In nineteen forty two, a young man named James Thompson wrote a letter to a newspaper in Pittsburgh. He was twenty-six, he worked in a factory, and he was asking a question that a great many Black Americans were asking that year.
The question was why he should fight for a country that did not treat him as a citizen.
His answer was to propose a campaign with two Vs in it. Victory abroad against the enemies of democracy, and victory at home against the people who denied it to him.
The newspaper ran with it and it spread across the country, and it is the frame this whole episode sits inside. Roughly one and a quarter million Black Americans served in this war, in an army that segregated them by regulation, and most of them were doing two things at once.
The United States armed forces in nineteen forty one were segregated by policy from top to bottom.
Black soldiers served in separate units, usually under white officers. They trained at separate camps, often in the American south, where local law applied to them the moment they stepped off the base. They ate separately, slept separately and were transported separately.
Most were assigned to service units rather than combat: supply, construction, transport, stevedoring, laundry, graves registration. The official reasoning, written down in staff studies of the period, held that Black troops were unsuited to combat, and that reasoning was circular, because units kept out of combat cannot demonstrate otherwise.
There is one detail that is quoted so often precisely because it is so hard to argue with. At several camps in the south, German prisoners of war were permitted to eat in canteens that Black American soldiers guarding them were not allowed to enter.
In August nineteen forty four the Allied armies broke out of Normandy and began moving across France at a speed nobody had planned for.
That created the crisis of the campaign. The railways of northern France had been systematically destroyed from the air, on purpose, to stop the Germans using them. The ports were still being cleared. And the fighting divisions were now hundreds of miles ahead of their supply dumps and pulling further away every day.
The answer was improvised in about two days and it was called the Red Ball Express.
Two parallel one-way roads were designated from Normandy to the front, closed to all other traffic, marked with red ball signs. Lorries ran along them in convoy, day and night, without stopping, and every vehicle that could be found was thrown into it.
At its peak nearly six thousand vehicles were on the route, carrying around twelve thousand tons a day.
Roughly three quarters of the drivers were Black soldiers. They drove in blackout conditions, often eighteen or twenty hours at a stretch, on roads not built for the traffic, and they drove them into the ground, because a lorry driven that hard breaks. Speed limits were officially set and universally ignored, and the standing joke was that the only thing a Red Ball driver would stop for was a bridge that was not there.
It ran for eighty-three days, and it is the reason Patton's army was anywhere near Germany in nineteen forty four.
The other half of this episode is in the air, and it began with a lawsuit and a political fight.
Under pressure, in nineteen forty one the army air corps set up a training programme for Black pilots at Tuskegee in Alabama. It was intended by several of the people who authorised it as an experiment that would fail and settle the question.
It produced around a thousand pilots. They flew first in North Africa and Sicily, and then, as the 332nd Fighter Group, in Italy.
They painted the tails of their aircraft bright red, which is where the name Red Tails comes from, and from mid nineteen forty four onward their main job was escorting heavy bombers on long raids into central Europe.
Bomber crews requested them. Not for political reasons, but because of a tactical habit: the 332nd stayed with the bombers rather than chasing after individual enemy fighters for personal scores, which is what a bomber crew wants above everything else.
There was for many years a claim that they never lost a bomber to enemy fighters. That is not accurate, and later research established that they did lose some, and it is worth saying so plainly, because their actual record is impressive enough without it and because getting it wrong hands ammunition to people looking for it.
This pattern was not only American, and it is worth widening the frame.
The largest volunteer army in history fought in this war and it was the Indian Army, around two and a half million men, none of them conscripted. They fought in North Africa, in Italy, and above all in Burma, where the Fourteenth Army came to call itself the Forgotten Army because it believed, with justification, that nobody at home was paying it any attention.
Around a million Africans served in British and French forces, in labour and combat units, from the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal, and elsewhere. Some of them fought in Burma. They were paid less than white soldiers of the same rank, as a matter of policy.
The Six Triple Eight, a battalion of Black American women, was sent to England in nineteen forty five to deal with a warehouse crisis: seventeen million pieces of mail had backed up, some of it two years old, addressed to soldiers who had moved a dozen times. They were given six months. They cleared it in three, working three shifts a day, and their motto was that no mail meant low morale.
In every case the pattern is the same. The work was essential, the conditions were worse, the pay or the recognition or both were less, and the story is not in most of the books.
And then the war ended and they came home, and the second V had not been won.
Black veterans came back to the same segregation they had left, and in the American south sometimes to worse than that, because a man in uniform who had been treated as an equal in Britain or France was regarded in some places as a problem to be corrected. There were assaults. There were a number of murders.
The benefits package for veterans, which sent millions to college and bought millions of houses, was administered locally, and locally it was administered unequally. Black veterans were refused mortgages in neighbourhoods where they were not wanted and turned away from universities that would not admit them.
But something had changed and it did not change back.
In July nineteen forty eight, President Truman signed an order ending segregation in the armed forces. It took years to be carried out fully, and it happened at all because of the record built by the people in this episode and because a great many of them came home and refused to be quiet.
A significant number of the people who led the civil rights movement in the nineteen fifties and sixties were veterans of this war.
No Black American serviceman received the Medal of Honor during the war or for decades afterwards. In the nineteen nineties the army commissioned a study into whether racial bias had affected awards. The study concluded that it had. In nineteen ninety seven, seven men were awarded the Medal of Honor for actions in this war. One of them, Vernon Baker, was still alive to receive it.
The Six Triple Eight were awarded a Congressional Gold Medal in twenty twenty two. Two of the women were alive for it.
The Red Ball Express drivers received essentially nothing at the time. There is now a memorial, and there was a film in the nineteen fifties in which the lead driver was played by a white actor.
Here is something to think about tonight. A great many of the men in this episode were fighting a war against a country built on the idea that some people are worth less than others, in an army that had been organised on a version of the same idea. How do you think they held both of those in their heads at once?