Furious, Prattis called Dixon home and replaced him with another college man named Theodore Stanford. Stanford arrived in France in time to witness the liberation of Paris, then was assigned to the black 784th Tank Battalion as it made its way across Belgium toward Germany, supporting the infantry divisions that withstood the Nazi counterattack at the Battle of the Bulge and advanced all the way to the Rhine River. Yet because almost all the Negro troops in the European Theater of Operations worked behind the front lines—as truck drivers, bridge builders, ammunition runners, mine sweepers, and bakers of thirty thousand tons of bread a day—there was little record outside the black press that one in ten American soldiers in the ETO was black. (In Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, for example, the black soldiers who operated antiaircraft decoy balloons over Omaha Beach on D-Day were nowhere to be seen.)
When the Blue Helmets did deploy in the spring of 1944, it was to the Pacific Theater. But as it turned out, Frank Bolden didn’t accompany them. Instead, Prattis assigned another improbable war correspondent, Billy Rowe, previously known to Courier readers as the paper’s New York–based theater columnist. Troops from the 93rd Infantry were assigned to a mission to liberate the Japanese-occupied island of Bougainville, and they took part in several battles. During one, inexperienced grunts panicked, adding to the charges of inadequacy that would be leveled against black troops. But in other skirmishes, they performed courageously—including one that made a minor hero of Billy Rowe himself. After a bloody day of fighting, Rowe volunteered to go back into the jungle with eight GIs to the retrieve the wounded. He shouldered rifles while the soldiers carried stretchers, and when the search party came under attack he helped the Blue Helmets circle back and kill three Japanese snipers.
Finally, in April 1944, Frank Bolden got his long-awaited letter from the War Department. He was assigned to black troops headed for an undisclosed location in the Middle East. In his first story during the ocean passage, Bolden’s excitement was palpable. Showing off his way with words, he conjured up the cast of characters on the ship. Two black GIs took over “the laundry and tonsorial concessions . . . and the trip was quite profitable for both of them,” Bolden reported. A canny card sharp feigned illiteracy—an act that “would never rate an ‘Oscar’ . . . but was otherwise amusing.” A private in charge of the KP “resembled the picture of the little man who adorns the cover page of Esquire and possessed a strong, booming voice somewhat like that of a rail gang boss.”
Bolden’s mood darkened, however, when after two months at sea he discovered his destination. It was the desert monarchy of Iran, where after seizing power from his father the young Shah had turned over large stretches of land for a “Persian Corridor” to supply Russian troops on the Eastern Front. As Bolden and the rest of the passengers disembarked in the Gulf city of Khorramshahr, it was so hot that a thermometer sitting in the sun registered 146 degrees. Black GIs who manned the port wore two layers of gloves as they unloaded metal equipment. The soldiers who had become so close during the long voyage were broken up and dispatched to new unknown locations. Meanwhile, Bolden boarded a train for the six-hundred-mile trip to Tehran across an arid landscape that he described as “making Death Valley look like the Florida Everglades.”
Bolden spent several months searching for compelling stories in the Iranian desert before giving up. Instead he made his way to Burma, the British colony in Southeast Asia where black troops were at the center of the most ambitious engineering project of the war. When the Japanese army pushed the British out of the area, the Allies had lost access to most of the Burma Road stretching from India into southern China. In order to supply the anti-Japanese forces of General Chiang Kai-shek, they had to airlift men and equipment over the “Hump” of the Himalayan Mountains. So, in 1942, the Allies undertook to build a new one-thousand-mile road through the part of Burma they still controlled to serve as the main supply route into China. The project became known as the “Ledo Road,” after the town in India where it originated. It was also called the “Stilwell Road,” for the man who was given command of the mission, U.S. General Joseph Stilwell. To build the road, Stilwell was assigned fifteen thousand troops, almost ten thousand of whom were black—the largest deployment of Negro soldiers to a single mission during the entire war.
