The captain was Benjamin Davis jr. The mention stating he wanted to be a pilot give it away.
The Falcon Cannot Hear: The Second American Civil War 1937-1944
- Thread starter Ephraim Ben Raphael
- Start date
- Status
And the Harry mentioned in the update is almost certainly Harry Haywood.
Ephraim Ben Raphael
Banned
Race and Racism- 1941-1942
The Banner Revolutionary Organization of Willing Negros had never possessed a clear chain of command. Created by the merger of several groups that been founded independently by surviving members of the Free Action Movement, it operated as a series of cells under local leadership which co-operated whenever possible. This configuration made the organization particularly difficult to suppress, but also meant that establishing any kind of coordinated strategy for the Browns was impossible. Relations between Brown and Blue partisans were handled independently, and when several of the organization’s commanders gathered together in early 1939 to dispatch a representative to Chicago it was an unusual display of unity. By 1940 however the need for centralization had become apparent to most of what was colloquially referred to as the Brown Army, and serious efforts were launched to organize a real leadership. Eisenhower’s reveal of the brutality of the camps lit a fire under the African-American resistance (who had been aware of the existence but unsure of the extent of the concentration camp program) as did the sudden weakness of the Whites, and on September 12, 1940 the Executive Committee of the BROWN met for the first time in the small town of Estill, South Carolina. For their chairman they elected a man who had gained the respect of his comrades and already wielded influence outside of his personal command;
Captain Benjamin Oliver Davis, Jr., United States Army.
Brown fighters in Mississippi in 1941.
When the Second American Civil War broke out there were only two African-American officers in the entire United States Army; Benjamin O. Davis Jr. and his father Benjamin O. Davis Sr. Both remained loyal to the chief of staff and reported for duty under the military government. Unfortunately for the father and son they immediately fell victim to the wave of suspicion that swept MacArthur’s regime. Oscar Stanton De Priest, the Congressional Representative who had appointed Benjamin Jr. to West Point, had joined the Constituent Assembly and J. Edgar Hoover believed that both men were potential agents for the Blues. On September 11, 1937 they were arrested under suspicion of subversive activities by members of the FBI. According to a report filed by the agents sent to arrest the elder Davis, he resisted violently and they had to use force to bring him in. It seems unlikely that the sixty-year-old lieutenant colonel actually fought the agents, judging by all accounts of the man such an act would have been completely out of character. Regardless he sustained a head injury during the arrest which probably was the cause of his death two weeks later in prison. Upon being told of his father’s death, the younger Davis expressed his outrage; “There was never more loyal or zealous man in the service of the United States government. He would have carried a rifle in the infantry if MacArthur had ordered him to, he would have laid down his life for his country gladly… in the end it was not my father who betrayed America, it was America who betrayed my father.” Benjamin Davis Jr. remained imprisoned for the next year, until Washington fell to the Whites who first interned him along with a number of other Khaki officers and later sent him to a concentration camp for middle class African Americans at Sangaree, South Carolina.
Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Sr. on the right, Captain Benjamin O. Davis Jr. on the left.
While in Sangaree Davis was for the first time exposed to radical ideologies, notably African Nationalism and Pan-Africanism. Among the intellectuals imprisoned with him were such people as Cyril Briggs, Gabriel Johnson, Henrietta Vinton Davis (no relation), Clifford Bourne, and James Robert Stewart whose ideas strongly influenced the young man. Many of them argued that the African people were in fact a single nation spread out among multiple countries and that rather than striving to become Americans, Cubans, or Englishmen, they should embrace their own independent culture and return to Africa which they hoped would become independent of the colonial powers. To the disillusioned former US Army captain who had struggled all his life to overcome discrimination and serve his country in uniform, only to have his father killed and himself imprisoned by that same country, these ideas were attractive. Where Davis different from most of the intellectuals around him, was his refutation of the return to Africa. He was familiar with the authoritarian nature of the Liberian and Haitian governments and considered them failures as free black countries. Rather than seek returning to Africa and creating a free African Nation there, he posited one in the United States of America.
The concentration camp outside of Sangaree, South Carolina.
“I was born in Washington D.C,” the Captain wrote in the makeshift diary he kept whilst imprisoned. “a city whose people were as black as they were white, yet which served as the seat of white dominion over Negros. What makes Monrovia superior to this other African city on this other side of the Atlantic? What makes the “White House”, built by black hands, unsuitable as the seat of a Negro government?… Why should the African Nation of America be required to abandon its home in order to be free on a distant shore?” One thing Benjamin Davis was sure about; “To truly be the masters of our own destiny the African Nation of America must be sovereign in its own country… a country loyal to the ideals of Jefferson and Lincoln.” He had difficulty convincing his fellow inmates of his ideas until January 8, 1939 when he took part in a successful breakout from Sangaree camp that saw him and some twenty or thirty others escape from their lackadaisical Klan guards via tunnel dug under one of the barracks.
Now free Davis successfully joined the BROWN, quickly becoming one of its most capable commanders. The Brown fighters found his arguments about an “African Nation of America” to be exciting and convincing in a way they didn’t see Pan-Africanism. Many worried that even if the progressive factions won the war, whatever new government entered existence would be white dominated and any rights African-Americans gained would have been given to them by the progressives instead of earned by they themselves. Many agreed that having their own state in America would be the only way that they could really protect themselves from discrimination and prejudice. And unlike the Pan-Africanists, Davis didn’t propose anyone having to abandon their homes where they had lived their entire lives. The “Nationalists” who subscribed to his branch of African Nationalism, soon became one of the major political factions among the Browns, alongside the Communists who supported the ASR and the Loyalists who supported either the Blues or the Khakis. It was thanks to an alliance between the Communists and the Nationalists that he managed to win election as Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Banner Revolutionary Organization of Willing Negros, and found himself in a position to make his plans a reality.
