by Alexis Clark
Magee was a decorated surgeon and army man, and a veteran of the Great War.23 He was also known to be a staunch segregationist. On March 7, 1941, Magee met with a special health council for blacks that included Staupers, who insisted on the elimination of race-based restrictions on joining the Army Nurse Corps. The pressure continued beyond the meeting until Magee finally acquiesced, and the U.S. Army Nurse Corps accepted fifty-six black nurses in April 1941. But the admittance of black nurses came with a restricted quota and a continuation of segregation. “Negro nurses and other Negro professional personnel would only be called to serve in hospitals or wards devoted exclusively to the treatment of Negro soldiers,” said Magee, who emphasized that separate units were consistent with the racial policies and customs that American culture had adopted long before, and that black nurses could take it or leave it.
Undeterred, Mabel Staupers accepted the offer but kept pushing for racial inclusion in the army. Out of the initial group of fifty-six nurses, all were sent to segregated bases: half went to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and the other half to Camp Livingston, Louisiana. In 1942, sixty nurses were sent to Fort Huachuca.24
Elinor’s training didn’t begin on a good note. Hot, sweaty, and covered in grime, she stood silently in formation while one of the commanding officers announced that the uniforms hadn’t arrived yet, so for basic training the nurses would have to wear whatever they had brought. This meant they would have to complete their prerequisites and drills wearing either the clothes on their backs or the nursing school whites they had packed. The reason given for the delay was that the military uniforms were changing and there weren’t enough new ones to distribute. “Others said it was because the ‘black’ army always got what was left,” recalled Elinor years later.25
It was a blow to the nurses’ integrity—wearing civilian clothing for basic training at a military base located in the blazing hot desert. Part of the rank and prestige of representing the United States during wartime was wearing a military uniform. Elinor had already filled a scrapbook with photos of her in nursing school wearing her pristine white jacket-and-skirt ensembles. Now she would be running around a dusty base, drenched in sweat, wearing clothes from home. The army could have allowed the nurses to train in older uniforms until the new ones arrived—anything was better than nothing—but Elinor, along with her fellow nursing sisters, would quickly find out that they, as black women, would come last in every situation.
Six months after Pearl Harbor, there were twelve thousand nurses on active duty in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. Very few had any military experience, and the majority were largely ignorant of the army way of life. It took until 1943 for Lieutenant General Brehon B. Somerville, commanding general of the Army Service Forces, to authorize a structured, mandatory four-week training course for all newly commissioned army nurses. On July 15, 1944, the same day Elinor’s army acceptance letter was issued, the War Department established the first basic training center for black army nurses at Fort Huachuca, located in the fort’s segregated black hospital, referred to as Hospital One. Elinor’s basic training included lessons in field sanitation, military protocol, and defense against air and chemical strikes, as well as a monotonous crash course in the skills they had learned in nursing school: administering prescriptions, taking X-rays, surgery prep, bedside care, and filing charts.26
The living conditions at Fort Huachuca were Spartan. Elinor wasn’t expecting stately furnishings, but none of the nurses were prepared for the depressing appearance of the barracks. They were long wooden shotgun houses painted beige, sitting on a mixture of gravel and dirt, each divided into small bedrooms with one common lounge area where the nurses could talk and play bridge or bid whist. Living on a military base would take some getting used to for anyone, but for black nurses from the North, like Elinor, the experience of entering buildings for “colored” people was infuriating. Many of the other nurses at Fort Huachuca came from the South. These women were used to Jim Crow. Overt discrimination was all they had ever known. But how was Elinor supposed to go from sitting wherever she wanted in a restaurant to socializing in the officers’ club for Negroes?
Basic training lasted for several weeks, so there really was no other choice but for Elinor to accept her new environment. She had made the decision to join, and she needed to see it through. From the very beginning, though, a bitterness began to brew inside her that would grow with each passing day.
There were hardly any places outside of Fort Huachuca that would serve a black person. Uniform or not, businesses and restaurants would deny service to African Americans. The poor treatment of black nurses, however, wasn’t nearly as bad as what black soldiers faced.
