Along these lines PI asks for all Black units they can get especially artillery, coastal artillery, anti-aircraft and engineers to free up more PI scouts to establish another infantry regiment. Plays on racial idiocy of the day to gain reinforcements
Can't decide whether this idea is brilliantly amusing, or amusingly brilliant, but what a load of fleece to pull over the eyes of the shmucks at the pentagon and in congress...
I read through the later posts, well skimmed anyway, to see if someone else brought this up...but what makes anyone think there were any "black units" in existence whatsoever prior to their formation during WWII?
In the context of American racism it made sense to form such units during WWII, especially considering the nature of the Nazi foe in Europe. Obviously the best thing from our modern anti-racist perspective would have been to simply allow African Americans, and any other recruit of any ethnic background, to rise in the integrated ranks on an equal basis--as so many military veterans of the modern world like to claim--"in the Army we are all one color...green!" Yay for that, insofar as it is actually true, which I'm sure it is for lots--be nice to know if truly a majority or not, surely not entirely universal in truth yet either unfortunately. But probably "good enough for government work." By now.
This is the mid-1930s. There are people wise enough to know racism is ugly and at least suspect it is a sham, even though mainstream scientists are at this point on board with a consensus that "of course" racism has a scientific basis--at this point a true non-racist has to be defiant of the mainstream of respectable elite thought. Even someone who does believe that there are measurable discrepancies in average abilities between the racist can, if they are especially fair minded, believe that nevertheless people are or should be politically if not socially equal, as Lincoln proclaimed, and recognize people perceived to be of exceptional merit in the presumed less capable races. Other people who are not so deeply mesmerized by mainstream "things people know that ain't so" as Will Rogers contemporarily put it, defy academia and the powers that be in the status quo to recognize the comprehensive equality of their fellow citizens based on authentic interpersonal experience. There are rival schools of thought to the mainstream consensus--generally associated with the radical left in fact. Perhaps there are people who believe in racial equality on religious grounds though that is rowing the boat upstream, since most mainstream religious denominations made their peace with the American racial hierarchy long ago--still some may recall the authentic revulsion against it many a denomination started with. Perhaps some recall Harriet Beecher Stowe's shrewd and damning observation in
Uncle Tom's Cabin nearly a century ago--eighty years ago at this point--- that if basic intelligence and general character really are racial things that differ between different breeds of humanity, then African Americans are essentially Anglo Saxons in such characteristics given the free manner in which white male slave owners availed themselves of the sexual services of the slave women they presumed to own, with consent quite irrelevant to the matter. Among the immigrant peoples making up the nation, at the expense of the few surviving Native Americans, no one has been here longer and worked more toward building modern America (this is true in 1937 or 2018) than African Americans; no one can be more American! All these possible approaches to an enlightened post racist mindset have examples and presence on the ground among white Americans.
But they don't hold majority sway in 1937! It would be nice to think the majority of white Americans who did accept and in some cases actively campaigned for white supremacy had some qualms or second thoughts or doubts or some flexibility in their minds on the subject, but the fact remained that when push came to shove there were limits to how far even people who thought of themselves as broad and fair minded dared rock this boat. And hard line racists were quite open and outspoken and politically dominant, and not just in the South either.
The experience of the Great War was that sending African Americans to war in US military uniform, even if they were restricted to lowly and inglorious support duties to avoid "confusing" them with adventures of military glory, was disruptive to Jim Crow norms back home. After all, they'd seen Gay Paree. They'd been part of the effort of the Americans to defend France, and even though French society is not free of racism either, it is a different kind of thing there than in the USA; grateful French people and Britons too treated them as fellow human beings without the "etiquette" of inferior subservience demanded of them back home. Many a black veteran was lynched or otherwise mistreated to "put them back in their places" when they came home and the African American community did not fail to learn lessons from all this.
