by Dan Goldberg
The men also studied the history of the US Navy, beginning in 1775 with the Continental Congress’s establishment of a three-member Naval Committee.
They learned the history of signal flags, how they were used on ships during the twelfth century, how the colonies used them during the Revolutionary War, and how their meaning had evolved down to the present day.
Time was spent on the firing range practicing with 20-millimeter guns, and on an anti-aircraft simulator that gave them training in the use of 40-millimeter guns.36
They trained in distance swimming, and swimming fully clothed. They had abandon-ship and lifeguard drills. They learned how to fashion life preservers from trousers, mattress covers, hats, and ditty bags.
They studied the sweet science of boxing—pages 72–82 in the Navy’s Physical Fitness Manual described how to land an effective blow and use self-defense techniques. Pages 88 and 89 explained how to wrestle and prepared men for hand-to-hand combat.
They instructed basic training companies and performed duty watches in regimental offices and the service schools.37
They memorized nautical terminology such as “cockbill” (to position a yard at an angle to the deck or place an anchor ready to be dropped) and “Irish pennants” (the untidy ends of a line or loose end of a poorly tied knot).
“Officers are friendly, honorable, just,” Cooper wrote neatly on lined loose-leaf paper, which he kept in a three-ring binder.
“Duty is that which should be performed with as much accuracy as possible,” his notes say. “The smallest order should be executed with as much interest and zest [as that] of a larger one.”
Cooper would commit these rules to memory at night, as he did the courtesies he was being taught to recite, such as “Call enlisted men by [last] name only. . . . Pass senior officer to left only after his permission has been given. Ask—’by your leave, sir,’“ and “Avoid conceit.” Cooper had those words underlined in his notebook.
The men learned how to keep a ship’s log and how to write a formal letter, where on the page to sign one’s name and how to respond to a request from a higher-ranking officer. They attended lectures on leadership and expected conduct.
There was a class on naval courts and procedures, and the men were quizzed on summary courts-martial and general courts-martial. They were quizzed on traditions, customs, and military insignia, as well as on Navy history and the different types of warships.38
The pace was brutal.
Most of these men had only a passing familiarity with these subjects. This is where Cooper and his knack for breaking down complex concepts into digestible nuggets came in handy. “Yeah, it went pretty fast, but here is what it meant,” he’d say at the end of another long day. “Here is what you really have to understand.”
The men were supposed to be in bed with the lights out at 10:30 p.m., but well past that hour, the sixteen candidates sat together in the bathroom, flashlights in hand, studying the lessons of the past day and preparing for the day ahead. They draped sheets over the windows so no one outside would notice the light.
They were intent on proving that their “selection was justified,” Sam Barnes said, “and that we weren’t a party to tokenism.”39
Arbor, the quartermaster, taught semaphore and Morse code, tapping out sentences on the wall of the restroom. He’d give a clue—say, “a ship approaching on such-and-such side.” The men would tap it out. If they got it wrong, they’d go back and start again. Even their toughest instructors weren’t as demanding of them as they were of themselves, so when the men went to class the next day there was little a teacher could do to catch them off-guard.
They’d average five or six hours of shut-eye a night, but sleep was never scheduled.
They studied until they felt prepared for the next day, or until the fatigue and stress overwhelmed them. That’s when Arbor’s sixth sense kicked in: “All of this is a lot of bullshit,” he’d say. “I’m hitting the sack.”40
“It was a long day,” Hair remembered. “Day in and day out, right on through.”41
Sublett described the training as “pure hell.”42
Cooper leaned on his wife, Peg, to help during the darkest hours. She had not wanted to remain in Virginia—a place she’d never liked—without her husband, so she took their baby girl to Hamilton, Ohio, where her family lived, while he trained at Great Lakes.
When Cooper wrote or called, he often spoke of the camaraderie he had found and how it was solace amid the enormous pressure he felt. He was studying all the time, he said, and the people in charge weren’t making it easy.43 His voice betrayed the doubt he felt, and he often appeared on the verge of tears.