Complaints from soldiers who wrote home from bases across the country about the terrible racist conditions they encountered initially fell on deaf ears. But the steady flow of heartbreaking letters that wives, girlfriends, siblings, and parents received month after month created such concern that it was only a matter of time before the NAACP and the Negro press got involved.27
Fort Huachuca was home to as many as twenty thousand black soldiers at a time, and the commanding general and his staff didn’t seem very interested in keeping their morale high. One black soldier, Sergeant Carter from the 597th Field Artillery Battalion, recalled, “Here was a big sprawling camp containing between 17,000 and 20,000 black men with a small percentage of white officers . . . who enforced the strictest segregation possible between themselves and the black officers. Their only contact was strictly in relation to military activities; social contact was out. How they could possibly function together in combat was a question that had to pass through many a black officer’s minds, not to mention the minds of enlisted men.”28
The black medical staff at Fort Huachuca had the largest group of African American medical professionals in the military. Hospital One, the first all-black hospital at the base, had 946 beds and was designated exclusively for blacks, from patients to personnel. It was led by Lieutenant Colonel Midian Othello Bousefield, the highest-ranking African American army physician. There were three dental clinics, with dentists treating approximately a thousand cases per week. The medical corps was staffed with forty-two black medical officers and many African American orderlies. In 1942, there were sixty black nurses, and by 1943, there were a hundred. The number grew each year as Fort Huachuca became the transitional station to train black nurses before shipping them out to various posts throughout the country and occasionally overseas.29
With an elite group of medical professionals and an abundance of black enlisted men in the immediate vicinity, Elinor and the other nurses primarily socialized inside the gates of Fort Huachuca. There wasn’t anywhere else to go, and at least when they stayed on base, they were surrounded by other black people who acknowledged and appreciated them. The 25th and 368th Infantries, the largest units of black troops, were activated at the fort; they included the fabled 92nd and 93rd Divisions, which had helped France achieve victory during World War I.30 There were thousands of black military personnel everywhere on base, which made both the black nurses and soldiers happy. Seeing black men in uniforms smiling and tipping their hats was comforting, and more in line with what a young nurse like Elinor thought the army would be like.
The concentrated population of young black women and men at Fort Huachuca had distinct social advantages. In 1942 two black companies of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (later simplified to WAC) arrived to assist with various jobs around the base. These women were part of the Service Command, whose tasks ranged from repairing stalled trucks to putting on dances for the troops—anything to boost morale and aid the war effort.31 That same year, Fort Huachuca finally built an officers’ club for African Americans, called Mountain View.
When Elinor arrived in 1944, Mountain View had been in operation for two years as an upscale social destination for high-ranking African American military personnel who were not allowed at Lake Side, Fort Huachuca’s officers’ club for whites. Before Mountain V
iew’s completion, while white officers smoked cigars, drank beer, listened to music and danced with female personnel or their wives, black officers with the same rank had nowhere comparable to congregate and pass the time. They couldn’t even frequent the establishments in the local town. At Mountain View, black officers could finally socialize with dignity.
Whenever there were entertainers or major celebrities visiting Fort Huachuca to entertain the troops, such as Lena Horne or Count Basie, however, whites were in front and blacks sat in the back, regardless of rank. On one occasion when Lena Horne was performing, she stepped down from the stage and walked to the back to face the black soldiers. She reportedly said, “I came here to sing for the colored troops. They’re back here.” Horne had a similar experience at Fort Robinson in Arkansas in early 1945. The first show was for the white troops. The second show was for black troops.32
As the demographics of Fort Huachuca began to shift, with many white enlisted men and officers transferred elsewhere, the remaining white officers were outnumbered by African American officers and enlisted men—a fact that fueled an ongoing visceral tension between the two racial groups. Because of the black-white ratio, Fort Huachuca, in the opinion of some of the white officers, was a less prestigious base because they associated blacks with deficient performance and ability. As their white counterparts were transferred out, the white officers remaining felt they were among a subpar population, and they made that clear.33
Consequently, the ratio of white officers to black enlisted men spawned a need for each group to diminish the other. Whites, who were fewer in number, used their race to disparage blacks. And blacks, in response, criticized the capabilities and stature of the white officers in charge. One lieutenant from the 93rd Division who was reinstated on the base in 1942 recalled the animosity that permeated life at Fort Huachuca:
Ninety-five to ninety-eight percent of the white officers were southerners. I think I was in a position to say that the majority of the white officers with the 93d were people who could not have made it with the 37th or 87th divisions, or any white division of any caliber. They might have been all right in the quartermasters, or some laundry units. Instead of being sent to jobs they were fit for, they were sloughed off on the 93d. . . . The black officers as a whole were superior to their senior officers in the 93d. And the black officers knew it; dissension was bound to arise. Then too, those white officers, though Lord knows they would never admit it, knew they were outclassed by their junior officers and this heightened their resentment. They took advantage of their rank to strike out at black officers.34
Even the presence of a superstar proved to do little for race relations between blacks and whites at Fort Huachuca. Boxer Joe Louis, born in rural and impoverished Alabama to sharecroppers, became the heavyweight champion of the world when he knocked out James Braddock on June 22, 1937. Louis became a hero to all soldiers, white and black, when in 1942, after defeating Buddy Baer, he donated his share of the purse to the Army and Navy Relief Fund. When Louis himself enlisted in the army and became a sergeant, he visited Fort Huachuca in 1943 to stage an exhibition match for the soldiers.35 It was a highlight among black and white soldiers alike. But the racism continued.