The house at Estill, South Carolina where the Executive Committee of the BROWN first met. It did not survive the war.
As the Browns planned their uprising and the Red Guard advanced quickly into the American South, the White government was in turmoil. The Klan, the Social Justice Platoons, and the Silver Legion were more interested in blaming each other for their military failures than actually correcting said failures, and the White army remained paralyzed and demoralization. A canny politician, Huey Long had been able to weld together the disparate political factions that made up the Whites, but with him isolated and powerless the movement was cracking apart. A new wave of conscription was ordered, but the new recruits were untrained and there were few weapons to spare to arm them. One unit about to go into battle in northern Tennessee had only half its members armed, the unarmed conscripts were told to “wait until someone else dies and take his rifle”. Undisciplined paramilitary troops that were sufficient to fight guerrillas and keep civil order proved a poor counter to the Reds’ Lincoln tanks. White resources were further drained by the expansion of the General Anti-Partisan Plan, it had previously focused on African-Americans but now Americans of “degenerate racial character” including Jews, those of mixed race, and individuals with East Asian or Southern European descent were being arrested and interred.
But the Whites weren’t the only ones interning people on racial grounds.
In early 1941 the Canadian and their Pactist allies moved in to deal the death blow to the beleaguered Japanese invaders. General Arnold cracked the San Bernardino Mountains Line and moved in to liberate Los Angeles and San Diego. Inspired by Kuribayashi’s tactics in Manchuria, Major General Cho fought to the death in both cities despite explicit orders from Masaharu Homma not to. The Japanese forces that had been stopped short of Sacramento were forced back to San Francisco Bay by the West Coast Division, which had the numbers in men, artillery, armor, and aircraft. Faced with an unwinnable battle, the Poet General ordered delaying actions to be carried out with hope of slowing down the Americans for as long as possible so his surviving forces could evacuate to Alaska and Hawaii. He himself remained behind, when Blue soldiers burst into the mayor’s office in the San Francisco City Hall Homma set off two tons of ammunition and explosives that his men had been forced to leave behind, killing himself and about a dozen American soldiers. Although San Francisco fell with minimal bloodshed- Homma had preferred to evacuate his forces rather than afflict the civilian population in a useless last stand- Colonel Tsuji Masanobu convinced about 5,000 soldiers and sailors to stay behind at San Jose where they deliberately destroyed as much of the city as possible before being annihilated by the Blues.
The ruins of San Jose after being liberated by the West Coast Division.
The last pocket of Imperial forces in the United States proper were the remaining men of the Imperial Guard Division with Tomoyuki Yamashita in Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. Upon hearing of Homma’s orders to evacuate, Yamashita asked his ten thousand survivors for volunteers to stay behind with him. Almost universally they opted to remain and fight, motivated by the old Yamato Damashii. The Canadians flooded the dense rainforest of the central peninsula with troops, still armed bands continued to resist guerilla style for another six months until the last of them were finally flushed out. Of the approximately 10,000 diehards exactly 218 surrendered or were taken prisoner. It was not true as Japanese propaganda claimed that the last words of most Japanese soldiers were “Ten Thousand Years for His Majesty the Emperor!” (one Japanese journalist noted that in fact most dying men called out for their mothers, regardless of nationality) but there was at least one case of it happening. On July 1, 1941, when Yamashita himself was finally surrounded, starving, ragged, and completely out of ammunition, the Tiger drew his sword and shouted one last “Tennouheika Banzai!” before attacking the Canadians and forcing then to gun him down.
A member of the Imperial Guard Division surrendering to Canadian soldiers.
With the threat from the Japanese military abated, the Allies began an immediate program of arresting and interning all Japanese-Americans in California, Oregon, and Washington, and all Japanese-Canadians in British Columbia. Together the internees numbered approximately 132,000 people who were relocated to camps in the Rockies or further west. In America the camps were largely administered by the 104th Infantry Division which was operating in a supportive capacity towards the Pact, there Japanese men were conscripted for labor repairing war damage and maintaining infrastructure. In Canada the Department of National Defense handled the internees, many of whom were used for agricultural labor in Alberta. North and south of the border the internment camps were “self-supporting” in that their inhabitants were expected to work and provide a contribution to the war effort equal to that which was required to maintain the camps. The cost of the relocation was paid for by confiscating the property of Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians- this ranged from the contents of bank accounts to automobiles and jewelry. Land ownership was revoked for most of the internees, in America their houses were turned over to European-Americans who had been displaced by the invasion or the war. The intention by the Provisional Government was nothing less than the complete dismantling of the Japanese-American community as evidenced by Sections 4 and 5 of the Anti-Espionage and Sabotage Act which authorized internment in the USA;
“4. All Japanese language publications and publishers are hereby banned, and all Japanese language material is to be destroyed.
5. All facilities for the encouragement of Emperor-worship and pro-Imperial propaganda are to be closed and their ownership transferred to the War Department.”
