Martha Settle in WAC uniform
Martha earned a master’s degree in history and applied for a teaching job in Washington, D.C. She says political cronyism dominated the school system, however, so she went to work as a statistical clerk for the War Manpower Commission, where she quickly encountered the institutional racism endemic to the nation’s capital in those days. So, in frustration, she resigned and volunteered for the newly formed Women’s Auxiliary Corps—the WACs, women in the Army.
It was not an idle choice. As a student of history, Martha understood that the war “was the turning point of the century. When it was over the world would change. And I wanted to profit from it.” She also wanted to be an officer and told the WAC official she would accept nothing less than a commission. It was an elite group: the Army had agreed to recruit blacks, but no more than their representation in the population. In other words, a quota. Forty black women were selected after they had been personally approved by Mary McLeod Bethune, the founding president of Bethune-Cookman College and the formidable president of the National Council of Negro Women.
Bethune was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt and she saw the WACs as a great opportunity for young black women. Through the war she closely monitored what she called “my WACs,” especially when it came to racial slights and worse.
Martha Settle was exactly the kind of young black woman Bethune had in mind, and after a six-week training course she was shipped off to Des Moines with her new lieutenant’s bars.
She helped train women recruits, but her duties were confined to teaching calisthenics and drills, the kinds of assignments reserved for blacks. There were other forms of discrimination, some shocking even during that time of racial apartheid in America.
Martha remembers to this day the anger she felt when a group of German officers, who were POWs at a garrison in the Des Moines area, were invited into the Fort Des Moines officers’ club while the black officers were barred. She also remembers there was nothing she could do about it.
Black musicians were routinely banned from the base band, so they formed their own—maybe the first all-black, all-female military band in the world. Martha recalls that Army officials in Washington sent word to Des Moines: “We don’t need two base bands. Get rid of the black band.” Martha, who normally kept her objections in race matters to herself, raised the band issue with her superior officer, although she acknowledges now that she did it in a low-key way since it might have jeopardized her chances for promotion. Others got involved as well, including the musicians’ guilds, and eventually word reached the White House and Eleanor Roosevelt. Not long after, the black band was back in business.
Martha does believe she was personally responsible for the integration of the base swimming pool. Black WACs were to swim on Fridays only but Martha says, “After every Friday they would clean the pool! It didn’t make me angry because I expected it.” All of the units at the base were segregated by color except one. It was made up of recruits who were struggling with basic training and it contained a half dozen black women. Since the swimming schedule was organized by unit, Martha saw her chance. She took the black recruits aside and said, “Swim with your unit.” After that, she says, “The pool rules became more relaxed and people more or less swam when they wanted to. I don’t know if that would have happened at the men’s camp. I think the women had a little more fellowship.”
That was never more clear to Martha than when she applied for additional specialized training. She wanted to avoid the plight of most blacks, being sent to the “unassigned pool,” which generally meant menial tasks. So she asked for and received permission to go to the Army’s adjutant general school to train as an executive officer or administrative commander.
En route to her new assignment in Texas, it was clear that other passengers on the train didn’t want to share their car with a black woman, but Dr. Putney remembers how her fellow officers, all white, rallied to her side, making sure they sat in the same car with her all the way to Houston. Later, as she was returning from Texas to the Midwest, there was a much uglier incident.
The train conductor refused to accept her Pullman car tickets and directed her to a freight car at the rear of the train. She protested but then started for the rear before deciding, “No, I won’t do this.” She stood between two cars, refusing to move. The conductor, quite angry now, called the Military Police. Dr. Putney chuckles now when she remembers that when the two MPs arrived, they saw her lieutenant’s rank and saluted her as the conductor watched, astonished. She was courteously escorted back to the base, where other officers hurriedly arranged for her to make the trip to Chicago and her new assignment in a military plane. She was heading for what she called “choice assignment,” the Women’s Army Corps Hospital in Chicago. Before she could begin work, however, she had to endure yet another uncomfortable round of discrimination.
Martha Settle Putney
Her all-black unit of medical technicians was to be housed near Gardner General Hospital, not too far from Chicago’s tony Lake Shore Drive. The Army had built a barracks for the WACs, but several local residents protested. They wrote city officials, demanding that black WACs be moved to another neighorhood. Local civil rights organizations heard about the protests and sent word to the War Department in Washington not to buckle. Dr. Putney remembers it took the War Department a while to do the right thing, and when it did, it said, in effect, “We’ll send you to that neighborhood, but if anything happens, we’ll move you out of there.”
Lieutenant Settle spent the rest of the war supervising medical technicians at the hospital with no difficulties. It was an assignment that she remembers with pride to this day.
After the war Martha returned to her old assignment as a statistical clerk with the Manpower Commission, work that is now a part of the Labor Department. She met her husband, Bill Putney, in Washington and they were married in 1947. They had one child, Bill Jr., now a product engineer with Ford in Detroit. Her husband died in 1965.
By then Martha’s ambitious intellect had kicked in again, this time prompting her to take advantage of the GI Bill and enroll in a doctoral program in history at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her PhD in European history and was hired by Bowie State College, a mostly black institution in Maryland.
