BLACK AMERICANS IN WW II: A DIGITAL RESOURCE MASTERPOST
Technical Sergeant William E. Thomas and PFC Joseph Jackson of the 969th Artillery Battalion, which received the Distinguished Unit Citation for providing vital fire support for the 101st Airborne Division during the siege of Bastogne (source)
GENERAL
African Americans in Nazi Germany - U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
Every Forgotten Black Combat Unit in WW2 Explained - War Insider
'Half American' Explores How Black WWII Servicemen Were Treated Better Abroad - NPR
Honor Deferred: Black Veterans and the Medal of Honor - National WWII Museum
How Nazi Germany Weaponized the Race Card Against the US Army - U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
How the Nazis Were Inspired by Jim Crow - History
Patriotism Crosses the Color Line: African Americans in World War II - History Now
The Nazi Persecution of Black People in Germany - U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
The Red Cross and Segregation of Life-Saving Blood Donations From African Americans - Our History Now
PHOTO COLLECTIONS
Historical Image Gallery - Samuel de Korte
Pictures of African Americans During World War II - National Archives
See World War II Through the Lens of an African American Soldier - National Museum of American History
EUROPEAN THEATER
A Distant Shore: African Americans of D-Day (2007) - History Channel
African American D-Day Heroes - Warfare History Network (if you hit a paywall, try opening in a new private window in your web browser)
Black U.S. Soldiers Fought Nazis and Liberated Concentration Camps—Only to Be Treated like Second Class Citizens Back Home - People's Dispatch
How a Black War Correspondent Fought to Tell the Story of the 761st Tank Battalion - History
Major Charles L. Thomas and the 614th Tank Destroyer Battalion - National WWII Museum
On the Road to Victory: The Red Ball Express - History Net
Red Ball Express: The Legendary Lifeline - Warfare History Network (if you hit a paywall, try opening in a new private window in your web browser)
Sacrifice: The 333rd Field Artillery at the Battle of the Bulge - National WW2 Museum
The 333rd Field Artillery Battalion - DetailedPedia
The 969th Field Artillery Battalion - DetailedPedia
The Black World War II Army Unit Tasked with Burying America's Fallen - History
The Tuskegee Airmen - National WWII Museum
The Tuskegee Airmen: An Interview with the Leading Authority - National WWII Museum
The Wereth 11 - American G.I. Museum
Unstoppable: The African American 784th Tank Battalion - National World War II Museum
PACIFIC THEATER
How Black Combat Engineers Did The Most Dangerous Job in the Pacific - War Insider
My War on Two Fronts: An African American Seabee Recalls His Battle with the Japanese—and Jim Crow - Warfare History Network (if you hit a paywall, try opening in a new private window in your web browser)
The 555th Parachute Infantry Company “Triple Nickles” - National Museum of the United States Army
The 93rd Infantry Division: The African-American Soldiers in the Pacific - Warfare History Network (if you hit a paywall, try opening in a new private window in your web browser)
The Few, the Proud, the Black Marines in World War II - Warfare History Network (if you hit a paywall, try opening in a new private window in your web browser)
The Marines of Montford Point: Fighting for Freedom - Sabrina Miller
The Right to Fight: African-American Marines in World War II - Marine Corp Historical Center
BLACK WOMEN IN THE MILITARY
6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion - Veterans History Project
Personal Narratives of African American Women in World War II - Veterans History Project
Siren of the Resistance: The Artistry and Espionage of Josephine Baker - National WWII Museum
The SixTripleEight: No Mail, Low Morale - National WWII Museum
Victory at Home and Abroad: African American Army Nurses in World War II - NMAAHC
When Black Nurses Were Relegated to Care for German POWs - History
Women’s Work: Fighting to Serve — Black Nurses in World War II - Saturday Evening Post
CIVILIAN INTERACTIONS
A Roman Holiday? African Americans and Italians in the Second World War (abstract) - Wiley
Black GIs in Britain - The Mixed Museum
Black Liberators During World War II - Europeana
Black Troops Were Welcome in Britain, but Jim Crow Wasn’t: The Race Riot of One Night in June 1943 - The Conversation
(TW: SA) Second World War’s Legacy of Racism - YaleGlobal Online
'They treated us royally'? Black Americans in Britain During the Second World War - American Archive
When Jim Crow Reigned Amid the Rubble of Nazi Germany - New York Times
Why Mixed-Race Children in Post-WWII Germany Were Deemed a ‘Social Problem’ - History
ON THE HOMEFRONT
A Deadly World War II Explosion Sparked Black Soldiers to Fight for Equal Treatment - Smithsonian Magazine
Black Labor and Race Relations in East Bay Shipyards During World War II - Jim Crow Museum
‘Black Rosies’: The Forgotten African American Heroines of the WWII Homefront - History
Double V Campaign - Jim Crow Museum
Port Chicago: The Fight for Equality that Changed America - Port Chicago Alliance
The Double V Victory - National WWII Museum
POST-WAR
After Victory in World War II, Black Veterans Continued the Fight for Freedom at Home - Smithsonian Magazine
How War Veterans Impacted the Civil Rights Movement - Terrance Bell via Army.mil
Returning from War, Returning to Racism - New York Times Magazine
The Tragic, Forgotten History of Black Military Veterans - The New Yorker
"Being an American of dark complexion and some 26 years, these questions flash through my mind:
Should I sacrifice my life to live half American? Will things be better for the next generation in the peace to follow? Would it be demanding too much to demand full citizenship rights in exchange for the sacrificing of my life? Is the kind of America I know worth defending? Will America be a true and pure democracy after this war? Will Colored Americans suffer still the indignities that have been heaped upon them in the past?"