Section 4 resulted in book burnings whose size was only surpassed by book burnings in White America, Section 5 proved the justification for the destruction or re-purposing of virtually all Buddhist and Shinto places of worship in the western United States.
Japanese-Americans in San Francisco being loaded onto train-cars en-route to a camp in Nevada.
“I remember when the soldiers came to our neighborhood.” Hisaye Yamamoto, only a child at the time of the internment, later recalled in her memoirs. “They shouted and banged on all the doors until everyone came out… we were forced to stand at attention for an hour while they shouted abuse. They called us animals and accused us of not being human… Eric Hayashi came out of his house wearing the blue uniform of a police officer, which he’d been in Hawaii before moving to California… the soldiers tore off his jacket. I remember watching the bright brass buttons bouncing on the pavement as they came off… he was beaten with rifle butts until he collapsed.”
Even respected people who were otherwise great enemies of racism were giving into expressions of hatred. Haim Kantorovich questioned whether or not a person could Japanese descent could ever truly “have loyalties other than to their emperor.” Walter Lippman wrote a harsh condemnation of Japanese culture and “it’s valuation of cruelty, imperialism, and inhuman violence.” It was proposed by a respect university professor that the long period of isolation on the Japanese islands had “led to systematic inbreeding… and an evolutionary trend towards island dwarfism, like that seen in the Canis lupus hodophilax- the Honshu Wolf.” He was an exception, most in Blue America cast their racism in cultural terms, arguing that Japanese social mores encouraged “inherently vicious tendencies” that made them as a people dangerous to the war effort and the American public.
Anti-Japanese poster in Blue America.
Not all of the camps were so terrible, when Emilio Rizal and the Philippine Corps chose to abandon their alliance with Japan, they were permitted to withdraw east into Canada where the Canadian government established a camp for them near Calgary. There they were free to come and go and many found employment in the nearby city and interacted amicably with the locals. Conditions there were adequate, and a number of the internees choose to stay when the war ended, forming the basis of the present day Filipino community in Alberta.
Into late 1941 the war continued to go better and better for the Red Oak Pact and its allies. The Whites were demoralized, divided, and preoccupied with diverting resources to their expanded system of concentration camps. With power no longer centralized under Long, their military strategy was uncoordinated as different factions squabbled about what to do. The cracks were not yet showing among the anti-White cobelligerents who were working together as they advanced through the Upper South. By November 1941 the American Soviet Republic in particular had more than doubled the territory under its control and was on the verge of invading northern Mississippi and Alabama. It was then, with the White Army fully committed to a losing defense and allies close at hand, that Benjamin Davis led the Organization in a full-scale uprising against the Montgomery Regime.
Brown partisans during the 1941-42 uprising.
By mobilizing its total strength, BROWN was initially able to raise approximately 30,000-40,000 fighters across the South. Most of its forces were concentrated in Mississippi and South Carolina, although there was a substantial Organization presence in Georgia and Alabama, and a smaller one in Louisiana and Arkansas. In terms of effectiveness Brown fighters were on par with second- and third-line White paramilitaries that they faced. Davis avoided major cities where more competent troops were stationed, and instead focused on capturing the countryside and cutting off White communications and transport. African-American civilians were recruited (in a few cases conscripted) to bolster the Brown numbers, and by the end of the year there were growing pockets of liberated territory in the Deep South. Forced to split its attention in multiple directions, the demoralized White Army began to collapse wholesale. The Reds reached the camp at Lebanon, Tennessee and linked up with the African-American insurgents in northern Mississippi. Browns liberated the Klan concentration camp at Scottsboro as well as the camp at Sangaree. Blue partisans established similar free areas in the Appalachians mountains. In the second week of January 1942, a new uprising broke out in the city of Atlanta, Georgia by the city’s African-American community. For the first time BROWN made an assault on a White center of population and industry.
Opposing it were ten thousand army regulars from the 31st Infantry Division (White) and a similar number of paramilitary troops. On paper it looked clear-cut; there were only 6,000 Brown “regulars” operating outside of the city, inside were 1,000 Browns and about 50,000 rebelling civilians. About sixty percent of Atlanta was white and could not be expected to support the uprising. However the city was starving, 1/6 of its population had been conscripted, many had died, the Hunting Season and the string of subsequent defeats had left Atlantans disillusioned, miserable, and not eager to fight for the ailing government in Montgomery. Relatively few whites supported the rebels (several thousand did, mostly members of the suppressed trade unions) but virtually none supported the Whites. The soldiers themselves were in poor condition, they knew that they were losing the war and the damage that the purges had done to their morale are impossible to estimate. They had no gasoline for their vehicles, limited amounts of ammunition, and most just wanted to keep themselves and their families safe. Only the Silver Legionaires and Klu Klux Klan members truly fought hard- the leader of the Legionaires in Atlanta was a minister named Erich Burger. Before his men would execute captured rebels or black civilians he would call out “In the holy name of god, fire!”
Silver Legionaries during the Battle of Atlanta.
On February 11, Davis himself arrived along with a force of several thousand additional men and women who had marched down from South Carolina. The commander of the Atlanta garrison was a World War I veteran and former National Guardsman named Albert Blanding who saw no value in fighting to the death for a losing cause. His men had begun deserting and he had no reason to believe that help was on the way. Blanding negotiated the withdrawal of his regulars with Davis, who agreed to let them leave unmolested along with any civilians who also wanted to go. The retreating regulars supervised a column of refugees, a combination of citizens who had been frightened by rumors of what the Browns might do to them, and citizens who just wanted to get away from the urban warfare that had convulsed their home. Before going, Blanding extracted a promise from his Brown counterpart that the whites who remained in Atlanta would be respected, Davis gave his word gladly and issued orders to that effect. The extent to which those orders were obeyed was very mixed, but they were at least given.