From the beginning, the operation was a Herculean struggle of man against nature. The first hundred miles of road traversed the mountains on the border between India and Burma, through a narrow opening known as “Hell Pass” because it was so treacherous. Bulldozers had to remove thousands of feet of dirt for every mile, along a path that twisted and turned through the dense jungle and rose more than four thousand feet from its lowest to its highest point. Over the next 350-mile stretch, until the new passage connected with an existing portion of the Burma Road, engineers had to erect bridges across a hundred rivers and 155 streams. At any time, they faced the threat of a Japanese air attack or a monsoon rain that could wash away a month’s work in one day. “They don’t need engineers here, they need sailors,” one GI lamented to Bolden.
Bolden described the mission as “Green Hell.” “Sweat, sweat, sweat . . . that’s what it took, not perspiration,” he wrote. “Men like these, with guts of Atlas, who helped move fourteen million cubic yards of dirt for the Ledo Road out of malaria, cobra, tiger-infested and heat-punishing, monsoon-drenched swamp land, don’t perspire. They sweat!” The toll was as much psychological as physical. The nearest “Negro Rest Club,” as the Army’s segregated relaxation facilities were known, was hundreds of miles away, in an orphanage in Calcutta. Days seemed endless. Sleep was fitful. Fear of death was constant, yet without any prospect of glory. Disease and accidents claimed lives every day, and rescue attempts often compounded the losses. One GI drowned trying to save another who fell into a monsoon-swelled river. A black private from Birmingham, Alabama, in the heart of Jim Crow country, befriended a white soldier in his unit only to die trying to save the buddy from a burning ammunition truck.
The black GIs weren’t even permitted to witness the rewards of their grueling labor. One Engineer Construction Battalion was assigned to build an airfield in a rice paddy on the Indian side of the Ledo Road. For three months, the men drained fields, hauled gravel from as far as ten miles away, and mixed and poured concrete in the 100-degree heat. They were gone, however, by the time Allied bombers began using the runway for the first land-based air attacks on the Japanese mainland. When the Ledo Road finally reached China, black truck drivers were excluded from the first convoy over the border. The decision was protested, and ten black drivers were added. When the convoy returned to Burma after only two days, there were rumors that the Chinese had turned the trucks back because they didn’t want Negroes in their country.
When Bolden ran into two old friends from Pittsburgh serving with a trucking company on the Ledo Road, all they wanted to talk about was home. Sergeant Johnny Adams was the “motor dispenser” for the unit, in charge of keeping its vehicles in working order. His white officer praised Adams as “an indefatigable worker who is about the best man at his job that he had ever seen,” Bolden reported. But Adams only wanted to quiz Bolden about “the girls and the 4-Fs” back in the Hill District, and about the value of the war bonds he had purchased in hopes of studying for a business degree. Sergeant Joe Walker of Homewood had logged 270,000 miles a month driving a cargo truck along the “Kidney Run,” as he called it, and had come under enemy fire countless times. But Walker’s mind was on “a certain Pittsburgh lovely” who was waiting for him at home and on a plan to open a haberdashery after the war was over.
When word of the victory in Europe reached Burma, it was monsoon season. The men on the Ledo Road told Bolden they were too exhausted to celebrate. “I’m actually happy but I lack the energy to show it,” Sergeant James Thompkins said, adding stoically: “It’ll probably be a long time before transportation will be made available to relieve us. Guess there is nothing to do but keep on working.” Sergeant Herbert Boyd of
Washington, D.C., who had worked on the road for twenty-two months, could only shrug. “I feel good about it but I can’t indulge in hysterics,” Boyd said. “There’s still some monotonous work to be done here and the monsoon makes things tougher. My major interest concerns my return home to my wife.” Several GIs preferred to talk about other news that had reached the jungle: that President Roosevelt had signed a new law to help returning vets finish school, buy homes, and start businesses. “I’m going straight to my wife and family, then I’m going to see about this GI Bill of Rights and try to get some loan money for my farm,” said Private Eddie William Fedd of Georgia. “The next depression won’t catch me this time.”
