The Golden Thirteen

by Dan Goldberg

  John Reagan, who enlisted in the Navy on July 1, quickly stood out among his peers. Reagan had dropped out of college, certain that the Air Forces would call, but month after month passed and the call never came. Worried that he’d be drafted into the Army, and still averse to being forced to fight, Reagan enlisted hoping that if he couldn’t see action in the sky, he’d find it at sea.

  One week into recruit training at Great Lakes, he received orders from the Air Forces to go down to Tuskegee to train with the Ninety-ninth Pursuit Squadron.

  Reagan was elated and sought out his executive officer.

  “I’ve only been in the Navy a week, and I’ve got these orders where I can be a flier. Can’t you let me out?” he begged.

  “No way,” the officer said.

  Reagan was crushed, but soon the Navy did not seem so bad. He had a bit of ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) training and was made an apprentice chief petty officer. Reagan took pride in his company and the work he did, believing that he needed to prove the Navy hadn’t made a mistake when it opened the general service to black men.24 Soon, his chief petty officer came around less and less, trusting Reagan to ensure the company was ready for inspections, on time for meals, orderly.

  James Hair was also enjoying his new Navy life. He entered the Navy the same day as Reagan, only he entered as James Hare, a superficial change he wouldn’t think much about until forty years later, when the Navy, unable to find him, assumed he was dead and didn’t let him know about reunions.

  The spelling change had come about in the mid-1930s, when Hair worked at a drugstore owned by the Browns, who were fans of a British tennis sensation, Charles Edgar Hare. They pitied their young employee for having been born the wrong color, but believed his skin was light enough to pass for white if he “whitened” up his name. They told him to spell his name “Hare,” the white way. Hair didn’t really care as long as he was getting paid, so he went along with the change.

  At the time, Hair was saving money for college and needed every dollar he could get. He left Fort Pierce in 1936, the year after his brother-in-law was lynched, and enrolled in a two-year program at Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach.25 When he graduated in 1938, he had no money, no job, and few prospects. The best work he could find was digging ditches for ten cents an hour while baking in the Florida sun. By the spring of 1939, Hair was wearing out the soles of his shoes looking for work, and he was praying—a lot.

  Salvation came, as it so often does, in the form of inspiration.

  Hair sent a note to the Peacock family, one of the wealthiest in Fort Pierce, to see if they could provide him with some work. He had two years of college, he told them, and needed to save up for another two in order to complete a degree.

  “If you have anything available, I’d appreciate hearing,” he wrote.26

  This was an audacious but not altogether unreasonable idea. The Peacocks were among the most influential couples in the area. They dispatched one of their servants to bring Hair to their mansion. Their butler, also named James, was doubling as the chauffeur and caretaker. James said he’d be glad for the extra help, and so Hair spent the next year as the butler and chauffeur at the Peacocks’ mansion.

  He saved enough money to enroll in Xavier University, a Catholic school in New Orleans, where he supplemented his savings by working in the registrar’s office after class. Then, he’d eat a quick supper and work until 3 a.m. as a porter in the cocktail lounge of the Jung Hotel. He managed a few hours of sleep each night, and then he was back in class the next morning.27

  Hair had only a semester remaining when war was declared. Like Martin he received an educational deferment that kept him out of the military until he graduated in the spring of 1942. He was expected to report to the Army, but Wright, his murdered brother-in-law, had taught him so much about the water—navigation, swimming, boating, seamanship—that Hair decided to enlist in the Navy. Besides, he later joked, he hated the color of those Army uniforms. “It reminded me of shit.”28

  The train that brought Martin, Reagan, Hair, and nearly one million more men to the shores of Lake Michigan stopped just feet from the main entrance to Great Lakes Naval Training Station, on the other side of Morrow Road.

  An officer stood at the gate, the first sign that their old civilian life had ended and a new military one was about to begin. As fresh black recruits were driven from the main entrance to the black camp, about one mile away, guards stationed outside other camps would yell, “You’re gonna be sorry” or “You had a good home but you left.”29

  Welcome to the Navy.