Burger and the remaining irregulars rejected the deal and fought on, but by the end of the month they had been defeated and their leader executed. By this point Milt’s combined army of Blues and Collectivists had reached South Carolina and the Red Guard was surrounding Montgomery itself. In Texas a group of previously unimportant Democrats led by Lyndon Johnson created a rival state government in Amarillo which joined the Continental Congress. Across the country optimists predicted that war was nearly over.
Lyndon B. Johnson as Texas Commissioner of Education before becoming Acting Governor of Texas.
On March 8, 1942, in the city of Atlanta, Benjamin O. David Jr., Harry Haywood, Gabriel Johnson, and seven others put their names to a document which read;
“On this day, the eighth day of March in the forty-second year of the twentieth century we the undersigned have gathered here to issue a declaration of independence for the African Nation of America, and to list the causes which have driven us to take this step.
First that despite our most sincere loyalty and devotion to the United States of America, the government of the United States and of its several states has oppressed and degraded us, denying us the rights and freedoms which we as men and women deserve.
Second that we have repeatedly and peacefully sought the redress of our grievances to no avail.
Third that the government of the United States of America to which we previously owed and provided our full and undivided loyalties has ceased to exist, being brought down by revolution and illegal usurpation of power.
Fourth that a body claiming falsely to be the successor to the above government has deliberately and knowingly engaged in the wholesale slaughter and systematic murder of the African Nation of America with the intention of reducing that people to a state of complete destruction or at least subservience.
Fifth that these repeated experiences have proven unquestionably that the African Nation of America will never be truly free so long as it lacks the freedom to determine its own future and is reliant on others to supply its god-given rights, rather than being able to assure those rights itself.
Sixth that this freedom and these rights can only be safeguarded by the existence of a sovereign, democratic, Afro-American state.
Therefore we the undersigned, acting as representatives of the African Nation of America, do in the name and authority of the above nation’s people, solemnly publish and declare the existence of the Free and Independent Republic of New Africa, with full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do."
Although the original document was lost in a fire in 1960, several original copies of the New African Declaration of Independence survive, including the one pictured above.
The Banner Revolutionary Organization of Willing Negros had never possessed a clear chain of command. Created by the merger of several groups that been founded independently by surviving members of the Free Action Movement, it operated as a series of cells under local leadership which co-operated whenever possible. This configuration made the organization particularly difficult to suppress, but also meant that establishing any kind of coordinated strategy for the Browns was impossible. Relations between Brown and Blue partisans were handled independently, and when several of the organization’s commanders gathered together in early 1939 to dispatch a representative to Chicago it was an unusual display of unity. By 1940 however the need for centralization had become apparent to most of what was colloquially referred to as the Brown Army, and serious efforts were launched to organize a real leadership. Eisenhower’s reveal of the brutality of the camps lit a fire under the African-American resistance (who had been aware of the existence but unsure of the extent of the concentration camp program) as did the sudden weakness of the Whites, and on September 12, 1940 the Executive Committee of the BROWN met for the first time in the small town of Estill, South Carolina. For their chairman they elected a man who had gained the respect of his comrades and already wielded influence outside of his personal command;
Captain Benjamin Oliver Davis, Jr., United States Army.
Brown fighters in Mississippi in 1941.
When the Second American Civil War broke out there were only two African-American officers in the entire United States Army; Benjamin O. Davis Jr. and his father Benjamin O. Davis Sr. Both remained loyal to the chief of staff and reported for duty under the military government. Unfortunately for the father and son they immediately fell victim to the wave of suspicion that swept MacArthur’s regime. Oscar Stanton De Priest, the Congressional Representative who had appointed Benjamin Jr. to West Point, had joined the Constituent Assembly and J. Edgar Hoover believed that both men were potential agents for the Blues. On September 11, 1937 they were arrested under suspicion of subversive activities by members of the FBI. According to a report filed by the agents sent to arrest the elder Davis, he resisted violently and they had to use force to bring him in. It seems unlikely that the sixty-year-old lieutenant colonel actually fought the agents, judging by all accounts of the man such an act would have been completely out of character. Regardless he sustained a head injury during the arrest which probably was the cause of his death two weeks later in prison. Upon being told of his father’s death, the younger Davis expressed his outrage; “There was never more loyal or zealous man in the service of the United States government. He would have carried a rifle in the infantry if MacArthur had ordered him to, he would have laid down his life for his country gladly… in the end it was not my father who betrayed America, it was America who betrayed my father.” Benjamin Davis Jr. remained imprisoned for the next year, until Washington fell to the Whites who first interned him along with a number of other Khaki officers and later sent him to a concentration camp for middle class African Americans at Sangaree, South Carolina.
Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Sr. on the right, Captain Benjamin O. Davis Jr. on the left.