James G. Thompson, “Should I Sacrifice to Live ‘Half-American?’” Pittsburgh Courier, January 31, 1942
Members of the 22nd Special Naval Construction Battalion at Naval Amphibious Base, Manus, Admiralty Islands, cheering news of Japan's acceptance of peace terms. The sign reads: "War is over! Good-Bye Pacific. Hello USA." (source)
he's actually one of three contenders to the title!
the others are a formerly enslaved man named Caesar Prince (allegedly born 1737 and died in 1851, freed only 10 years before his death):
and John Adams (no, not that one- born 1745 and died 1849)
so why the debate? because Caesar's exact birth year is uncertain, and Hayer may have actually been born in 1753- every document on the date of his birth written before 1850 says so
if Caesar's birth year really is 1737, he's the earliest-born currently known person to be photographed alive
"hey Marzi, why are those all men?" greeeeeat question
the earliest-born woman ever photographed alive, who can currently be confirmed, was Mary Sanderson (1748-1852)
yes, I'm...pretty sure she's alive in that picture. her hands are clenched, and I doubt they could be if she were dead. not with her arms propped up like that on her chair
born earlier than Conrad Heyer, though not earlier than Caesar Prince if he was indeed born in 1737, or Not That John Adams
scurvy has got to have one of the biggest disease/treatment coolness gaps of all time. like yeah too much time at sea will afflict you with a curse where your body starts unraveling and old wounds come back to haunt you like vengeful ghosts. unless☝️you eat a lemon
when i first started looking into wwii records, my main thought was ‘damn really feels like this should be easier??’ i was thinking, given the booming books-about-tanks industry in america, that there would be some kind of massive GI database or a big book saying where every unit was when, etc etc. and there is super not. in my opinion this is the fault of the national archives and records administration, but we don’t have to get into it.
here is a big list of the workarounds and resources i use to find existing primary and secondary source information about wwii, from the level of one individual GI up to units and divisions, as well as general context about the soldier’s experience.
SO YOU WANNA FIND…
…one particular guy
draft cards - every man in the us born between 1877 and 1927 was required, at some point 1940-43, to register for the draft. the registration cards have all kinds of data, including a guy’s birthdate, address, full name, next of kin, employer, and physical description. you can also see their signatures which is nice. digitized by state on familysearch (accesssible w free account). also a collective database on ancestry (paywalled).
enlistment records - these records have some overlap w draft cards, but they include the date and place of enlistment, initial serial number, amount of school completed, and job at the time of enlistment. index on familysearch (accessible w free account)
hospital admission records - transcriptions of army surgeon general records on just about every injury or illness treated in army hospitals during the war, including what kind of injury, how and when it was acquired, and how it was treated. i hesitate to recommend something that's only accessible behind a paywall but these records are SO juicy. on ancestry.
newspapers - if your guy of interest was from a small town, there is a decent chance that some local paper was literally publishing his letters home to his mother throughout the war. newspapers are also a good way to keep track of things like promotions. newspapers.com and newspaperarchive.com are two good repositories, but they’re paywalled. lots of state libraries, historical societies, or university systems will have free historical newspaper databases (here’s california’s.)
census - if you want more info about a guy’s family or life in the states before or after the war, the us census is your go-to. taken every ten years, the latest year currently available to the public is 1950. the 1940 lives here. the 1930 is here. (accessible w free account)
…one particular unit
the org chart - aka the order of battle in the eto. what units were in charge of what other units, who was in command when, what campaigns was everybody part of, etc etc. not juicy, but useful. transcription at the center for military history.
unit histories - the real juicy stuff (where a unit was on each day of the war and what they did) is in the unit histories. the originals are held by nara and can be accessed by paying them for photocopies and waiting five months or by going to college park maryland which i do not recommend. fortunately, an enormous variety of unit histories, morning reports, and after-action reports, primarily for combat units, have been digitized and made full-text searchable on the ike skelton digital research library.
unit yearbooks - lots of units also wrote their own unofficial histories or yearbooks. these can be a treasure trove of weird inside jokes, details about living conditions and day-to-day duties, and old photos. there’s a collection on fold3.org (paywalled) but it’s by no means complete, plenty are available on the internet archive as well.
oral histories - wwii oral histories are scattered wildly across the internet, but the closest thing i’ve found to a central repository is the veterans history project at the library of congress. they have a giant database of oral histories from veterans, which you can search by unit, branch of service, campaign, and geographic area. in a lot of cases you can also stream the original recording, which is great to get a sense of tone and speech patterns.
just plugging the name of the unit into archive.org or google or jstor and seeing what comes up - self explanatory. a good way to find weird little memoirs and dissertations and forums and war department publications.
