In August 1944, an American soldier finishing up an Army survey was asked whether he had any further remarks. He did.
“White supremacy must be maintained,” he wrote.
“I’ll fight if necessary to prevent racial equality. I’ll never salute a negro officer and I’ll not take orders from a negroe. I’m sick of the army’s method of treating …[Black soldiers] as if they were human. Segregation of the races must continue.”
Another soldier wrote: “God has placed between us a barrier of color … We must accept this barrier and live, fight, and play separately.”
These harsh views, and others, from the segregated Army of World War II, emerge in a new project at Virginia Tech that presents the uncensored results of dozens of surveys the service administered to soldiers during the war.
Much of material is being placed on the Internet for the first time, and a lot of it runs counter to the wholesome image of the war’s “greatest generation.”
Raw attitudes on topics including race, women, sex, gender and combat are revealed in 65,000 pages from Army surveys that a Virginia Tech historian found in the National Archives.
Black soldiers had their own views about the men they called Southern “crackers” who couldn’t admit that the Civil War was over. Some soldiers were suspicious of women in the service. A gay soldier wondered why he had been drafted. And several soldiers said they had been in combat too long.
The project is called “The American Soldier in World War II,” and is supported by funding from the university and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and by the work of the National Archives.
It is directed by Edward J.K. Gitre, an assistant professor of history at Virginia Tech.
“It does speak to a generation,” he said in a recent interview. “The good, the bad, the ugly, heroic, not heroic.”
The website, which debuted on Dec. 7, makes available digitized and transcribed survey responses, as well as analyses, lists and statistics.
The surveys guaranteed anonymity. (About 500,000 service members were surveyed, but results from about 300,000 survive.) The surveys gave soldiers a chance to beef, opine or vent, and gave the Army an idea of what soldiers were thinking.
For scholars, and now the public, they provide a glimpse into the mind-set of the American generation serving in the war, which for the United States lasted from 1941 to 1945.