Peg, on the other end of the line, promised her husband everything was going to work out. “You can do this,” she’d repeat to him. “You are smart enough to do it and you have to do it.”
It could not have been easy for Peg to say. Even decades later she never felt all that patriotic for a country that had treated her race so poorly. She related to the African Americans who wrote letters to the Pittsburgh Courier wondering why they should lay down their lives to live half-American; to Charles Newby, whom White had prosecuted for stating that black men had no business fighting for a nation that treated them as a subspecies. She didn’t want to participate in the war effort, and certainly didn’t want her husband to travel the world for it. She felt that way about all of the nation’s wars, up to and including America’s second war in Iraq. Why should black boys die for this country in some faraway place when they were treated as second-class citizens at home?
“It’s like Cassius Clay said,” Peg later told an interviewer, referring to the boxer who changed his name to Muhammad Ali. “No Vietnamese ever called him a ‘nigger.’“44
Whatever ambivalence she harbored about the nation and the war she kept to herself during those first ten weeks of 1944. The war had nothing to do with her husband’s struggle, and she told him he’d have to fight through, past and beyond whatever the Navy threw at him.
“That’s the way I feel about things,” she later said. “You go out and you fight, you fight like hell.”45
Her husband was going to become one of the first black naval officers. She was certain of it.
“Any accomplishment, if I can claim any, has to do with my wife and the support that I’ve gotten from her,” Cooper later said. “You call on the telephone and just cry your heart out, and there’s somebody on the other end of the line who’s going to listen to you and she’s going to say, ‘Keep your chin up.’“46
One Saturday morning, not long after their training began, Phil Barnes received a letter from his sister, who was living in Washington, DC. She instructed him to call her as soon as he could. When he did, she sounded very strange. She needed a phone number where he could be reached. She wouldn’t say why, but she told her brother to be by that phone at 4 p.m. the following Saturday. She’d explain then.
When they connected, she said she was working as a janitor at Navy headquarters, cleaning offices, including the office of Undersecretary of the Navy James Forrestal.
Something funny is going on, she told her brother.
“I see a list of men here—that they’re going to be some kind of officers,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Barnes asked.
“Don’t tell anybody now, because it’s top secret, and it’s not supposed to be on this desk. I can’t pick it up, but I can read. It doesn’t say what date it’s going to be, but they’re going to make the first colored officers.”47
Barnes’s name was on the list, which is why she had thought to call.
The training program was still a secret, but that fortuitous connection confirmed for the men that they weren’t engaging in a pointless exercise. The Navy, all the way to the top, was taking this seriously.
If the men passed their tests the Navy was prepared to commission them.
White men knew it, too, and many were aghast at the prospect. And the surest way to preven
t it from happening was to prove that the Navy’s worst fears—that black men were incapable of discipline—were correct.
If the sixteen officer candidates ever lost their cool, ever broke ranks, ever screamed at an injustice, it could be enough for someone to say that African Americans lacked the temperament to be officers—enough to end this experiment.
Naysayers goaded the men in the hopes that one would lose his temper and blow it for the whole group.
On one occasion, the officer candidates were lined up for a medical exam.
“All right, you boys, strip down,” someone yelled. “Everything off. Strip down.”
So they did.
“Stand over there,” came another order. “Stand at attention.”
Jesse Arbor, a well-endowed man, had white splotches on the skin near the top of his penis. A white pharmacist’s mate grabbed a thirty-six-inch ruler and yelled out, “Look at this, look at this. Here’s this Negro here. Look at this man, half white and half black.”
As he spoke, he rapped Arbor’s penis with the ruler, causing him to wince with each whack.
Hair was certain a riot was about to start. This was it. This was the moment they would surely be kicked out.
“Hey, boy, where did you get this thing from?” the pharmacist’s mate asked, still whacking Arbor’s penis.