  The thousands of recruits who arrived in the summer of 1942 found a naval station in the final throes of an unprecedented expansion that saw Great Lakes grow tenfold in the months following Pearl Harbor.

  Two hours after news of the Japanese attack reached Great Lakes, Captain Ralph D. Spalding, the public works director, walked into the office of the Ninth Naval District’s commandant, Rear Admiral John Downes. In Spalding’s briefcase were plans that he and his staff had developed during the previous year, a vision that would allow Great Lakes to go from training 6,000 sailors on December 7, to 68,000 by the following summer, to 100,000 by September 1942.

  “We are at war, all of us,” Navy Secretary Knox had said after Pearl Harbor. “There is no time now for disputes or delay of any kind. We must have ships and more ships, guns and more guns, men and more men—faster and faster. There is no time to lose. The Navy must lead the way. Speed up—it’s your Navy and your nation.”30

  And so they did.

  More than 13,000 civilians worked around the clock for almost a year to turn Spalding’s plans into reality. Blueprints cluttered the admiral’s office during those months and decisions that used to take weeks were made in minutes.

  Between September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, and December 7, 1941, when Japan attacked Hawaii, twenty-five new buildings were constructed at a cost of $10 million. During the next ten months, 453 new buildings were constructed at a cost of $75 million.31

  Spalding requisitioned 375 acres from the Veterans Administration, which had land near the base’s hospital just west of the main station, to build 109 new barracks. Another 685 acres of private land were condemned and taken by the Navy to make up the Green Bay area, which held six more camps.

  In September 1942, when more space was needed, the hammocks Martin and Hair had gotten used to were replaced by bunk beds, allowing the Navy to cram even more recruits into the barracks.32

  The building boom transformed Great Lakes from a 172-acre campus to a sprawling 1,600-acre facility that would, by the end of the war, train nearly one million men, close to one-third of the entire Navy, and twice the number trained anywhere else.

  It was hell on the men who arrived during those first few months of the war. They trained in mud, flood, and dust the likes of which most had never seen.

  “With the rain we’ve been having around here lately, I might just as well be out at sea,” wrote the “Dear Mazie” columnist in the Great Lakes Bulletin. “Then, if a couple of hours do happen to get by without any rain appearing it gets so dusty you can’t breathe. It is the only place where you can stand up to your knees in the mud and choke to death from dust.”33

  There were times during those first few months when men, both black and white, had to do without heat, hot water, and a full issue of clothing, as the nation’s supplies failed to keep up with enlistments. The shortage was so severe that by the fall of 1942 more than thirty thousand men lacked overcoats for the coming winter.

  Conditions improved somewhat the following year, once the drill fields were paved, trees and flowers planted, and black dirt hauled into the station, though the air still stank from coal-burning heating plants, nearby industrial plants, and the steam locomotives that spewed cinders and soot.34

  Recruits began their training with a physical exam and a mental health evaluation, a haircut, and inoculations against tetanus, typhoid, and smallpox. Then they
received their first uniforms—woolen “blues” for winter and white twill for summer.

  Assignment to company and barracks came next.

  During the first week, enlistees learned how to wear their uniforms properly, roll their clothes and stow them in seabags, scrub clean their own laundry, salute correctly, and conduct themselves with proper military decorum. They learned how to secure a gas mask and how to march and were lectured on naval customs and military courtesy. Then came hours of calisthenics and long hikes while carrying a full pack.

