No Ordinary Time, Page 65

  To many Negroes, army historian Ulysses Lee concluded in his study of Negro troops, “the uncertainty of their status was as damaging to morale as the knowledge of definite restrictions.” Since the rules varied widely from post to post and from town to town, each recruit had to find his own way through the maze of shaded meanings. Would he be served if he tried to make a purchase at the main post exchange? Was there a special Negro branch? Was he free to enter the gym, the bowling alley, the theater? Was he allowed to subscribe to a Negro newspaper? Which chair should he use in the barber shop, in the dentist’s office? “That’s the kind of democracy we are fighting for,” Private Laurence Burnett pointedly remarked upon discovering that he had to sit in a colored-only chair at the dental clinic. “It is so foolish it makes me laugh most of the time. I can’t sit in a dental chair that a white man has sat in or will sit in in the future!”

  When Eleanor heard these stories, she felt like weeping. “What a lot we must do to make our war a real victory for democracy,” she said, again and again. From her sitting room on the second floor, she fired off passionate missives to General Marshall asking him to investigate the unacceptable situations described by men like Henry Jones. So large was the flow of Eleanor’s letters to Marshall that the general was forced to assign one and later two members of his staff to respond.

  Finally, on March 10, 1943, the War Department took corrective action. A directive was issued to all service commands forbidding the designation of any recreational facilities, “including theaters and post exchanges,” by race. The new directive required the removal of remaining “White” and “Colored only” signs in the designation of facilities, specifying that, if only one facility existed on a camp, arrangements must be made for its equal use by troops of both races. Though the directive did not touch on transportation, perhaps the most deeply felt problem, and though it did not prevent the continued use of separate facilities as long as they were not designated by racial signs (on many posts, blacks still frequented what had been the colored service club, since it was closest to their barracks, only now it was known as Service Club No. 2), it did establish the principle that Negro troops were to be given equal opportunity to use all the existing facilities provided for the welfare and recreation of soldiers. “The fact that anyone could use any facility,” army historians observed, “was enough to turn the tide of Negro soldiers’ morale upward.” It was a beginning wedge in the desegregation of the armed forces.

  Eleanor’s special advocacy of Negro troops involved her later that same spring in the fortunes of the 99th Pursuit Squadron, the first unit of Negro combat pilots. The flight program at Tuskegee Air Field had been instituted in March 1941 in response to a legal suit filed by a young black pilot, Yancey Williams, who had been denied admission to the all-white Air Corps. Through 1941 and 1942, the program produced nearly a thousand black combat pilots, but by the spring of 1943 not a single one had been sent into combat. “We were undoubtedly the most highly trained squadron in the US,” Louis Purnell, a member of the 99th, later wrote; “the Air Corps brass couldn’t decide what to do with us so we flew and flew for nearly a whole year simply to maintain our proficiency.” Inspectors had declared the 99th ready for deployment in September 1942, but still nothing happened. “The waiting got tiresome,” squadron leader Benjamin Davis, Jr., recalled.

  In March, Tuskegee Director Frederick Patterson turned to Eleanor for help. “The program of preflight training is going forward,” he explained, “but morale is disturbed by the fact that the 99th Pursuit Squadron trained for more than a year is still at Tuskegee and virtually idle.” Eleanor sent a copy of Patterson’s letter to Stimson with a cover note of her own: “This seems to me a really crucial situation.”

  The long period of waiting came to an end on the morning of April 15, 1943, when the members of the 99th boarded a ship en route to North Africa. News of the squadron’s departure spread quickly through the Negro press, which had been agitating for months “to get our boys overseas like everybody else.” It was a “tremendous moment,” Benjamin Davis, Jr., recalled. “All the members of the 99th were beginning to understand the significance of an assignment which went far beyond purely military considerations. If a black fighter squadron could get a good account of itself in combat, its success might lead the way to greater opportunities for black people throughout the armed services.”

  “As we left the shores of the United States,” Davis recalled, “we felt as if we were separating ourselves, at least for the moment, from the evils of racial discrimination. Perhaps in combat overseas, we would have more freedom and respect than we had experienced at home.”

  The Tuskegee airmen would prove to the world, a Defense Department study later noted, that “blacks could fly in combat with the best of the pilots of any nation.” In the course of 1,578 missions over North Africa, Italy, and Germany, the 99th Pursuit Squadron would be credited with shooting down 111 airborne craft and destroying 150 on the ground. Winners of a hundred Distinguished Flying Crosses, the 99th was the only escort group that never lost a single bomber to an enemy fighter.

  • • •

  On April 13, 1943, Roosevelt was scheduled to leave for a sixteen-day train trip through the deep South and the Midwest to inspect army bases and training camps. It was almost seven months since his last inspection trip, and the commander-in-chief was anxious to take his own measure of the readiness of the American soldier.

  Eleanor had intended to accompany her husband on the trip, but when she learned that Anna, agitated by John’s imminent departure to North Africa, was on her way to Washington, she decided to stay with her daughter for several days and then join Franklin on the road later in the week. Anna was still finding it hard to accept John’s decision to leave the hard plodding job of publishing the paper to her while he opted for a glamorous assignment abroad. “Men are always little boys, I guess,” Eleanor told her daughter. Never had the bond between mother and daughter seemed stronger. “I’ll always be on hand when you need me,” Eleanor promised.