While in Sangaree Davis was for the first time exposed to radical ideologies, notably African Nationalism and Pan-Africanism. Among the intellectuals imprisoned with him were such people as Cyril Briggs, Gabriel Johnson, Henrietta Vinton Davis (no relation), Clifford Bourne, and James Robert Stewart whose ideas strongly influenced the young man. Many of them argued that the African people were in fact a single nation spread out among multiple countries and that rather than striving to become Americans, Cubans, or Englishmen, they should embrace their own independent culture and return to Africa which they hoped would become independent of the colonial powers. To the disillusioned former US Army captain who had struggled all his life to overcome discrimination and serve his country in uniform, only to have his father killed and himself imprisoned by that same country, these ideas were attractive. Where Davis different from most of the intellectuals around him, was his refutation of the return to Africa. He was familiar with the authoritarian nature of the Liberian and Haitian governments and considered them failures as free black countries. Rather than seek returning to Africa and creating a free African Nation there, he posited one in the United States of America.
The concentration camp outside of Sangaree, South Carolina.
“I was born in Washington D.C,” the Captain wrote in the makeshift diary he kept whilst imprisoned. “a city whose people were as black as they were white, yet which served as the seat of white dominion over Negros. What makes Monrovia superior to this other African city on this other side of the Atlantic? What makes the “White House”, built by black hands, unsuitable as the seat of a Negro government?… Why should the African Nation of America be required to abandon its home in order to be free on a distant shore?” One thing Benjamin Davis was sure about; “To truly be the masters of our own destiny the African Nation of America must be sovereign in its own country… a country loyal to the ideals of Jefferson and Lincoln.” He had difficulty convincing his fellow inmates of his ideas until January 8, 1939 when he took part in a successful breakout from Sangaree camp that saw him and some twenty or thirty others escape from their lackadaisical Klan guards via tunnel dug under one of the barracks.
Now free Davis successfully joined the BROWN, quickly becoming one of its most capable commanders. The Brown fighters found his arguments about an “African Nation of America” to be exciting and convincing in a way they didn’t see Pan-Africanism. Many worried that even if the progressive factions won the war, whatever new government entered existence would be white dominated and any rights African-Americans gained would have been given to them by the progressives instead of earned by they themselves. Many agreed that having their own state in America would be the only way that they could really protect themselves from discrimination and prejudice. And unlike the Pan-Africanists, Davis didn’t propose anyone having to abandon their homes where they had lived their entire lives. The “Nationalists” who subscribed to his branch of African Nationalism, soon became one of the major political factions among the Browns, alongside the Communists who supported the ASR and the Loyalists who supported either the Blues or the Khakis. It was thanks to an alliance between the Communists and the Nationalists that he managed to win election as Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Banner Revolutionary Organization of Willing Negros, and found himself in a position to make his plans a reality.
The house at Estill, South Carolina where the Executive Committee of the BROWN first met. It did not survive the war.
As the Browns planned their uprising and the Red Guard advanced quickly into the American South, the White government was in turmoil. The Klan, the Social Justice Platoons, and the Silver Legion were more interested in blaming each other for their military failures than actually correcting said failures, and the White army remained paralyzed and demoralization. A canny politician, Huey Long had been able to weld together the disparate political factions that made up the Whites, but with him isolated and powerless the movement was cracking apart. A new wave of conscription was ordered, but the new recruits were untrained and there were few weapons to spare to arm them. One unit about to go into battle in northern Tennessee had only half its members armed, the unarmed conscripts were told to “wait until someone else dies and take his rifle”. Undisciplined paramilitary troops that were sufficient to fight guerrillas and keep civil order proved a poor counter to the Reds’ Lincoln tanks. White resources were further drained by the expansion of the General Anti-Partisan Plan, it had previously focused on African-Americans but now Americans of “degenerate racial character” including Jews, those of mixed race, and individuals with East Asian or Southern European descent were being arrested and interred.
But the Whites weren’t the only ones interning people on racial grounds.
In early 1941 the Canadian and their Pactist allies moved in to deal the death blow to the beleaguered Japanese invaders. General Arnold cracked the San Bernardino Mountains Line and moved in to liberate Los Angeles and San Diego. Inspired by Kuribayashi’s tactics in Manchuria, Major General Cho fought to the death in both cities despite explicit orders from Masaharu Homma not to. The Japanese forces that had been stopped short of Sacramento were forced back to San Francisco Bay by the West Coast Division, which had the numbers in men, artillery, armor, and aircraft. Faced with an unwinnable battle, the Poet General ordered delaying actions to be carried out with hope of slowing down the Americans for as long as possible so his surviving forces could evacuate to Alaska and Hawaii. He himself remained behind, when Blue soldiers burst into the mayor’s office in the San Francisco City Hall Homma set off two tons of ammunition and explosives that his men had been forced to leave behind, killing himself and about a dozen American soldiers. Although San Francisco fell with minimal bloodshed- Homma had preferred to evacuate his forces rather than afflict the civilian population in a useless last stand- Colonel Tsuji Masanobu convinced about 5,000 soldiers and sailors to stay behind at San Jose where they deliberately destroyed as much of the city as possible before being annihilated by the Blues.
The ruins of San Jose after being liberated by the West Coast Division.
The last pocket of Imperial forces in the United States proper were the remaining men of the Imperial Guard Division with Tomoyuki Yamashita in Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. Upon hearing of Homma’s orders to evacuate, Yamashita asked his ten thousand survivors for volunteers to stay behind with him. Almost universally they opted to remain and fight, motivated by the old Yamato Damashii. The Canadians flooded the dense rainforest of the central peninsula with troops, still armed bands continued to resist guerilla style for another six months until the last of them were finally flushed out. Of the approximately 10,000 diehards exactly 218 surrendered or were taken prisoner. It was not true as Japanese propaganda claimed that the last words of most Japanese soldiers were “Ten Thousand Years for His Majesty the Emperor!” (one Japanese journalist noted that in fact most dying men called out for their mothers, regardless of nationality) but there was at least one case of it happening. On July 1, 1941, when Yamashita himself was finally surrounded, starving, ragged, and completely out of ammunition, the Tiger drew his sword and shouted one last “Tennouheika Banzai!” before attacking the Canadians and forcing then to gun him down.