Arbor looked him directly in the eye, just the way the Navy had taught.
“Well, you see, sir, I was raised in a white neighborhood.”
Nothing more than a snicker escaped his comrades’ lips, and the white men, furious that they could not get a rise out of the sixteen officer candidates, stormed off.48
Arbor was determined to respond to provocation with tranquility and creativity. He felt he owed it to the group.
Their restraint was neither an accident nor a character flaw. These men had been winnowed from hundreds of candidates, chosen because the Navy deemed them not too “extreme” in their attitudes.
“They are all good leaders and they are not radical in any sense of the word,” Richmond wrote a friend shortly after the men received their commissions. “They were picked because we knew that we could count on them to benefit the Navy and they will not raise racial issues, I am sure, such as coming to the Officers’ Club or anything of that nature. They are loyal to the Navy.”49
In short, Armstrong and Downes had chosen these men because they expected them to suffer these indignities quietly and gracefully.50
The instructors during officer candidate school were all white, except for Chief Petty Officer Noble Payton, who had earned a master’s degree from Howard University in 1934. He was a renowned chemistry professor and physicist who had worked with Sam Barnes at Livingstone, had taught at Howard University, and had worked with Cooper, Baugh, and Phil Barnes at Hampton. He was brought to Barracks 202 to teach mathematics, which was necessary to calculate the speed and direction of a ship as it passes through water, and he provided a familiar face and a sympathetic ear.51
The one other person they could lean on, the only white man who seemed to empathize, was Lieutenant John Flint Dille Jr., who had been a classmate of White’s at the University of Chicago, though the two did not know one another until they met in the Navy.52
Before the war, Dille had worked for the National Newspaper Service, a syndicate that his father, John Dille Sr., had started and made famous with a comic he helped create called Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D.
Dille Jr. created his own syndicated puzzle called “Brain Twizzlers by Professor J. D. Flint,” a play on his own name. It proved quite successful and ran in several newspapers.
But when Japan attacked, he left it all behind. Dille, a handsome six-foot, three-inch man with brown hair and blue eyes, had a new baby boy at home and might have received a deferment, but like so many men he felt a duty to serve. He enlisted on April 13, 1942, six days after Knox announced that black men would be trained for the general-service ratings.
Dille chose the Navy because, like Martin and Barnes, he was a germophobe. That meant the Army was out. And at twenty-eight, he thought he was too old to learn to be a fighter pilot. Besides, he figured, he was a big guy, and those cockpits looked a tad too small to accommodate a man who wore size 13 shoes.
Dille passed the physical exams, but the Navy discovered he was partially defective in color perception—an irony not lost on the men of Robert Smalls, who would become his protégés—and, worried he would not be able to read signal flags correctly, denied him sea assignments.
Instead, Dille was put in charge of training a battalion of new recruits at Great Lakes Naval Training Station, only ten miles from his home in Highland Park. He formed new recruits into marching units and taught them correct pace and rhythm, and good military bearing. Dille himself actually had very little natural rhythm, but he knew how to teach.53 Eyes straight ahead, Dille would order. There is a proper length of stride and a correct distance for how far out the arms should swing.
Knowing that his “fellow officers wouldn’t have been happy to see black faces in their dining hall,” Dille asked his superior officer, Lieutenant Commander William Turek, if he could be assigned to work with the black recruits at Camp Robert Smalls.54 It was a chance to distinguish himself, Dille thought, and perhaps earn a promotion. And he figured black men would need all the help and understanding they could get from the officers in charge.55
Dille came from a home well ahead of its time on matters of race relations. His mother, Phoebe Minerva Crabtree, was a Chicago chapter president of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She had reared Dille on the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and to appreciate a person regardless of skin color. Her father, Dille’s grandfather, John Dawson Crabtree, had fought with Illinois’s Thirteenth Infantry Regiment during the Civil War, helping the Union lay siege to Vicksburg.56
Dille grew up in Evanston, Illinois, which had a sizable black community, and he had African American friends in high school. This set him apart from many white officers at Great Lakes, most of whom had grown up in the South, had graduated from the Naval Academy at Annapolis, and wanted little to do with the latest Navy experiment.
