they were poised to help spearhead the planned invasion of mainland Japan. Reflecting on their important role in helping win the war in the Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur described the Bushmasters as “the greatest fighting combat team ever deployed for battle.”Native Americans in World War 2Native Americans also enlisted in large numbers, with some 45,000 serving in the armed forces, a figure equal to more than ten percent of the Indian population at the time. Navajo “Code Talkers,” whose ranks exceeded 400 during the course of the war, served in all six Marine divisions. The Code Talkers’ primary job was to transmit confidential information in their native dialect in order to communicate tactics, troop movements, orders and other vital battlefield information via telegraphs and radios. Nobody outside of the Navajos themselves could understand their language, and the Code Talkers took advantage of their unique linguistic skills to provide a critical tactical advantage to the Marines.Joe Medicine CrowA young Joe Medicine Crow. His grandfather was a chief of the Crow tribe.Many Native Americans came to the war steeped in age-old warrior traditions. “I was ready to go overseas, and a cousin of mine had just come back from Europe, you know. He was a tail gunner,” remembered?Joe Medicine Crow?of the Crow Nation. “And before he left, a medicine man, a Sun Dance medicine man called Sacred Powers, gave my cousin an eagle feather, a fluffy feather painted yellow. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘Put that inside of your helmet, then she’ll protect you.’ So long as that, that sacred, protective feather was in my helmet, why, I was never afraid of anything.”In the spring of 1945, with the Germans still desperately fighting in Europe, Medicine Crow performed the four traditional “war deeds” that are required to become a tribal chief. While serving in the 103rd Infantry Division, he was able to lead a victorious war party, touch an enemy and then disarm him, and steal his enemy’s horses. He is the last Crow Indian to become a chief.Despite the role that Americans of all ethnicities played in winning the war, many victorious troops returned home to find that little had changed for minorities in America. When they went off to war, Latino recruits had embraced the slogan “Americans All,” to express their willingness to fight on behalf of a country that in many cases had marginalized them and denied them equal opportunities at home. But the old prejudices would not always disappear easily. Staff Sergeant Macario Garcia, recipient of the Medal of Honor for his heroic actions fighting in Germany, was refused service a café in Richmond, Texas in 1945. The café did not serve Mexican Americans. When the remains of Private Felix Longoria, who had been killed in action in the Philippines, returned to his hometown of Three Rivers, Texas, in 1949, the local funeral home refused to bury his body because he was Mexican American.These ugly incidents did not go unnoticed. A civil rights awareness had been awakened among returning veterans, many of whom were inspired by what they experienced in the military to demand equality in civilian life. During the years after the Second World War, veterans and other Americans waged civil rights struggles that would — like the war itself — change America forever.African-Americans in World War 2Despite the bravery of African Americans in all of America’s previous wars, despite the argument made by the NAACP and others that “a Jim Crow army cannot fight for a free world,” the armed forces of the United States remained strictly segregated during the Second World War. The Selective Service Act expressly forbade the intermingling of “colored and white” draftees. Even blood supplies for saving the lives of the wounded were kept separate. Blacks were barred from frontline combat, at least at first, and asked instead to perform in uniform the menial tasks many had performed as civilians.Library of CongressTwo Marines walk in Harlem.Black citizens were outraged at the idea of fighting bigotry abroad while it was tolerated at home, but the military continued to insist on segregating African-American servicemen into all-black units. Some men refused to serve in the segregated armed forces and were imprisoned for it. Others were willing to serve, but frustrated by the intransigence of a Jim Crow military. The distinguished historian?John Hope Franklin?described his attempts to volunteer for the Navy:“I went down to the recruiting office, the Navy and volunteered. I volunteered in response to the call that they made specifically for men to man the offices. The young recruiter for the navy said, ‘What can you do?’ I said, ‘Well, I can run an office. I can type. I can take shorthand if that’s needed.’ I said, ‘And, oh, yes, I have a Ph.D. in history from Harvard.’ And I wondered what he was gonna say. He said, ‘You have everything but color.’ And I said, ‘Well, I thought there was an emergency, but obviously there’s not, so I bid you a good day.’ And I vowed that day that they would not get me, because they did not deserve me. If I was able — physically, mentally, every other kind of way, able and willing to serve my country — and my country turned me down on the basis of color, then my country did not deserve me. And I vowed then that they would not get me.”Franklin would keep that pledge and never served in the armed forces. But more than a million African Americas did join the military, and did what they could to make the best of a difficult situation.Problems began as early as basic training. Many black draftees from the North, sent to training camps in the deep South, encountered Jim Crow laws for the first time. There were frequent and sometimes bloody confrontations between black servicemen and white civilians, black troops and white ones — over women and local customs and equal access to military facilities. African Americans soldiers discovered their army meal tickets would not be accepted; they would not be served in restaurants that freely