A member of the Imperial Guard Division surrendering to Canadian soldiers.
With the threat from the Japanese military abated, the Allies began an immediate program of arresting and interning all Japanese-Americans in California, Oregon, and Washington, and all Japanese-Canadians in British Columbia. Together the internees numbered approximately 132,000 people who were relocated to camps in the Rockies or further west. In America the camps were largely administered by the 104th Infantry Division which was operating in a supportive capacity towards the Pact, there Japanese men were conscripted for labor repairing war damage and maintaining infrastructure. In Canada the Department of National Defense handled the internees, many of whom were used for agricultural labor in Alberta. North and south of the border the internment camps were “self-supporting” in that their inhabitants were expected to work and provide a contribution to the war effort equal to that which was required to maintain the camps. The cost of the relocation was paid for by confiscating the property of Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians- this ranged from the contents of bank accounts to automobiles and jewelry. Land ownership was revoked for most of the internees, in America their houses were turned over to European-Americans who had been displaced by the invasion or the war. The intention by the Provisional Government was nothing less than the complete dismantling of the Japanese-American community as evidenced by Sections 4 and 5 of the Anti-Espionage and Sabotage Act which authorized internment in the USA;
“4. All Japanese language publications and publishers are hereby banned, and all Japanese language material is to be destroyed.
5. All facilities for the encouragement of Emperor-worship and pro-Imperial propaganda are to be closed and their ownership transferred to the War Department.”
Section 4 resulted in book burnings whose size was only surpassed by book burnings in White America, Section 5 proved the justification for the destruction or re-purposing of virtually all Buddhist and Shinto places of worship in the western United States.
Japanese-Americans in San Francisco being loaded onto train-cars en-route to a camp in Nevada.
“I remember when the soldiers came to our neighborhood.” Hisaye Yamamoto, only a child at the time of the internment, later recalled in her memoirs. “They shouted and banged on all the doors until everyone came out… we were forced to stand at attention for an hour while they shouted abuse. They called us animals and accused us of not being human… Eric Hayashi came out of his house wearing the blue uniform of a police officer, which he’d been in Hawaii before moving to California… the soldiers tore off his jacket. I remember watching the bright brass buttons bouncing on the pavement as they came off… he was beaten with rifle butts until he collapsed.”
Even respected people who were otherwise great enemies of racism were giving into expressions of hatred. Haim Kantorovich questioned whether or not a person could Japanese descent could ever truly “have loyalties other than to their emperor.” Walter Lippman wrote a harsh condemnation of Japanese culture and “it’s valuation of cruelty, imperialism, and inhuman violence.” It was proposed by a respect university professor that the long period of isolation on the Japanese islands had “led to systematic inbreeding… and an evolutionary trend towards island dwarfism, like that seen in the Canis lupus hodophilax- the Honshu Wolf.” He was an exception, most in Blue America cast their racism in cultural terms, arguing that Japanese social mores encouraged “inherently vicious tendencies” that made them as a people dangerous to the war effort and the American public.
Anti-Japanese poster in Blue America.
Not all of the camps were so terrible, when Emilio Rizal and the Philippine Corps chose to abandon their alliance with Japan, they were permitted to withdraw east into Canada where the Canadian government established a camp for them near Calgary. There they were free to come and go and many found employment in the nearby city and interacted amicably with the locals. Conditions there were adequate, and a number of the internees choose to stay when the war ended, forming the basis of the present day Filipino community in Alberta.
Into late 1941 the war continued to go better and better for the Red Oak Pact and its allies. The Whites were demoralized, divided, and preoccupied with diverting resources to their expanded system of concentration camps. With power no longer centralized under Long, their military strategy was uncoordinated as different factions squabbled about what to do. The cracks were not yet showing among the anti-White cobelligerents who were working together as they advanced through the Upper South. By November 1941 the American Soviet Republic in particular had more than doubled the territory under its control and was on the verge of invading northern Mississippi and Alabama. It was then, with the White Army fully committed to a losing defense and allies close at hand, that Benjamin Davis led the Organization in a full-scale uprising against the Montgomery Regime.
Brown partisans during the 1941-42 uprising.
By mobilizing its total strength, BROWN was initially able to raise approximately 30,000-40,000 fighters across the South. Most of its forces were concentrated in Mississippi and South Carolina, although there was a substantial Organization presence in Georgia and Alabama, and a smaller one in Louisiana and Arkansas. In terms of effectiveness Brown fighters were on par with second- and third-line White paramilitaries that they faced. Davis avoided major cities where more competent troops were stationed, and instead focused on capturing the countryside and cutting off White communications and transport. African-American civilians were recruited (in a few cases conscripted) to bolster the Brown numbers, and by the end of the year there were growing pockets of liberated territory in the Deep South. Forced to split its attention in multiple directions, the demoralized White Army began to collapse wholesale. The Reds reached the camp at Lebanon, Tennessee and linked up with the African-American insurgents in northern Mississippi. Browns liberated the Klan concentration camp at Scottsboro as well as the camp at Sangaree. Blue partisans established similar free areas in the Appalachians mountains. In the second week of January 1942, a new uprising broke out in the city of Atlanta, Georgia by the city’s African-American community. For the first time BROWN made an assault on a White center of population and industry.
