It is, as the leading trade magazine of the book industry told its subscribers during New York’s newspaper blackout, “a fine job of writing which rises to true eloquence,” and “has a cumulative impact that fairly rivets the reader to the pages.” The hero is a Negro GI, Solly Saunders.
Fannie Mae is not necessarily the most eloquent of the three women—one white—who love the sensitive, college-bred Solly. But love only strengthens her conviction that the war provided an unrivaled opportunity for “Double V”—the wartime slogan of America’s disadvantaged minority—victory at home and victory abroad.
To Millie, Solly’s light-skinned sophisticate wife, World War II offered her husband a more cynical opportunity—officer-status, social prestige and a chance to lift them both above and away from the Harlem hordes.
To the pretty Australian nurse Celia, probably the least selfish of the three in her love, the war had brought Solly. But America defeated her too. For to Solly, she had the face—if not the body—of the enemy.
Solly is the chief protagonist, but he does not dwarf his fellow sufferers and associates. The panorama of Army prejudice could not be fully understood without Worm and Jimmy and Baby and Scott—not a Martin Luther King in the lot of them.
Equally vivid are the cracker Capt. Rutherford, the Jewish Lieut. Samuels (of whom Saunders demands more than he would of any Negro) and several other characters.
* * * * *
There are minor flaws in “And Then We Heard the Thunder.” Solly probably has been portrayed as too handsome and too irresistible to women. For surely he is not this season’s most lovable character. But this big, robust, readable novel more than fulfills the promise of Killens’s “Youngblood.”
Ted Poston
From the New York Post (March 31, 1963)
Copyright © News Group Publications, Inc.
From The New York Times, April 7, 1963
An angry, uneven but often stirring book about a Negro amphibious regiment in World War II. Solly Saunders, a New York law student, enters Fort Dix determined to be “the best damn soldier in the Army of the United States of North America.” But the pressures of Jim Crow force upon him the role of a “race man”—a militant battler for equality. From the red clay country of Georgia, where he is beaten by white police, to the Pacific theater where he is thrown out of a restricted Red Cross Club, Saunders is forced to make common cause with his race rather than with his army. In Australia, the hostilities that have been smouldering throughout the book finally erupt in a bloody race riot. Though Mr. Killens slides too easily into the platitudinous and the maudlin, pungent characterizations and a core of honest indignation make this an affecting novel.
© 1963 by The New York Times Company.
Reprinted by permission.
From Saturday Review, January 26, 1963
In this big, polyphonic, violent novel about Negro soldiers in World War II, John Oliver Killens drags the reader into the fullness of the Negro’s desolating experience. The author, formerly a member of the National Labor Relations Board in Washington and now a movie and television writer, served in the Amphibian Forces in the South Pacific. His novel, therefore, has the depth and complexity of lived experience. It calls James Jones to mind, though Killens writes with less technical control and more poetically. But his battle scenes have the same hallucinatory power; his characters live and speak the raw language of the streets and the barracks.
This non-Negro reader who served in the Pacific alongside Negro troops recognizes the events and characters of this novel; but he sees them with a sort of brain-twisting transformation of insights. He never gave much thought, for example, to the hideous irony of asking the Negro to fight (in segregated units) and die in order to preserve the very freedoms which he could not enjoy at home. Few non-Negroes knew the Negro soldier’s common motto, the Double V for Victory: victory against Fascism overseas and victory against Fascism at home. Nor did it ruffle us to hear the band play “God Bless America” while we boarded troopships and then switch to “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” when the Negro troops’ turn came.
But here, living it through the Negro’s reaction, we cannot believe our ears. We look up at the white soldiers on deck “waving and smiling innocently and friendly-like at the Negro soldiers below and yelling, ‘Yeah, man!’ and popping their pinky white fingers,” and the same taste of gall creeps up from our stomachs into our mouths. And we hear a companion whisper, “We ain’t no soldiers. We ain’t nothing but a bunch of goddamn clowns.”
The book’s hero, Solly Saunders, is an educated Negro, a man of taste, position, and ability who went into the war with illusions about fighting to protect America from her enemies. He was confident he would advance, become a leader, do his part to democratize the army.
But he discovered, in those days before integration of the armed forces, that the Negro in uniform was even more harrowingly at the mercy of racists than in civilian life, particularly if the racist happened to be an officer. In order to advance he found he had to lick boots, turn against his own, “go white”—something he could not do.
The bitterness was compounded by rigid segregation even in overseas combat zones. Mimicking the attitudes of white officers, the hero explains:
“’ . . . just because many of them [Negro soldiers] had left their black blood to smear the pretty white beaches . . . and left their black and brown comrades to fertilize the land of strangers. Just because they were soldiers, tried and trusted nephews of their Uncle Sam, they had the colossal nerve to want to go to all the places where the other soldiers went and to be treated free and equal. They were stinking opportunists. They wanted to be treated in Australia better than they were at home. What arrogance—what treachery—what . . . gall!’“
If the Negro’s bitterness and disillusion with his slave status in the old army were massive, he at least expected something better when he returned to America after fighting for democracy overseas. The reader, living all the indignities of the Negro soldier, sees clearly how it looked from the other side of the color line. Discrimination in the armed forces has been eliminated. But the deep wounds of Negro soldiers have not. This novel magnificently illumines the reasons why. Their second victory—against Fascism at home—is slow in coming.
John Howard Griffin
© 1963 Saturday Review Magazine Co.
Reprinted by permission.
REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER
Thank you so much for reading our book, we hope you really enjoyed it.
As you probably know, many people look at the reviews before they decide to purchase a book.
If you liked the book, could you please take a minute to leave a review with your feedback?
60 seconds is all I’m asking for, and it would mean the world to us.
Thank you so much,
Pickle Partners Publishing
And Then We Heard the Thunder Page 58