…general info about the soldier’s experience
technical/field manuals - handy dandy instruction booklets for the soldier, published in the bajillions by the war department. a helpful way to understand how things were supposed to operate during the war. the library of congress has research guides listing the titles of each tm and fm.
the green books - enormous series of books written by the army postwar to analyze their own performance. helpful for understanding how macro-level decision making translated into unit level movements, and answers a lot of questions about logistics. if you are wondering things like ‘where were they getting the bullets from?’ or ‘how did a replacement depot work?’ the answers are probably in these books. index of titles is here, the books themselves are on the internet archive.
film shorts - a librarian on the internet archive has collected, among a ton of other super useful publications and ephemera, over 2,000 wwii era newsreels, cartoons, and training films. they're sick!
the american soldier in wwii project - a modern project out of virginia tech analyzing and transcribing the results of a corpus of surveys given to gis during the war. interesting commentary! just a neat project! also includes a helpful glossary of slang and abbreviations.
life magazine - a good look at how the war was marketed to the american public as it was happening. helpful for understanding pop culture as well. also the ads are often hilarious. full-text searchable on google books.
mizzou prices and wages through the decades libguide - closing on my best best best best best beloved. my legal wife the mizzou prices and wages through the decades libguide. designed to contextualize comparative historical values of money. i would recommend clicking around on it, losing 1-6 hours, and coming back to thank me.
record access caveats under the cut, bc i can’t help myself:
all of these resources deal primarily/exclusively with american records, specifically american army records, specifically in the european theater, bc that’s my personal wheelhouse and also i had to cut myself off somewhere. as kate beaton said ugly people and other countries may have fought against the nazis but we may never know for sure. also i don’t know shit about the navy etc and i refuse to find out as i am afraid of boats. onwards:
draft cards - there were six waves of registration that all use slightly different paperwork. later ones (for men who turned 21 after october 1940) are slightly more informative as they give the relationship with the next of kin in addition to just their name and addy, but it’s much the same. also, it is possible for some guys who enlisted in their teens to kind of wiggle through eligibility periods and never actually register for the draft. the link above also has a breakdown of who registered when and potentially relevant records at nara regarding the draft process broadly, though a lot of specific classification records were destroyed in the 70s.
[also destroyed in the 70s at nara - millions of individual personnel records, in a big yet-unexplained fire at their facility in st louis. something like 90% of individual army service records were destroyed without ever being duplicated or indexed, which has very little to do with the rest of this post as you can't really get your hands on personnel files anyway unless you're a relative, but i just like to bitch about this. goddamn nara.]
enlistment records - the originals are held by NARA which means they’re a huge pain in the ass to get a hold of and i don’t believe they’ve been digitized anywhere. the index linked has a lot of mistranscriptions and misspellings in the names, so you may need to get creative with your search terms if you don’t find the guy you’re looking for.
hospital records - if possible search this collection by serial number. not every record has a name attached, and they were originally filed by serial number only. searching by name won't always get you complete results for a particular guy
newspapers - in a lot of cases neither the paywalled repositories nor the state collections will include the big papers of record for a particular city - ex, the boston globe, the nyt, the chicago tribune. if your guy of interest was a city dweller and doesn’t show up in a search of statewide papers, city public libraries will often have archival access to their big papers (in addition to microfilm records of other small local papers that might not have been digitized yet, if you’re in really deep).
census - the census is available like 16 places online. the links above are free, but i find ancestry’s (paywalled) search the most usable. lots of public libraries have institutional access to paywalled sites like ancestry, newspapers, jstor, etc. literally always worth checking
unit histories - the skelton library is home to all kinds of weird and extremely specific declassified paperwork! the ike skelton library is my best friend! i recommend searching all levels of the org chart - unit, corps, and army. in lots of cases for famous units like the 101st ab, other people have already combed through and collated this kind of documentation, but i still think it’s helpful to look at the og if you can. it’s often very interesting to see what is included/elided in these reports and how things are phrased.
technical/field manuals - unforch as usual there’s no central repository of tms and fms. once you have the tm or fm number of your manual of interest, you can look for a copy on hyperwar, hathitrust, or the internet archive. i haven’t personally noticed patterns in which type of manual lives where.
the green books - worth looking at for this insane logo alone.
I found these pictures of women of colour in the 1920s and they made me happy because you see them so rarely in the modern romanticization of this era x
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