Opposing it were ten thousand army regulars from the 31st Infantry Division (White) and a similar number of paramilitary troops. On paper it looked clear-cut; there were only 6,000 Brown “regulars” operating outside of the city, inside were 1,000 Browns and about 50,000 rebelling civilians. About sixty percent of Atlanta was white and could not be expected to support the uprising. However the city was starving, 1/6 of its population had been conscripted, many had died, the Hunting Season and the string of subsequent defeats had left Atlantans disillusioned, miserable, and not eager to fight for the ailing government in Montgomery. Relatively few whites supported the rebels (several thousand did, mostly members of the suppressed trade unions) but virtually none supported the Whites. The soldiers themselves were in poor condition, they knew that they were losing the war and the damage that the purges had done to their morale are impossible to estimate. They had no gasoline for their vehicles, limited amounts of ammunition, and most just wanted to keep themselves and their families safe. Only the Silver Legionaires and Klu Klux Klan members truly fought hard- the leader of the Legionaires in Atlanta was a minister named Erich Burger. Before his men would execute captured rebels or black civilians he would call out “In the holy name of god, fire!”
Silver Legionaries during the Battle of Atlanta.
On February 11, Davis himself arrived along with a force of several thousand additional men and women who had marched down from South Carolina. The commander of the Atlanta garrison was a World War I veteran and former National Guardsman named Albert Blanding who saw no value in fighting to the death for a losing cause. His men had begun deserting and he had no reason to believe that help was on the way. Blanding negotiated the withdrawal of his regulars with Davis, who agreed to let them leave unmolested along with any civilians who also wanted to go. The retreating regulars supervised a column of refugees, a combination of citizens who had been frightened by rumors of what the Browns might do to them, and citizens who just wanted to get away from the urban warfare that had convulsed their home. Before going, Blanding extracted a promise from his Brown counterpart that the whites who remained in Atlanta would be respected, Davis gave his word gladly and issued orders to that effect. The extent to which those orders were obeyed was very mixed, but they were at least given.
Burger and the remaining irregulars rejected the deal and fought on, but by the end of the month they had been defeated and their leader executed. By this point Milt’s combined army of Blues and Collectivists had reached South Carolina and the Red Guard was surrounding Montgomery itself. In Texas a group of previously unimportant Democrats led by Lyndon Johnson created a rival state government in Amarillo which joined the Continental Congress. Across the country optimists predicted that war was nearly over.
Lyndon B. Johnson as Texas Commissioner of Education before becoming Acting Governor of Texas.
On March 8, 1942, in the city of Atlanta, Benjamin O. David Jr., Harry Haywood, Gabriel Johnson, and seven others put their names to a document which read;
“On this day, the eighth day of March in the forty-second year of the twentieth century we the undersigned have gathered here to issue a declaration of independence for the African Nation of America, and to list the causes which have driven us to take this step.
First that despite our most sincere loyalty and devotion to the United States of America, the government of the United States and of its several states has oppressed and degraded us, denying us the rights and freedoms which we as men and women deserve.
Second that we have repeatedly and peacefully sought the redress of our grievances to no avail.
Third that the government of the United States of America to which we previously owed and provided our full and undivided loyalties has ceased to exist, being brought down by revolution and illegal usurpation of power.
Fourth that a body claiming falsely to be the successor to the above government has deliberately and knowingly engaged in the wholesale slaughter and systematic murder of the African Nation of America with the intention of reducing that people to a state of complete destruction or at least subservience.
Fifth that these repeated experiences have proven unquestionably that the African Nation of America will never be truly free so long as it lacks the freedom to determine its own future and is reliant on others to supply its god-given rights, rather than being able to assure those rights itself.
Sixth that this freedom and these rights can only be safeguarded by the existence of a sovereign, democratic, Afro-American state.
Therefore we the undersigned, acting as representatives of the African Nation of America, do in the name and authority of the above nation’s people, solemnly publish and declare the existence of the Free and Independent Republic of New Africa, with full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do."
Although the original document was lost in a fire in 1960, several original copies of the New African Declaration of Independence survive, including the one pictured above.
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The whites looks to be in a deep crisis, but there are still two years of war to go... this means that unfortunately the Red Oak Pact will probably face a bloody breakup.
Happy about the liberation of some camps!
The Declaration of Independence is very compelling, wonder what will be its effects after the end of the white faction.
Great final scenes for the Japanese! How much was the treatment of Japanese-americans worse than in OTL?
Happy about the liberation of some camps!
The Declaration of Independence is very compelling, wonder what will be its effects after the end of the white faction.
Great final scenes for the Japanese! How much was the treatment of Japanese-americans worse than in OTL?
Constantinople
Banned
Hm, that leaves all three major American factions pretty large and powerful.
Two more years of war... and I have no idea who will come out on top.
Can't wait for a map...!
Two more years of war... and I have no idea who will come out on top.
Can't wait for a map...!
Blue-Green-Brown Alliance forever!