With the end of the war finally in sight, Bolden left the Ledo Road temporarily in the summer of 1945 to cover the other major story in the region: India’s push for independence from Britain. Lord Wavell, the British viceroy, had summoned the leaders of the movement to a meeting in the town of Simla in the northern mountains. Arriving in Simla, Bolden found the Indians curious to meet a black reporter, and eager to send messages to U.S. readers. “So you have come all the way from America as a representative of the Negro press—splendid!” Jawaharlal Nehru, the head of the Hindu-led Congress party, exclaimed as they shook hands. Questioned by Bolden about the Indian caste system, Nehru predicted that it would disappear under the “modified Socialist system” that he advocated. Nehru also waved off the idea that demands for autonomy from India’s 93 million Muslims and their leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, could not be defused peacefully. “Even Mr. Jinnah would not welcome a civil war,” Nehru insisted, calmly puffing on a cigarette. “Nationalism is our goal and not division.”
Jinnah took a very different tone in his meeting with Bolden. Wasting no time on pleasantries, he launched into an attack on the Congress party for trying to dictate which Muslims could participate in an interim regime. Jinnah also charged that Mahatma Gandhi, with his saintly appeals to one-man, one-vote rule, was part of the anti-Muslim conspiracy. “Planning is Gandhi’s strongest point,” Jinnah scoffed. “He knew that majority rule is the essence of democracy. What good would it be to the Hindu majority if it did not have the Muslim minority under control? Yes, the Muslims must be destroyed as a separate political entity!”
When Gandhi invited Bolden for an interview, he responded with quiet fatalism to Nehru’s imperviousness and Jinnah’s paranoia. “If there should be chaos, God will work it out,” Gandhi said, sitting cross-legged on the floor in his spare loincloth. Fixing Bolden with a soft-eyed stare, the Mahatma expounded on his theories of nonviolence—offering what for many black American readers would be their exposure to the philosophy that would one day play such an important role in their own struggle. Nonviolence did not extend to opposing all war, or even withholding support for British troops and bases, Gandhi made clear. “I do not want the Axis to win,” he said. “Non-violence is the best way of fighting the enemy within the city’s gates—especially when you are too weak physically and economically to exert physical force and violence.”
“What about the Negroes in America?” Gandhi asked at one point. “Is their lot improving?” Bolden responded positively. He described how awful Jim Crow was in the South but how different life was for Negroes in the North. He talked about the rise in literacy and business ownership in Northern cities. He described the increase in factory jobs and the improving relations with the white labor movement. And he spoke proudly of the role his editors in Pittsburgh had played in that progress. “They will never stop, never let up,” Bolden told Gandhi. “They keep probing, jabbing and screaming until they flush another reactionary victim from his smug and lucrative foxhole.”
When the Japanese finally surrendered on September 2, 1945, Billy Rowe wrote the front-page story for the Courier. From General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters in Manila, he reported that black service troops were on ships headed for Japan and would be among the first GIs to enter Tokyo. (Due to a paperwork error, Rowe himself beat the soldiers there, becoming one of the first Americans to set foot in the ravaged capital.)
Meanwhile, Frank Bolden’s story about the end of the war for the men of the Ledo Road was relegated to page nine. “Peace Means These GIs Can Leave Jungle Hell,” read the headline. This time, Bolden reported, the men allowed themselves to celebrate. “We got mean drunk, because there was nothing else to do or place to go,” said Corporal Willis Pickens of Long Branch, New Jersey. An Army points system gave combat troops priority in being discharged, so most of the soldiers still didn’t know when they would get to leave. “I hope to be home by Christmas,” said Corporal Joe Patterson of New York City, adding that he wanted to “hurry home to my sweet wife and the old Civil Service job where I hope to enjoy the ease and comfort of the best home on earth.”
Bolden did his writerly best to sum up the legacy of the Ledo Road troops. “The Tan Yanks have written their names high among those who served their country well,” he wrote. “The milestones along the Stilwell Road are the graves of those who made the supreme sacrifice.” Yet for all of Bolden’s eloquence, it was a sacrifice to little avail. More than $150 million had been spent on the Ledo Road. More than a thousand men had died, a vast number of them black. Yet the road had never become the invaluable supply route that the Allies envisioned. By the end of the war, it accounted for less than a tenth of the tonnage reaching China, the majority of which was still being airlifted over the Himalayas. Winston Churchill’s prediction—that the Ledo Road would prove “an immense, laborious task, unlikely to be finished until the need for it had passed”—had proved prophetic. As soon as the war ended, the road was largely abandoned and was gradually swallowed up by nature.
