Black Soldiers Battled Fascism and Racism

Like the overwhelming majority of blacks who participated in the war, Strawder was initially assigned to a service unit -- in his case a quartermaster company assigned to an air base near Cambridge, England, early in 1943 to build landing strips, dig ditches and clean latrines. Four days after the D-Day invasion, they were shipped to northern France to bury the dead.

"There were hundreds of bodies all over the place," Strawder said. "We'd spend day after day loading them on trucks. Lordy, was it sickening."

Combat was not an option. Before the war, the Marines and the Army Air Corps barred blacks outright. The Navy accepted them only as cooks, stewards or longshoremen. The Army had only a handful of black combat units, mostly led by white officers.

Still, Strawder said, when white soldiers taunted him about being in a service role, "I just felt inferior. It hurt."

He also remembered the words of one of his high school teachers: "The only way the black man will ever be free is if he is ready to put his blood on the line when the time comes."

African American leaders in the United States felt the same way and pressed President Franklin D. Roosevelt to use more black troops in combat. As casualties among white soldiers mounted and the need for replacements grew, the administration's resistance weakened.

The Navy began commissioning a few black officers -- about 60 by the war's end -- and allowing blacks to fill skilled positions such as signalman and electrician on support ships. The Army Air Forces, precursor to today's Air Force, began training nearly 1,000 black pilots. Dubbed the Tuskegee Airmen after their base in Alabama, they flew more than 15,000 sorties over Europe, as part of dive-bombing, strafing, patrol and bomber escort missions.

The Marines trained several hundred blacks for two combat battalions. Several thousand more were trained for depot and ammunition companies. Though technically not combat units, some of the companies repulsed fierce attacks by the Japanese in the Pacific.

Meanwhile, the Army began deploying black combat troops, including such storied units as the 92nd Infantry Division and the 761st "Black Panther" Tank Battalion, which led a 183-day thrust from France into Germany. Montgomery was in the first contingent of the 92nd Infantry to land in Naples, Italy, disembarking in the summer of 1944 in pitch darkness. So many wrecked boats blocked the harbor that the men had to walk from their transports to shore on a long network of narrow planks, swaying unsteadily under the weight of their packs as German fighter planes strafed them and Allied antiaircraft guns boomed back in reply.

As Montgomery reached the dock, he began to make out a new sound "like the roar of a crowd in a ballpark," he said. Hundreds of black service troops -- cooks, stewards and laborers -- had gathered to cheer the arrival of the first black combat soldiers in Italy.

Col. Benjamin O. Davis Jr., the African American commander of the Tuskegee Airmen, was careful to impress on his men the special responsibility they had as representatives of their race, said Charles McGee, who left college to join the Airmen and flew missions over Europe out of southern Italy. At a briefing soon after McGee's arrival, Davis sternly warned the pilots to stick close to the bombers they were assigned to escort into Germany rather than peel off to engage German fighter planes in glamorous, but unnecessary, dogfights that would leave the bombers vulnerable.

"He said, 'If any of you go happy hunting, I'll court-martial you,' " McGee recalled.

Some of the pilots chafed under the rules, which prevented all but two from shooting down the five enemy planes required to become an ace. But McGee took pride in the result of Davis's policy: The Airmen, then flying as the 332nd Fighter Group, did not lose a single bomber to an enemy fighter.

McGee, now 84, enjoyed flying so much that he went on to a 30-year career in the Air Force.