She stayed for sixteen years and then went on the faculty at Howard for another nine years. Martha attributes her success in life to the opportunities she would not have had without the war. “I knew when World War II approached it would be a terrible thing, but afterward I was so grateful. . . . It provided opportunity. The army has a way of teaching personnel, and it sticks. At Bowie they had a book on teachers the students passed around. Under my name it said, ‘Don’t take her unless you want to study.’ ”
Dr. Clifford Muse, Jr., now a professor at Howard, did his graduate work under Dr. Putney, an experience he remembers well. “She worked me to death. I really learned from her. She tried to prepare you for discrimination in the sense you had to be very good to be accepted.” In fact, that was how Dr. Putney had always dealt with discrimination, and she was determined to pass along to all of her students the lessons of her own life.
William Missouri, another former student, recalled, “I was in Dr. Putney’s African American history class and, let me tell you, it was tough.” Missouri, now a circuit judge in Maryland, dreaded the days he arrived in class unprepared. “She would bring you up short in front of the class. She wouldn’t chastise you, but she’d say, ‘How can you be an African American and not want to learn African American history?’
“She’d say, ‘Work hard. If you fail, don’t look around for others to blame. Look in the mirror. You have to accept responsibility for your own life.’ ” When Dr. Putney did discuss her military experience it was always in that context: she felt she had to do extra well because she was so conscious that she was representing other black women with her success. In her conversations with Dr. Muse, Judge Missouri, and her other students, she used her life
during World War II as a teaching tool for them.
Since retiring from Howard, Dr. Putney has been volunteering at the Smithsonian and working on her histories of the role of blacks in the armed forces. She’s already written When the Nation Was in Need: Blacks in the Women’s Army Corps During World War II. She’s also been working on a history of blacks in combat from the Revolutionary War through Operation Desert Storm.
For all of the changes she’s witnessed, for all of the successes she’s enjoyed personally, Dr. Putney is saddened by the recent turn against affirmative action in California and other states. She knows what can happen when government programs provide opportunity. “We still have honor in America within a basic core of people. . . . But you can’t make all people [share that sense of] honor unless you respect them. If you push them around they’re not going to respond.”
She’s persuaded she was accepted for graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania because of her whole life, including the military, and not just because of how well she performed on tests. Dr. Putney is convinced more emphasis must be placed on essays and backgrounds rather than SAT scores for college admission or the situation will not change much.
Dr. Putney and her husband were in Washington the day Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., made his “I Have a Dream” speech. “I really thought it was going to be a new day after that. There has been a lot of progress but I have been disappointed. People need to be accepted on their merits and their character. Not everyone gets the same opportunity.”
Martha Settle, a working-class black female from a tough town in Pennsylvania, didn’t have affirmative action when she was coming of age. She had a national crisis in which the need for the bright and able was so great she could take advantage of opportunities that would not have been available otherwise. Racism was still the order of the day, but it gave way just enough for Dr. Martha Settle Putney to remind everyone that the premise was false and the consequences were unworthy.
JOHNNIE HOLMES
“It is my country right or wrong. . . . None of us can ever contribute enough.”
JOHNNIE HOLMES was born in Ohio in 1921, but his family moved to the Chicago area after a few years because there was, well, opportunity: an aunt was involved in the Al Capone bootlegging empire and Johnnie’s father could get a job as a driver and deliveryman.
They settled in the suburbs, in Evanston, home of Northwestern University, and life was good. His father had steady work and Johnnie, one of the few black students in Evanston High School, has no memory of any racial discrimination.
At an early age he became enthralled with the military way of life. For a time he even considered joining the French Foreign Legion. So by the time the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor it had a ready volunteer in Johnnie Holmes, even though the U.S. military was hardly friendly territory for black Americans.
It’s not that black Americans were not represented numerically. There were 1.2 million in uniform during the war, almost 10 percent of America’s black population at the time. Most were confined to the service areas of the military, however. They were ship’s stewards or worked in the quartermaster corps or served as drivers for transportation outfits. Ten percent saw combat. Those who did had distinguished records, but the myths remained. The military establishment was reluctant to acknowledge that black Americans were fully capable of taking their place in the front ranks.
Johnnie Holmes, wartime portrait
Holmes was blissfully unaware of what awaited him. As he put it, “I went into the Army to become a man. I told my momma, ‘I’m not going to let it break me. I’m going to let it make me.’ ”
He began his military career at Fort Custer in Michigan but it wasn’t until he shipped out to Fort Knox, Kentucky, that he encountered real, bitter racial hatred and segregation for the first time. All of the noncommissioned officers were white southerners, as Holmes remembers it, and they made the trials of basic training all the more difficult for the all-black outfits. Among other indignities, Holmes is persuaded that Fort Knox dentists experimented on the black soldiers. He remembers being strapped in a dentist chair and getting his teeth drilled with no novocaine.
At the end of basic, Holmes was sent on to Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, to begin his training as a tanker. By now Holmes and the other black soldiers had weekend passes, but even though they wore the uniform of the United States Army and even though they were prepared to give their lives in defense of their country and for the cause of freedom and against the fascist juggernaut rolling across Europe, the racial wounds deepened. Whenever they accidentally strayed into all-white neighborhoods they were met with anger and derision: “Hey, boy, what you doin’ here? Git outta here, nigger.”