  In Eleanor’s absence, Laura Delano and Margaret Suckley once again accompanied the president on his trip. Ross McIntire, Steve Early, Grace Tully, and Basil O’Connor were also on the train, though, from what Tommy could gather, Roosevelt spent all his time with Laura and Margaret, “had two meals every day with them and only once or twice had any of the others on the train at meals.” Feeling irritated at Laura Delano, whom she considered “an imperious thing,” Tommy failed to understand that on trips like this, when he was out among thousands of people all day long, the president needed to relax, and with Laura and Margaret he could say what he wanted and never worry about the consequences.

  As usual, Margaret was in charge of the president’s dog, Fala. A favorite with the crowds, Fala was invariably greeted by oohs and aahs whenever he emerged from the train for his limbering-up walks. Laura had also brought along a dog, a five-month-old Irish setter. “She had to get off at every stop,” Tommy complained, “find a grass stop and wait for the biological functions which she then discussed in detail with anyone who would listen. One night she was off the train and the secret service did not realize it until the train had started. They threw her on and threw the dog after her and were much annoyed.”

  The president stopped first at the Parris Island Marine boot camp in South Carolina, where two thousand recruits were massed to render honors and be reviewed. After the official ceremonies, the president was driven to the rifle range, where, in the midst of a howling windstorm, he witnessed an elaborate target practice with Garand rifles.

  No longer were American soldiers training with broomsticks and stovepipes; no longer did the army look like “a few nice boys with BB guns.” By the spring of 1943, after only three years of mobilization, the American army had expanded from fewer than five hundred thousand to 4.3 million, and the president had authorized a total of 7.5 million by the end of the year. Nothing so large had ever been created in such a short time. “Just imagining it and wi
lling it into existence,” historian Geoffrey Perrett has written in his study of the American army in World War II, “was a brilliant, thrilling adventure of the spirit.”

  Nor were the men soft and overweight, as they had been in September of 1940, when the president first witnessed maneuvers in upstate New York. At Fort Benning, Georgia, the next day, the president was told that the men in training had pulled in their belts an average of four inches while adding an inch to their chests and ten pounds of muscle. Driving through the wooded hilly terrain of Fort Benning, the president saw paratroopers leaping from huge transports in groups of eighty-two and watched with interest as officer candidates ducked and dodged through a field alive with tracer bullets and exploding charges.

  “Fort Benning is such an immense post,” Roosevelt’s naval aide William Rigdon wrote in his report of the trip, “and there was so much of interest happening here today, as to create within one the same feeling he would experience in attending his first 5 ring circus.” After visiting the Parachute School, Roosevelt visited the Infantry School, where every phase of the complex training of an infantryman was demonstrated. “Even in the Infantry, the ground arm requiring the least technical training,” army historian Robert Palmer notes in his study of the procurement of enlisted personnel, “the private had to understand the use of a dozen weapons. He had to acquire at least an elementary knowledge of many things besides: camouflage and concealment; mine removal and the detection of booby traps; patrolling and map reading; and combat intelligence; recognition of American, Allied and enemy aircraft, armored vehicles, and other equipment; the use and disposal of captured equipment; the processing of prisoners of war; first aid, field sanitation, and maintenance of life and health out of doors over long periods and under conditions of extreme difficulty.”

  Although these facts were understood by the high command of the armed forces, the combination of voluntary enlistment in the navy and the Marine Corps, and priorities established in 1942 which gave the army air force first call on the army’s highest-quality men, had left a disproportionate share of the nation’s lowest-quality enlistees—in terms of intelligence and education—in the ground forces. By mid-1943, Lieutenant General Leslie McNair, commanding general of the army ground forces, was so worried about the situation, believing that American soldiers were sustaining avoidable casualties because ground troops “did not represent a fair cross section of the nation’s manpower,” that the priority of air and ground forces was reversed.

  At Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, the following day, the president inspected three companies of WAAC trainees. Standing in formation along the border of the parade field, trim and neat in their khaki summer uniforms, the women were so excited to see the president that they momentarily forgot their military status and broke ranks to wave. The president smiled broadly and waved back. The next day, he enjoyed a hearty meal at Camp Gruber consisting of salad, chili con carne, macaroni, carrots, French-fried potatoes, rolls, and butter. “I don’t get as good a meal as that in the White House,” he laughingly remarked, referring, of course, to the infamous Henrietta Nesbitt.

  Eleanor joined her husband at their son Elliott’s home in Fort Worth, Texas, on the morning of April 19. Though Elliott was overseas, the Roosevelts enjoyed the chance to see their daughter-in-law Ruth and their three grandchildren. “This is a lovely restful home,” Eleanor noted in her column that day, though everywhere she looked she was reminded of her absent son, who was stationed in Africa. “How many men there are today whose little children will have to learn to know them after their babyhood is over,” she remarked. Photographs, books, saddles, and pictures all spoke of her son’s interests, but it might be years before he would be home again.