fed German or Italian prisoners. In some towns, African-American soldiers were jailed. A few were lynched.Once trained and deployed, most African Americans were relegated to service and support duties, regardless of their qualifications. African Americans made up half of the Transportation Corps in the European theater, including the members of the “Red Ball Express,” the enormous convoy system that supplied Allied forces moving through Europe following the invasion of Normandy. Black troops were assigned to build air bases, clear mines, and feed the troops, and to the unpleasant job of graves registration — identifying and burying the dead. Such tasks were essential to victory, and often terribly dangerous, but rarely afforded the glory connected with frontline combat.Confronted with growing protest, the military did eventually make a few changes. An Army Air Corps training camp was set up at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Two all-African American Army divisions were deployed overseas — the 92nd in Europe, and the 93rd in the Pacific. A single ship, the?USS Mason, was manned entirely by blacks — except for her commander. The all-black 761st Tank Battalion would eventually fight in Europe, sent to the front by George Patton with the admonition: “I don’t care what color you are, so long as you go up there and kill those kraut sonsabitches.”The Marine Corps had initially refused to accept any African Americans at all. But after 1942, as casualties in the Pacific mounted and pressure from civil rights groups intensified, blacks were finally allowed to sign on and serve, but were mostly assigned to non-combat jobs. Eventually one black unit would be trained for combat, the 51st Defense Battalion. Its commander won his men’s loyalty by declaring, “There is nothing that suitable colored personnel cannot be taught.” That,John Gray?recalled, was a great improvement on the commandant of Camp Lejeune, where the 51st trained, who told the men he had been “out on the jungles and he had fought this and he had done that and he came back to find?women?Marines and?dogMarines and then ‘You?people.’ We didn’t like it when people said ‘you people’ instead of referring to troops as troops,” said Gray. “We resented that.”Willie Rushton?had also enlisted in the Marines. “A lot of people just thought the black man just wasn’t up to it,” Rushton remembered. “Because you had to be something to be a Marine, you know. And a lot of them didn’t think the black man had the ability. My job in the Marines was to prove to them that I could withstand whatever they could withstand.”Slowly, the contributions of African-American servicemen began to shake long-entrenched prejudices. Black Marines on Saipan acquitted themselves so well that the Marine commandant proclaimed that “the Negro Marines are no longer on trial. They are Marines, period.” In Europe, black infantrymen had fought on Elsenborn Ridge and guarded bridges across the Meuse. Black artillery units and black tankers had helped defend Bastogne. The 761st Tank Battalion became so beloved by Patton that he used them to spearhead many of his advances. The Tuskegee Airmen so distinguished themselves that bomber crews began requesting them; the famed red-tailed 332nd Fighter Group never lost an escorted plane to enemy fighters.In March 1945, with the war in Europe in its final months, black troops were finally integrated into white infantry units. For the first time since the Revolutionary War, black platoons would become full-fledged parts of white infantry companies. Practicality, not progressivism, had brought about the change — infantry replacements were in short supply after unexpectedly savage winter warfare. Waymon Ransom’s 5th Platoon, K Company, 394th Infantry Regiment, 99th Infantry Division, consisted of sixty African-American men. To the white troops pinned down by German machine gun fire at the Remagen Bridgehead near the Rhine, the black replacements were a welcome sight. “I think their first reaction was they were glad to see anybody. And before the night was over they was really glad to see anybody.” Ransom’s platoon was a part of the final push to drive back a still dangerous German army, and win the war in Europe.But when African-American servicemen got home they found that little had changed. Returning black veterans, who had fought for freedom overseas, once again faced the same Jim Crow system they had left behind.“It would be a matter of disgust and distaste with you when you found out that the fruits of victory were not yours,” Gray said. “That there were still elements of the status quo and people who fought to keep the status quo.”But much had changed in the?expectations?of returning African-American servicemen themselves, and black veterans would go on to play a crucial role in the postwar struggle for civil rights. Japanese-American veteran?Daniel Inouye?reflected on the changes that the war brought for all minorities,“One of the most important results of this war was to begin the process of integration,” Inouye said. “One must recall that in that war, you had the Japanese, like my regiment, the 92nd division, the Tuskegee airmen, the Navajo code talkers. The Filipino-Americans in Manila, the Puerto Rican regiment, the 65th regiment. All these segregated groups. And all of them, in their way, fought bravely and made a heroic chapter of their lives. And so I think the war played a major role in civil rights. Not realizing that that was the purpose, but, so after that, who will tell us, ‘No, you’re not worthy to be considered Americans?’ No one can tell us that to our face.”Japanese-Americans in World War 2After Pearl Harbor, the Federal government took the unprecedented step of ordering some 110,000 Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese descent living along the West Coast out of their homes and into ten inland internment camps. In addition, all Japanese-American men of draft age, except those already in the armed forces, were classified as 4-C, enemy aliens, forbidden to serve their country.Then, in early 1943, Washington reversed its policy on military service. The Japanese government had been making effective propaganda in Asia out of the internment of Japanese Americans in the U.S.; the camps appeared to confirm their depiction of the war as a racial conflict. To respond to the Japanese propaganda, and under pressure from Japanese American and civil liberties organizations, President Roosevelt authorized the enlistment of Japanese-American men into the U.S. Armed Forces.Japanese Americans were now permitted to form a special segregated infantry outfit – the unit would come to be called the 442nd Infantry Regimental Combat Team. In Hawaii, where Japanese Americans had never been locked up, recruitment exceeded all expectations. When the Army called for 1,500 volunteers, 10,000 turned up at recruiting offices.National ArchivesJapanese-American soldiers rest in the street of Leghorn, Italy. July 19, 1944.Among the new recruits was?Daniel Inouye, an eighteen-year-old pre-med student from Honolulu. “I was angered to realize that my government felt that I was disloyal and part of the enemy, [an] enemy alien,” Inouye said. “And I wanted to be able to demonstrate, not only to my government, but to my neighbors that I was a good American.”But not all Japanese Americans were eager to serve a government that had forced so many of them and their families into internment camps. Some in the camps refused to cooperate with the draft until their rights were restored. Many objected to the loyalty questionnaire they were forced to sign, which asked them to renounce allegiance to the Japanese emperor, a provision many found insulting. Others felt the new unit would be a “suicide squad” meant only to save the lives of white servicemen. Still, some 2,100 men in the camps stepped forward for the new all-Japanese American unit.Many military leaders were reluctant to have Japanese Americans in the armed forces. General Eisenhower’s staff had initially rejected the idea of Japanese-American troops, but General Mark Clark, commander of the Fifth Army in Italy, had said that he would “take anybody that will fight.”In June 1944, The men who signed on with the 442nd would find themselves in Italy, fighting alongside the 100th Infantry Battalion, the battle-tested unit made up mostly of Japanese Americans from Hawaii. The 100th had been formed in 1942, before the ban had been placed on the enlistment of Japanese Americans, and they had seen action in North Africa and Italy. For months, the men of the 100th had distinguished themselves in repeated assaults on the German lines as the Allies fought northward in Italy. The 100th had lost over 950 men, so many that they came to be called the “Purple Heart Battalion.” The fall of Rome in June 1944 had boosted Allied morale, but it had not ended warfare in Italy, and new troops were needed to fight the Germans. As the campaign in Italy continued into the autumn, the newcomers of the 442nd and the combat-wise survivors of the 100th would be asked to spearhead the Fifth Army’s drive northward from Rome.National ArchivesJapanese Americans go through the chow line while fighting in France.“We all had the idea of proving that we were loyal Americans,”?Tim Tokuno?said. “And so everything was ‘go, go, go forward, go forward.’ And so I understand it, we never retreated. We never took a backward step. Always forward.”The 442nd fought so well and so hard in the drive toward the German “Gothic Line” that when General Clark led his men into the important port city of Livorno in full view of the cameras that accompanied him everywhere, he insisted that the Japanese Americans march right behind his jeep. “They were superb!” said General George Marshall. “They showed rare courage and tremendous fighting spirit. Everybody wanted them.”In September, the 442nd was moved from the ongoing battle in Italy and rushed to France. Once considered a “problem” by the army, the 442nd was now seen as a problem solver. But the battles they would endure in the Vosges Mountains in France would be their greatest challenge – if only because the orders of an incompetent General would send them into impossible situations where they would endure terrible losses. On October 29, 1944, the 442nd was called upon to rescue the so-called “Lost Battalion” – 275 men from the 141st Regiment who had been surrounded by Germans due to the reckless orders of their General. The 442nd lost 400 men rescuing the 230 men of the Lost Battalion who had survived their ordeal, and further secured their reputation for extraordinary bravery and valor.At war’s end, the “Purple Heart Battalion” had suffered 9,486 casualties. Over 600 made the ultimate sacrifice.Japanese Americans would also help win the war in the Pacific, as interpreters and translators in the war against Japan. They served in the Military Intelligence Service, intercepting secret Japanese communication, often making quick translations of the battlefield messages and orders of Japanese officers. On Okinawa and Saipan, Japanese-American servicemen were able to convince some Japanese soldiers to surrender, and they tried to reason with terrified civilians who had been told by the Japanese to expect horrible atrocities at the hands of the arriving Americans.But on returning home, Japanese-American soldiers found many of the old prejudices remained. Veterans of the 442nd were denied service, even while in uniform. Some seven years after the war,?Susumu Satow?took his family to a restaurant in his hometown of Sacramento. They ordered their meal. It never arrived. “There’s no point in making any commotion and so we just walked out,” he said.With time, the Japanese-American soldiers would be recognized for their bravery and sacrifice. After fifty-five years, twenty members of the 442nd , including Inouye, would finally be awarded the Medal of Honor, our nation’s highest award for valor. Nobody could ever again question the Japanese Americans’ loyalty, or doubt their contributions to winning the war. ................
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