Negro Officers in Two World Wars

Abstract

Soldiers make military history faster than historians can compile it. Today, while men in arms are waging the Second World War, other men are still writing the official history of the First World War. Beyond the slowness of this process, strange aberrations occur in the retelling of how the battle went. Man's memory, his imagination and his prejudices all become inextricably interwoven in the writing of military history, no less and probably even more than in the recording of more prosaic events.' It is, therefore, important at the outset to realize that once we adventure beyond statistics, which are not yet fully compiled, accounts of the Negro's participation in the First World War are likely to be inaccurate in many particulars. In the treatment of a subject so controversial as the service of the Negro officer, the inevitable tendency toward romantic narration in the retelling of military events is accentuated by strong bias, pro or con, in the mind of the narrator. But these very difficulties of separating fact from fiction make the appraisal and evaluation of available data all the more important.