  The next day, the president and the first lady headed to Monterrey, Mexico, for dinner with Mexican President and Mrs. Manuel Avila Camacho. Though the visit was not announced until that afternoon, the streets were lined with thousands of people holding flags, flowers, and children. Ever since the president’s Good Neighbor Policy in 1933, which declared America’s commitment to equality and cooperation among the American republics and called for an abolition of all artificial barriers to trade, Roosevelt had been a popular figure in Latin America. Driving with Mrs. Avila Camacho, Eleanor proudly carried on a small conversation in Spanish, the result of the Spanish lessons she had begun that winter in Washington. At Corpus Christi, Texas, the following day, the president addressed the body of naval cadets and witnessed an impressive aerial show highlighted by an exhibition of dive-bombing in which seaplanes dived to within fifty feet of the water before releasing their dummy bombs over a small yellow float moored in the bay. At each direct hit, the crowd roared with applause. There was also a large contingent of WAVES at the base, and Eleanor was amused to learn that “some of the officers who had been very much opposed to them were now clamoring for more.”

  On Easter Sunday, the president stopped at Fort Riley, Kansas, one of the oldest military posts in the nation, dating back to 1852. After lunch at the Cavalry School Club, Roosevelt spoke reassuringly to the troops, contrasting this inspection tour with the last one he had made, seven months earlier. “It seems to me that I see in you that intangible thing,” he said, “a very definite improvement.” Morale was strikingly higher than it had been before. He could see it by watching the faces of the officers and listening to them talk. He could see it by looking at the tough seasoned bodies of the young recruits. He could see it by driving through the grounds of bustling camps where only dirt and mud had existed a short time before. “The Army has gone through growing pains and today the Army is a grown-up unit.” Indeed, so impressed was he by the healthy appearance of the men and women he had seen that he had begun, he admitted, to come around to the idea Eleanor had originally backed, of continuing some form of national service even in peacetime.

  On returning to Washington, the president met with the press. “His spirits were higher and he looked fresher,” reporters noted. He had seen “a picture of America’s resources, physical, industrial, agricultural and spiritual,” being summoned to “an all out effort” to win the war. “He had traveled many miles in various kinds of conveyances, had felt sun and wind and rain, had eaten turkey, hot dogs, chili and a seven course Mexican dinner, had made talks and been among crowds. But for him, it was fun; it was one of his favorite ways of relaxing.”

  • • •

  In the middle of the president’s tour, the White House mail pouch had carried a disturbing letter from Interior Secretary Ickes suggesting that the situation in the Japanese internment camps was rapidly becoming worse. The evacuees, Ickes warned, “who first accepted with philosophical understanding the decision of their Government,” were becoming increasingly bitter. “I do not think that we can disregard the unnecessary creating of a hostile group right in our own territory,” Ickes wrote.

  Troubled by the tone of Ickes’ letter, the president asked Eleanor to take a side trip to the Gila River Camp in Arizona before returning to Washington. It was a risky request for Roosevelt to make, knowing as he did the strength of Eleanor’s negative feelings about the original order to evacuate. Sending her to check things out would inevitably involve her again in the situation. But there was no one else he trusted as much to bring him back an unvarnished picture of what was going on.

  The Gila River Camp, housing twelve thousand people, was one of ten permanent camps built by the War Relocation Authority to house the hundred thousand evacuees. The others included Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Topaz in Utah, Manzanar in California, and Minidoka in Idaho. Set in the middle of the desert, Gila endured temperatures that ranged between 125 degrees in the summer and thirty degrees below in winter. In the summer, one evacuee wrote, “You could not take hold of a doorknob without a handkerchief in hand.” On summer nights, the internees all slept out of doors, some between wet sheets, others with wet towels on their heads.

  Arriving on April 23, Eleanor was spared the unbearable heat of the summer sun, though she did en
counter the swirling dust that left everyone’s hair white, mouths gritty, and eyes red. “It chokes you and brings about irritations of the nose and throat,” she wrote. For many evacuees, the ever-present dust in the desert camps was enemy number one. “It gets into every pore in the body,” one evacuee wrote; “it comes in through every crack in the room of which there are thousands; it comes sifting down from the roof and it gets through your clothes and sticks to your body.”

  Eleanor was escorted through the camp by Dillon Myer, director of the War Relocation Authority, which oversaw the ten centers. Myer was overwhelmed by Eleanor’s energy. She “covered everything in the center of any importance,” he wrote, “including all the wards in the hospitals, the schools and all phases of the service activities so that she could report back to the President.”

  Eleanor came away from her sojourn with increased respect for the ingenuity and endurance of the Japanese Americans. Despite the wind and the dust, the internees had created a productive community. On the land surrounding the camp, they were raising livestock and producing vegetables sufficient to feed the entire camp. A camouflage-net factory was producing far beyond expectations. Within the camp itself, the evacuees had set up their own barber shops, dental offices, newspapers, adult-education courses, movie theaters, and government. In the ten centers as a whole, over 25 percent of the adult population were enrolled in a wide variety of classes, including psychology, English, American history, cabinetmaking, radio repair, auto mechanics, and shorthand, with English and American history the two most popular subjects.