  The second week, after another typhoid vaccine, was when these “boots,” as the recruits were called because of the leggings they wore during training, were given their first aptitude test and swimming tests.35 There were classes on seamanship where boots learned knot-tying and splicing, about life aboard ship, and lifesaving drills. They learned how to replace missing buttons on their uniforms and repair rips in their clothing. They memorized a new vocabulary. “Port” and “starboard” are left and right. Recruits “come aboard” when they arrive and “go ashore” when they leave.36 During the third week, there were tests for service schools and lectures on steering and sea watches.37

  The segregated camp, where thousands of black men spent their first two months in the Navy, was fitted with as many practical training devices as the officers could acquire. There was a five-inch gun moved into the drill hall, and replica ships were built so boots could visualize the location of different parts of a vessel.38

  The “commando course,” built by black recruits themselves, was the pride of the Great Lakes station. It was an obstacle course laid out like a golf course, where different obstacles replaced the holes. Boots raced between sandbags, climbed over high board fences, shimmied up ropes, and swung from handlebars before crawling through knee-scraping tunnels of iron.39 Meanwhile the Navy trainers attempted to simulate war by broadcasting “battle noises” over loudspeakers attached to the trees.40

  Among the obstacles was a twenty-foot-wide, six-foot-deep ditch that sailors jumped into and then climbed out of. One anxious recruit, not quite understanding the rules, ran full speed at the edge and leaped across the entire ditch.

  “I thought I was supposed to jump across, so I did,” he told his dumbstruck superior officer.41

  Hair didn’t mind the rigors of boot camp. The drilling and calisthenics weren’t too much of a challenge, as he was in excellent shape when he entered the Navy. Nor did he find the classroom work too difficult. He was a college graduate, more educated than most and more accustomed to academic work. He was selected honor man of his company.42

  But unlike Martin, Hair never did get used to the beans for breakfast, which wasn’t served until the men had been drilled, had cleaned their barracks, and had stood for inspection. The beans were always cold by the time he sat down. The coffee got low marks as well—several chief petty officers said it was the worst they ever tasted—but waste was not permitted. Watchers at each scullery stopped men from leaving the mess until everything edible on their plate was eaten.43

  Regular drilling didn’t much bother Hair, but he hated the drilling done for disciplinary reasons. An officer might enter the barracks at 3 a.m., and if he found a piece of paper on the floor or a Baby Ruth candy wrapper under a hammock, the whole group would be up in the predawn cold doing calisthenics.

  “Boy, if we could just find out who that guy is, we’d kill him,” Hair remembered thinking.44

  Punishing the group for one man’s actions was standard. If a boot talked out of turn, the whole unit might have to drill with their caps in their mouths.45

  When one recruit stepped out of line, it fell on his company to mete out justice. One time, a black sailor who thought his undershirt was clean enough to pass inspection did not bother to put on a fresh one. The inspecting officer stopped in front of him, grabbed the T-shirt’s collar, turned it inside out, and asked for the sailor’s name. He was put on report, the official punishment. The unofficial discipline happened later. When the men in his unit returned to the barracks they undressed and each man grabbed a clothes brush, the type used for scrubbing. The offending sailor was taken into the shower, fully clothed, and each piece of clothing was scrubbed clean while he was still wearing it. When that was finished, he was stripped down and the men took turns scrubbing him. He was red for two days but never again was caught unprepared or unclean.46

  When boot camp ended, most men would be sent to either a shore establishment or a naval base. Roughly one-third qualified for Class A instruction where they would train for a rating in the general service. Advanced training for above-deck assignments such as gunner’s mate, quartermaster, boatswain’s mate, and yeoman took place at Great Lakes. Those training for below-deck ratings—electrician’s mates, carpenter’s mates, shipfitters, machinist’s mates, metalsmiths, firemen, and cooks—went to Hampton Institute, a service school in Virginia.

  Men received their first leave after they completed boot camp. Those, like Martin, who lived within a couple hundred miles, could travel home to see their girlfriends, wives, or parents.47

  For men such as Hair, who could not travel home, the opportunities for leisure around Great Lakes were sparse. Most took the bus or train into Chicago, about an hour away.48 Hair enjoyed the YMCA on the city’s South Side and took advantage of the different programs it offered in the black section of the city.

  There was also plenty of entertainment inside the black camp.