So I do not know for sure, but I would be willing to bet that postwar the US military services, themselves controlled by officers and NCOs who would include racists of the outspoken type among them and among whom radicals on the other side would have to be most discreet if not ferreted out completely, were inclined to reimpose Jim Crow subordination within their own ranks, and any lax attitudes on their part would be corrected with orders from above demanded by the powerful Solid South Democrats of Congress. Whatever the officers and sergeants might have personally thought for whatever reason, they were under orders to racially discriminate, and be on the lookout against anything that might strengthen the pride and self worth of African American recruits. There were in the interwar years factors to mitigate this basic demand of an American society deeply committed to racial hierarchy--for instance the Republicans controlled the White House for most of the postwar generation, and they had not yet totally forgotten the legacy of Lincoln. By the 1920s few would stick their necks out far to annoy the Jim Crow and Klan types, and quite a few were deeply complicit in a more Northern style of bigotry of their own. But surely the military was less purged than it would be under southern Democratic leaders such as Wilson (whereas Wilson's hands had been tied by the need for a massive mobilization). Then the Democrats took over again, but under the New Deal coalition--FDR was hardly an activist for racial equality but he did court the votes of Northern urban African Americans. Again the effect is not so much action against institutionalized racism as much as tolerance of little deviations from the ideals of white supremacists.
But forming separate but equal African American divisions, with their own African American officers or even with all white officers, but anyway black sergeants, training them to perform all the military functions white soldiers do...could anything be better calculated to give the white supremacist establishment conniption fits? Especially in a time of Depression, when a military position, ill paid as it is, is clearly better than being completely unemployed and dependent on charity or the public dole? Surely moving African American recruits from their service positions as cooks and so forth to regular duties would merely lead to calls to muster the lot of them out and recruit more white soldiers from the long lines of applicants at recruiting stations to take their place? And yet separate units is hardly satisfactory to the overwhelming majority of African Americans (and what about other minorities--Latinos, Asians, shall each of the numerous subdivisions of humanity pre-WWII Americans were assured by most scientists and most religious leaders alike were separated by nature or by God's will each have their own divisions, or should all non-whites be shoved willy nilly into one great subdivision to be discriminated against equally?) and however many whites were on the spectrum of admitting something was seriously wrong with America's racist order--the latter at least might be divided on the question, but the former--well, actually separatism on the discriminated against side is not an unknown thing, but it makes sense mainly in the context of meaningful autonomy. If African Americans too would appreciate being in units with no white people around to look down on them and interfere with their own affairs, how militarily reliable are the units to fall into line obeying an all white command structure at whatever level the break is? How politically loyal to a federal republic that in some places disfranchises the lot of them by transparent subterfuges, in most places puts the power of the law behind gross discrimination that despite the "but equal" wording of Plessy v Ferguson's all white judge ruling is anything but equal and painfully separate, and in the best places for them they still suffer much informal mistreatment that the law can't be arsed to frown on in a colorblind manner? Clearly doing this is just asking for trouble of many potential kinds, some of which are dead certain, and for what political benefit to any politician? At most, some African American wards of voters in the North might appreciate it as a grudging and limited step forward, and a scattering of do-gooders in office whose net constituency support in this matter is likely to be shaky at best; if reelected it will more often be despite than because of this move and more likely they will be primaried out and if not, defeated at the general election precisely because of this. In this generation, in this decade, it is perfectly OK in polite white society to openly campaign against favoring African Americans in any way, and such appeals would fall on many receptive ears; those fighting back had better watch their words and implications because white supremacists will strike back hard and there are a broad array of reasonable arguments and observations any honest person would agree are true that nevertheless are deemed national fighting words that justify white supremacists in precipitate action, or anyway are mitigating excuses for behavior deemed bad, but "understandable." As
To Kill A Mockingbird, set in this very decade, makes clear in the mouth of the second most sympathetic white character in it, after Scout herself, Atticus Finch, defending his African American client falsely accused of an "outrage," affirms the urgent need for tight social control and that any breach in the line of racial containment is accepted by all, himself apparently included, to lead to civil disaster. This state of ongoing racial war is deemed by the majority of the white national majority, north and south, to justify and demand the latitude given Southern states for severe measures.
I predict therefore that if you look for evidence of such separate but equal (or even separate and disadvantaged) uniformed units of African Americans trained for comprehensive competence in the full range of military battlefield service, you will look in vain. I have not attempted a search to disprove or prove this assumption of mine because I think it rests on pretty firm presumptions. I would be quite pleased and amazed to be proven wrong as it would raise the esteem I hold my nation in another notch, but while I would like to believe in an America that properly appreciated the value of its citizens, particularly the long serving and long suffering African Americans, we ought to have a grip on basic realism here. The only thing wrong with African American units is that they are not integrated with others on an equal basis as they ought to be; given separation as a hard fact, equal opportunity separately would be better than the reality I expect to find in real history.