When a black soldier friend of Holmes’s was found dead on railroad tracks near an all-white neighborhood in Alexandria, the other black soldiers were not fooled by the official story that he’d gotten drunk, stumbled onto the tracks, and been run over by a train. They were sure he’d been beaten to death, and they were furious. They were by now combat-trained and they were prepared to go to war against Alexandria. They rounded up their tanks, machine guns, and grenades, but Colonel Steele, their commanding officer, reasoned with them and they backed off.
It wasn’t long, however, before there was another racial flare-up, this one at the PX. A black soldier was cheated at the cash register by a white clerk. When the soldier protested, racial slurs started flying, and again the Louisiana base was at a racial flashpoint. Holmes recalls with pride that not long after that the PX staff was integrated.
If anything, life as a black soldier became even more intolerable when Johnnie Holmes and his units transferred to Fort Hood, Texas, to begin the final phase of their preparation as an armored unit. Fort Hood was also home to a stockade full of German prisoners of war. It is one of the little-remembered curiosities of World War II that German and Italian prisoners were often shipped to remote places in the American West to await the end of the war, with more comforts than they would have had at home.
Johnnie Holmes remembers, however, just as Martha Putney remembers. He remembers the German POWs were allowed to go to the PX when Holmes and his friends could not. He remembers white officers saying, “If you boys don’t behave we’ll have those Germans guard you.” What he remembers most of all was an incident involving his platoon lieutenant, a recent graduate of UCLA, where he had starred in three sports. His name was Jackie Robinson.
One weekend Holmes, Robinson, and some of their friends went to Temple, Texas, on a weekend pass. They weren’t in town long before Holmes felt a piercing pain in his chest. He didn’t know it at the time but it was pleurisy, an inflammation of the thorax membranes that can be debilitating. He could barely walk.
Lieutenant Robinson helped his young soldier onto a bus headed back to the base, stretching him across the front row of bus seats. The white driver would have none of it, telling Robinson to get Holmes to the back of the bus and get there himself. As Holmes remembers it, Robinson said no, he would not move Holmes to the back of the bus and he sure wasn’t going there himself. Holmes recalls that they were arrested by MPs back at the base. I was unable to find references to this in biographies of Jackie Robinson, but given the time and place, it may have been too common to warrant attention.
In many other accounts of his life, another Robinson bus incident involved a light-skinned black woman who was the wife of a fellow officer. When Robinson was told by the bus driver to stop talking to her and move back, Robinson refused and was court-martialed. He was subsequently found not guilty and left the service not long after, suffering from bone chips in his ankle from his college playing days.
Holmes and his fellow black tankers shipped out for Europe as the 761st Tank Battalion. They were quickly in the thick of battle in the final drive across Europe toward the heart of Germany. They were in combat for 183 straight days, including the worst of the Battle of the Bulge, the ferocious fight through the winter of 1944–45 in the forests of Belgiu
m. They were praised by General Patton and the other commanders of the infantry units they were supporting, but they could not fully escape the racial insults, not even there. Holmes remembers coming back from battles, their tanks battered and bloodied by the loss of their comrades, and hearing white soldiers tell Belgian villagers, “Those niggers ain’t up there. They’re just bringing the tanks up for the white boys to use.”
Johnnie Holmes
Johnnie Holmes, with 761st Tank Battalion
In fact, Holmes and the others in the 761st were face-to-face with death every day. One of Holmes’s chilling memories is running through the woods, on attack, when he spotted a German sniper. He opened fire, killing the sniper immediately, realizing that if he had not seen him, just by chance, Holmes would have been shot in the back as he ran past.
There was a widespread belief that the black soldiers weren’t up to the job. Dale Wilson, a retired Army major and now a military historian, said, “The African American was fighting a war on two fronts. He was fighting racism at home—Jim Crow, segregation—and he was fighting for the opportunity to fight. . . . Here’s a guy who has to beg to get into combat.”
General George S. Patton became a hero to the black tankers when he appeared before the 761st. Holmes thought he was “the most dashing thing you ever saw—standing on a half-track with those two pearl-handled pistols.” Patton said something to the effect of “You guys are a credit to your race. You’re here because I asked for the best. Now go out there and kick some Kraut ass.” Yet there’s also evidence that Patton had his private doubts about the ability of blacks to perform as well as whites in the military.
The record of the 761st, however, was exemplary. Those black soldiers earned 8 Silver Stars, 62 Bronze Stars, and 296 Purple Hearts, according to Trezzvant W. Anderson’s book Come Out Fighting: The Epic Tale of the 761st Tank Battalion, 1942–1945. The historian Dale Wilson has no doubt about the effectiveness of the 761st. “This unit saw action with eight divisions, so it was making a significant contribution during the war. It performed in an outstanding manner. I think there are clear-cut cases where guys should have been recognized, if not with an award he didn’t receive, then with a higher award than what was given.”
Tom Brokaw Page 17