  Movies were shown in the drill hall nearly every night. It was too small to accommodate the whole camp at one time, so select companies would be marched to the movie, and then they were free to return to their barracks on their own, as long as they were back in time for taps.49

  The Ship’s Company Band performed every Wednesday evening and Sunday afternoon for happy hours. During the Wednesday happy hours, the band, thanks to the USO, would be accompanied by an entertainer such as Lena Horne, Dorothy Donegan, or the Jimmie Lunceford Band.50 The camp also hosted the renowned contralto Marian Anderson and Hazel Scott, the Trinidadian pianist who later married Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York.

  On Sundays, when family members could visit, the bands played classical music and jazz. White officers who worked in other camps at Great Lakes considered it a privilege to come over and listen to some of the happy hour shows.51

  Hair, Reagan, and Martin experienced little prejudice during their first few weeks, but that was not true for every new black recruit. Much depended on the white officers they encountered during training. Some were outstanding leaders, while others were low-class bigots. Hair remembered one graduation ceremony that caused a particular ruckus. Most officers gave a short speech to graduates, something along the lines of “Go get ‘em,” but one officer, someone who had mistreated the black men under his charge for weeks, refused to be so constructive.

  “Look, fellows, we’ve done a good job here in boot training, and so we’re going out,” he said. “But before we go, I want all you niggers to know I don’t want no shit out of you.”52

  About one month after Hair, Martin, and Reagan arrived, Camp Morrow was renamed in honor of Robert Smalls, a black Civil War hero who escaped slavery in May 1862 when he commandeered a heavily armed Confederate ship, navigated it north from Charleston, past Fort Sumter, and surrendered it to the Union.53

  Overseeing Camp Robert Smalls was Lieutenant Commander Daniel Armstrong, an innovative micromanager and workaholic who had impressed Navy Secretary Knox the previous March with a plan for integrating the general service that the secretary deemed “reasonably practical.”54

  “Any plan for the enlistment of negroes . . . requires segregation,” Armstrong told Knox. “To put untrained negro enlistees alongside white recruits in Naval Training Stations and on Naval vessels would put the negro at a distinct disadvantage at the outset because of his background and the inferior educational facilities which have been available to him.”

  Armstrong believed there was no need to commission “col
ored officers until . . . through meritorious conduct under combat conditions, the service as a whole would endorse commissions”—a sentiment that Knox no doubt appreciated.55

  Armstrong’s father, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, was a Union general who had helped found Hampton Institute, an all-black college in Virginia where the Navy would soon train some of its recruits. Armstrong told Knox that he had served as a trustee at the prestigious school since 1929 and was “known to many of the leading negroes in this country.”

  Hampton’s model focused on educating “the head, the heart and the hands,” and those traditions were carried on at Camp Robert Smalls.

  Armstrong, a forty-nine-year-old graduate of the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, who had once taken the future Duchess of Windsor to a prom, was a bit of a Rorschach test—the men under him saw what they wanted.

  To white men, he was practical, and his willingness, even eagerness, to work with black men set him apart.56 Black men’s perception of Armstrong depended, in part, on where they came from. Men from the South typically found him to be fair and open-minded, while many from the North, as well as better-educated Southerners, generally resented what they saw as his condescending paternalism.

  Martin was in the latter group, describing Armstrong as a “great white father,” the kind of officer who assumed he understood how black men thought because he had grown up around them.57

  Dennis Nelson felt that Armstrong was susceptible to some of the most “pathetic stereotypes” of the South and that he could never see black men as anything more than cooks or servants.

  “He was definitely the wrong man for the job he was assigned,” Nelson said.58

  Armstrong encouraged black men to be proud of their race and heritage and insisted that everyone at Camp Robert Smalls observe Negro History Week on February 7. As part of those festivities, he had recruits prepare an extensive exhibition of paintings, photographs, and historical documents showing the achievements and contributions that African Americans had made in art, sciences, industry, education, business, athletics, literature, and music.59