The contingencies of WWII produced pressure to get rid of measures that handicapped us in winning the war, and opportunity for civil rights advocates to use that pressure to undermine the national party line and move at least grudgingly forward. The good fortune that African Americans and other minorities had in Harry Truman as FDR's postwar successor helped reinforce these steps forward and prevent as much backlash as otherwise might be expected after the war, but hardly all of it--indeed it was learning of such incidents of backlash that steeled Truman's resolve to affirm the human dignity of fellow citizens and especially fellow veterans of national service. And it cost him politically though not fortunately actual electoral victory--it certainly threatened it potentially.
There will be no African American units to post to the Philippines to be found.
What might be possible is to leverage white supremacist racism to back a scheme wherein US money is appropriated to build up the Filipino forces, by offering powerful Southern Congressional leaders the incentive of a plan to muster the existing African American recruits out of the military, in favor of either budget cutting or recruiting more whites for an all white services, and then facilitating the Philippine government recruiting these discharged servicemen along with others who had done a stint earlier or were veterans of the Great War to the Filipino forces; the soldiers would thus be removed from the USA presumably with their families and perhaps even cease to be US citizens, taking a new allegiance to the Philippines instead. Thus a category of African Americans the white supremacists looked to as potential troublemakers would be removed from the continent and sent off to fend for themselves far far overseas, in some non-white nation.
Even this is quite dubious on every level! Pragmatically, regular US forces will continue to serve at posts in the Philippines, and now they would be facing fellow American born English speaking counterparts of a third color in the local forces they are supposed to cooperate with, so African American trouble making is not totally ended; if the US forces are purged of any African Americans in their ranks, the form of trouble is less troublesome, but still some serious doubts about the rightness of American practices might be raised in at least some of these white American officers and service members called upon to rely on their non-white counterparts born in their own country but serving a new foreign flag. Some won't trust them and degrade cooperation, others will wonder instead about the reliability of their own fellow service members.
Then there is the whole question of how Filipinos would view African Americans, and whether that would change for better or for worse if great legions of them suddenly are living among them competing with native born Filipinos who blend in with the local culture, while among them are displaced Americans, and their wives and children too perhaps, trying to find a new place in a very strange to them climate and society that they are sworn to serve without actually knowing in advance if they can really make a home here comfortably. Since they are a minority here as well as back home, what advantage to the African Americans to exchange the devil they know for a possible new one they generally definitely do not? (There will have been some contact in advance, some African American recruits to the US military services will have had tours of duty in the Philippines, and Filipinos will have migrated to America to work in service positions generally, where African Americans will have met them. But all this is on a low scale, even among African American veterans, and few African Americans will have attempted to live under typical Filipino conditions that their new political masters will deem normal.
Naturally when being approached by Filipino recruiters in America, quite a few African American former service members, no matter how desperate being discharged in service of this scheme makes them, are going to have some shrewd questions about how well the Philippines can do against being attacked by the Japanese. I will deal in another post about how "unforeseen" and "unlikely" that contingency would be perceived in 1937, but I can preview it by saying "not very, to anyone with eyes open and ear to the ground." It is one thing to put yourself between your beloved home and war's desolation, quite another to take it on for a bunch of doomed strangers. African Americans have seen many a dubious scheme offered to them before and shrewdly wonder, if this gig is any good, how come white people aren't lining up for it. The question of whether this is tied up with the US forces bugging out makes it a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation; if Uncle Sam is keeping his hard won bases in the islands for our imperial power projection abilities, then the islands are a target for sure; if he walks away there might be neutrality or even alliance with Japan in the cards--and in an "Asia for the Asians Co-Prosperity Sphere," what is the place of African Americans exactly?
They might take the gig, hoping to prove something, or reasoning that no place can be worse than such a racist America. Or for a variety of other motives. But it is not a very appealing offer really.
And of course the question of funding hangs over it like a Sword of Damocles. While the black veterans remain on US soil the imagined coalition of white interest in this scheme remains motivated to fork over the cash, perhaps, assuming the scheme is not simply dismissed out of hand as a preposterously pointless expense. Once the veterans have made good on their side of the bargain, what is to stop Uncle Sam from pulling the plug, if they plan to cut and run from the islands? If they don't won't they favor white forces in US uniform over all others and leave the Philippines with a new expense to maintain eating into their meagre resources? In the long run, why should the USA go on subsidizing the Filipino military? In the context of the coming Cold War, that question may answer itself, but who anticipates that in this time frame?