And the incidents of discrimination inevitably affected the plight of black nurses. After gaining admittance in 1941, the actual enlistment of black nurses in the army remained incredibly low. It was obvious the army didn’t want them in the war effort. In 1944, there were only 330 black nurses in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, even though 8,000 had tried to enlist.36
After Elinor and the other nurses in her cohort completed basic training in the summer of 1944, the army gave them official orders to report to another destination as second lieutenants in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. Until then, none of the nurses knew where they would end up during the war. Many longed to go overseas. There was a group of black nurses from the 25th Infantry who were in New Guinea and the Philippines tending to the black soldiers stationed in the Pacific. But foreign assignments were rare for black nurses and largely depended on how many black soldiers would be stationed nearby. There was a revolving door of transfers at Fort Huachuca. Soldiers came in and were then deployed out to other bases. Black nurses tended to follow the black soldiers, given the strict segregation rules, but Elinor’s group received shocking instructions. They were headed to Camp Florence, a prisoner-of-war camp for German soldiers located in an even more remote area of Arizona.
Questioning orders was not part of military protocol, but the black nurses wondered among themselves why they were being sent to treat Germans instead of American soldiers. Why were Germans even in the United States when the war was being fought overseas? None of it made any sense. Being told to care for the enemy was unfathomable. Their question was partly answered when they were brought together by the commanding officer, who told them that black nurses were being shipped to POW camps because there had been too much fraternization between the POWs and the white nurses who were stationed at those facilities.37
The news angered Elinor and her peers. Some wrote to Mabel Staupers and the NAACP to complain about the POW assignment. Would they be in danger caring for Nazis? These were the very people who thought nonwhites were subhuman. Why should African American nurses be exposed to such a potentially volatile group of people? They could barely handle the discrimination they faced from their fellow American citizens. The assignment also seemed counterintuitive to Jim Crow laws. If blacks weren’t supposed to be in contact with whites, then it didn’t make sense for black nurses to treat German soldiers. The sad truth was that the military had a quota system that didn’t allow for a substantial number of black nurses to participate in the war effort. It didn’t matter that there was a serious nursing shortage. A decision had been made that black nurses were to be utilized strictly for the care of black troops or POWs. White nurses were shipped out whenever possible to care exclusively for Allied soldiers. And though white nurses would have to care for a substantial number of prisoners of war throughout World War II, whenever there was an opportunity to replace white nurses in POW camps with black ones, the swap was made. Either the U.S. military thought there would be no risk of fraternization between Germans and black nurses or it didn’t even care enough to be concerned. However insulting these assumptions, there was nothing Elinor could do to protest her assignment. Black nurses, from the start, were not a welcomed group, and the army expressed this rationale explicitly.
With her new khaki-colored Army Nurse Corps uniform, which had finally arrived, she boarded a train for the two-hour trip to Camp Florence, where the staff consisted of white guards, white military police (MPs), white doctors, and a handful of white nurses they’d be replacing. The reality of Elinor’s situation was grim. If she hadn’t realized it at the start of basic training, she certainly did when she arrived at the POW camp. She was defending her country’s freedom at the expense of her own.
4.
German POWs in the United States
IN 1944, GLADYS POWELL WAS A WIDOW AT 48, living alone in Milton, in poor health and suffering from hypertension, the same condition that had contributed to her husband’s death a year earlier. The former no-nonsense southern belle didn’t have her daughters nearby; they had all started new chapters of their lives in other parts of the country. Gladys was in the Red Cross in Arizona; Elinor was in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, also stationed in Arizona; and the youngest, Ruth, was a student at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
The Powells were hardly the only family to be separated and scattered as a result of the war. The workforce was transformed as people left their jobs to serve in the military, leaving dozens of industries inadequately staffed, and the devastatingly large number of casualties resulted in broken families in addition to vacant jobs.
The staggering numbers of men and women entering the armed services triggered fundamental shifts in the American workforce. The number of men in the army more than quadrupled between 1941 and 1943, from 1.5 million to 6.9
million. By 1945, the total number in the army jumped to 8.3 million. Out of that number, 73 percent served overseas, spending an average of sixteen months abroad. By the end of World War II, more than 12 million Americans served in the U.S. Army, Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard combined.1
Farms, factories, plants, and canneries had to figure out a way to cope with the sudden lack of manpower. In particular, cotton farmers needed pickers. Cotton was a crop that wasn’t managed by agricultural machinery yet; cotton picking required backbreaking manual labor in order to extract the cotton from the thorny bush. Cotton was vital to the war effort, but demands for it had begun much earlier. Besides clothing and linens, cotton had been used since the early twentieth century to make rubber tires and airplane wing covers. In Arizona, it had become a substantial cash crop, central to the state’s economy. Several tire companies had moved there, including Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, which set up factories in 1917 in a town later named in its honor. By 1920, there were 800,000 acres of cotton in Arizona.2 After the Great War, the cotton boom ended—until the coveted fabric was needed again for World War II. When American men continued to enlist, leaving the work of sharecropping (and particularly picking cotton) unattended, the U.S. military took advantage of another source of cheap labor: prisoners of war.
The transfer of hundreds of thousands of Axis prisoners of war to American soil is one of the great untold stories of World War II. There were 371,683 German POWs, 51,156 Italians, and 5,413 Japanese detained in the United States during World War II in more than six hundred camps scattered across the country.3 Having this many foreign prisoners of war interned within its borders was a new experience for the United States. It was a moment in history that would not be as widely reported or emphasized for future generations to absorb.4