Divisions

Abstract

Divisions examines racism and resistance in America’s World War II military. The military built not one color line, but a complex tangle of them, involving every imaginable aspect of military life. Who served? Who fought? Who died? Who gave orders and who was forced to follow them? Who received the best ratings and jobs and pay and promotions? Who was court-martialed? Who received furloughs and leaves? Who received honorable or dishonorable discharges? Who ate at the officers’ club? Who danced at the post’s main recreation center? Who drank at the best pub in Cherbourg, France, or swam in the nicest pool in Calcutta? Color lines, which divided American troops in various configurations, often spoke definitively in all these matters and more. Taken together, they represented a sprawling structure of white supremacy and of African American, Japanese American, and other nonwhite subordination. Varied freedom struggles arose in response, democratizing portions of the wartime military and setting the postwar stage for its desegregation and for the flowering of civil rights movements beyond. But the costs of the military’s color lines were devastating. They impeded America’s war effort, undermined the nation’s Four Freedoms rhetoric, traumatized, even killed, an unknowable number of nonwhite troops, further naturalized the very concept of race, deepened many whites’ investments in white supremacy, especially anti-black racism, and further fractured the American people.