And man, race relations in whatever successor state(s) arise out of the war are going to be both better and worse than OTL. My guess is that the blacks, having gone through a quasi-Holocaust (so much so that they're advocating the creation of a separate nation within North America) will probably be better off (even if New Africa doesn't get off the ground, they're not going anywhere and will have sizable political/military clout).
Asians, on the other hand...well, at least this means Anime will never get a foothold in the US, so its already superior to OTL.
ThePest179
Banned
I assume the same.
In the same way Nazi Germany falling was good.
Questions:
How many people did the Whites kill (as in: people killed in purges, race riots, and in death camps)? How bad was the violence between BROWN and white civilians (like as bad as the Red Army in Germany?)? How bad was L.A. and San Diego treated by the Japanese (and the "kill count" from that?)? How bad are Japanese-American internment camps?
Lots of Questions, I hope you don't mind.
Yeah the black population has been forced to literally fight for their rights, whatever government manages to stitch the US back together is going to acknowledge that.
On Anime, well Japanese culture is going to be very different. Imperial Japan looks like it might be around for a while yet :/
Good post but LBJ is way too old in that photo. He'd be 33 at the time, this is him March '42 IOTL -
Obviously you cannot use that photo due to the uniform, but something like this may be better for his next appearance -
Obviously you cannot use that photo due to the uniform, but something like this may be better for his next appearance -
Ephraim Ben Raphael
Banned
Thank you.
OTL the Japanese had some pretty rough treatment, but unlike ITTL they weren't used as little more than forced labor, they weren't divested of so much of their possessions, and there was no concerted effort to destroy them culturally as a community.
I'm working on a map, the problem is I can't seem to come up with anything really satisfactory. There's all these little pockets and areas of mixed control. I'll get something together eventually.
Not quite. Huey Long still has one more act before he exits stage right.
In the same way Nazi Germany falling was good.
Questions:
How many people did the Whites kill (as in: people killed in purges, race riots, and in death camps)? How bad was the violence between BROWN and white civilians (like as bad as the Red Army in Germany?)? How bad was L.A. and San Diego treated by the Japanese (and the "kill count" from that?)? How bad are Japanese-American internment camps?
Lots of Questions, I hope you don't mind.
I absolutely don't mind, questions mean that people are interested.
The number of African-Americans killed in the concentration camps is approx. half-a-million. Killed in the purges, maybe five thousand. I'm not sure what you mean by race riots. Quite a lot of people died in the war, of course.
The violence between the Browns and white civilians was... unpleasant. Not up to Red Army in Germany standards, but there were plenty of murders, rapes, and quite a lot of looting. The fact that their leaders had officially ordered them to be restrained helped a little, but it didn't stop all of it. Over 150,000 people died in L.A, another 50,000 in San Diego. In terms of percentage of the civilian population dead San Jose was actually worse than either, of the 60,000 or so people living there when the Japanese invaded virtually all were either killed or displaced and most of the city was destroyed. There were about two thousand people still living in the ruins when it was finally liberated, about another 10,000 displaced survivors in refugee camps.
The Japanese-American internment camps are much worse than OTL, albeit light-years better than the White Concentration Camps. There is, for instance, no deliberate attempt to starve them to death.
Very good point. I have swapped out my picture for your second one, hopefully that's more plausible.
Theory: Long "endorses" another faction (probably the Greens at this point), leading to an influx of ex-Whites (mostly conservative but some Facists) into Continental territory. This leads to the Red Oak Pact splitting.
OTL the Japanese had some pretty rough treatment, but unlike ITTL they weren't used as little more than forced labor, they weren't divested of so much of their possessions, and there was no concerted effort to destroy them culturally as a community.
The Japanese-American internment camps are much worse than OTL, albeit light-years better than the White Concentration Camps. There is, for instance, no deliberate attempt to starve them to death.
On the other hand, OTL, the Japanese never invaded an American state and never fought on the American mainland. So regardless of the fact it wasn't the Japanese Americans that invited them, (and more than a few would have fought against them), through ignorance and racism they will all be tarred with the same brush.
I don't think he can do that. Or he is going to do that, and the Continentals will laugh in is face and force any defecting Whites to undergo pretty stringent loyalty tests beforehand.
Since the civil war is continuing for at least another two years, I suspect that the conflict will either go on as a guerilla war or will be a final showdown between the Red Oak Pact and the Reds for control of the United States.
teg
I still wonder if we might up with some States simply going their own way and not rejoining whatever state succeeds the US at the end of this war, the Catherverse for example is centered around a US that has disintegrated and this TL might still end up in that direction (though probably with less independent countries arising out of the former US).
ThePest179
Banned
I absolutely don't mind, questions mean that people are interested.
Thanks.
OTL the Japanese had some pretty rough treatment, but unlike ITTL they weren't used as little more than forced labor, they weren't divested of so much of their possessions, and there was no concerted effort to destroy them culturally as a community.
The Japanese-American internment camps are much worse than OTL, albeit light-years better than the White Concentration Camps. There is, for instance, no deliberate attempt to starve them to death.
Ah. Well that's horrible.
Not quite. Huey Long still has one more act before he exits stage right.
Please let there be an ATL version of Untergang with Huey Long.
Err, weren't there anti-minority riots after the very first BROWN attack?
Thank Jesus. still horrible, but some bright spots.
And now we're back to the horror.
Thanks for answering my questions, Ill let you know if I get any more.
How's Hawaii doing? And Spain and Italy?
I imagine guerilla warfare/terrorist insurgency is for after the war, but anything can happen.
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