Turek told Dille that Robert Smalls was an assignment reserved for Naval Academy graduates and sent him on his way. But when Ensign Robert E. Blackwell, one of the four men assigned to work with black boots, was ordered to sea, Turek, remembering the eager young man, brought Dille back to Camp Robert Smalls.
Eighteen months later, when Dille learned that black men were to be trained as officers, he volunteered for that assignment as well. He figured he could help indoctrinate these candidates in protocol and military courtesy; once again, he correctly assumed that they’d see few friendly faces during their training.
Almost immediately Dille found these officer candidates to be some of the finest sailors he’d ever met.
“But they were going to face problems, and they knew it and I knew it,” he said. “To the extent that I could be helpful, I tried to articulate these circumstances and set the warning signals up.”
Dille talked to them about how to comport themselves around other officers and enlisted men. He spoke of the importance of keeping their cool when they were invariably shunned at—or excluded from—an officers’ club, and of proudly wearing the uniform no matter what invective is hurled their way.
Dille never had anything written down in advance; there were no formal lectures on racism in the Navy. There didn’t need to be. “More often than not, being the intelligent, educated, and, for the most part, sensitive men that they had to be to be qualified, they would anticipate those things and very well bring it up themselves, whether with me or among themselves,” Dille later recalled.57
Mostly, though, Dille listened. He was a morale booster at a time when the men needed it most and provided a link to the world beyond their barracks. In early February, Dille dropped by to inform the men of the invasion of the Marshall Islands. It was a key battle in the war and Dille explained why. Th
e mood brightened. This was all part of a larger mission, and the United States was winning. Everyone’s spirits lifted.
Dille offered practical help as well. The officer candidates took turns as officers of the day, training companies in boot camp. They were graded on how well they inspected and drilled the enlisted men.
Dille was among the officers assigned to grade their work. If someone made a mistake or did not know what to do, he could ask Dille for advice.
The admiration the men felt for Dille and the sympathy he felt toward them remained a closely guarded secret. Outwardly, Dille was businesslike, an officer training candidates. He maintained a military posture. There was no fraternizing. But on occasion, he might flash a smile or give a knowing nod that conveyed his understanding.
That was enough.58
Richmond, on the other hand, appeared in view of the men to be Dille’s opposite. It seemed he was purposefully harder on them than he needed to be. Richmond had always wanted to be at sea and made plain that he resented being stuck at Great Lakes. The men felt his brusqueness was an attempt to provoke them in the hopes that their resentment of him would get the better of their judgment. Then Richmond could fail them all. Only after the men were commissioned did he congratulate them on completing a semester’s worth of training in half that time. Even then that seemed to the men to be a halfhearted gesture.59
Decades later Richmond would say he had no malicious intent but wanted to make the course as tough as he could because he knew the men would be scrutinized once they graduated, and because he had so much to teach in such a short period of time. At the Naval Academy, Richmond had studied navigation for a year. Now, he’d be teaching it in a month.
Richmond, a Michigan native, was a by-the-book sailor who sought to carry out every order to the letter. It was his duty to see that these men became officers. But he felt awkward about his role, his cousin later explained. He was very much aware that these men were older and better educated than he was. He was supposed to train leaders, but these men, he thought, were already leaders. He was teaching people whom he felt really had a lot to teach him, a sentiment that he could never outwardly express. He was an officer, and decorum must be maintained. So this twenty-three-year-old, charged with training the first black officers, fell back on what he knew from his Annapolis days.60 Making it difficult—being gruff, callous, even indifferent—was how you molded men into officers. And if he scared them a little by telling them that they weren’t up to snuff or that they weren’t going to make it, it was only to motivate them.