In the V-J Day edition of the Courier, another story was tucked in the bottom corner of the front page. “600,000 Negroes Face Job Loss in Cutbacks,” read the headline. The story detailed an Urban League report on the expected layoffs of wartime factory workers, and the problems it would create in cities across America for black communities whose numbers had swelled yet again with a third wave of migration from the South. Over the coming months, millions of white soldiers would return from World War II to their old jobs in the cities, or to new lives in the suburbs made possible by cheap home loans provided by the GI Bill. Postwar movies and books and the new medium of television would celebrate those veterans, including the millions of white immigrants who had proved their patriotism by serving their country. But for black GIs and their families and neighbors, and for P.L. Prattis and Frank Bolden and all the Courier editors who had kindled their hopes, the dream of a Double Victory that burned so bright at the start of the war would be slowly snuffed out, just like the road that ten thousand anonymous “Tan Yanks” had carved out of an implacable jungle.
In 1946, (left to right) Earl Hines, Mary Lou Williams, Erroll Garner, Billy Eckstine, and Maxine Sullivan all came home for a “Night of the Stars” gala as part of a Pittsburgh tradition known as “FROGS Week.”
MUSIC
7
THE COMPLEX MR. B
TEENIE HARRIS JOINED THE Courier as its first staff photographer in 1941, just in time to capture the men of black Pittsburgh going off to war. Retiring from his former life as a numbers runner for his older brother, Woogie, Harris roamed the city with his bulky Speed Graphic camera, snapping photos with a thrifty speed that earned him the nickname “One Shot.” He photographed Johnny Woodruff, the University of Pittsburgh sprinter who won a gold medal at the Berlin Olympics, in his lieutenant’s uniform as Woodruff prepared to join the 369th antiaircraft regiment. Harris recorded the hero’s welcome received by James Wiley, the Pitt physics major who was one of the first Tuskegee Airmen to fly missions over Italy. As black soldiers started to return home, they trooped to Teenie’s private studio on Wylie Avenue for formal portraits in their dress khakis, accompanied by sweethearts in fur coats and their finest hats and jewelry.
Now it was summer of 1944, and nightlife was in full swing again as word of the successful D-Day invasion reache
d Pittsburgh. In the music world, the big news was that Billy Eckstine was coming home with his own big band, and a new spelling of his name. “It’s Eckstine Now!” announced the Courier to readers who had always known Billy by his family name, Eckstein. On a steamy night in August, Teenie Harris went downtown in one of the luxury cars he always drove—Cadillacs and Lincoln Continentals handed down from Woogie—to photograph the Billy Eck- stine Orchestra performing at the Aragon Ballroom. Climbing up onto the raised stage, he got a shot that would prove historic: of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, the two Eckstine sidemen who would go on to revolutionize jazz, playing together while Billy eyed the camera in the background. Then Teenie climbed up to the balcony to capture a panoramic view of the entire orchestra, fronted by an as yet little known singer wearing a flowered skirt, a ruffled white blouse, and a gardenia in her hair. Her name was Sarah Vaughan.
By the time the Billy Eckstine Orchestra came back to Pittsburgh two months later, it was a national sensation. In just ten weeks, it had performed in ten different cities across the East and the Midwest and sold more than $100,000 worth of concert tickets. The band had played to sellout crowds at the country’s top black theaters, the Apollo in Harlem and the Regal in Chicago. Its latest recording, a seductive ballad called “Good Jelly Blues,” was on its way to selling a million copies. This time the Eckstine orchestra played at the former Pythian Temple on the Hill, now renamed the Hill City Auditorium, and Teenie Harris was there to photograph the band’s newest members. Sonny Stitt and Dexter Gordon had joined the saxophone section, and the band had a new drummer, Art Blakey, who had also grown up in Pittsburgh and who played with such ferocity that his drumsticks disappeared in a blur in Teenie’s photos.
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