Double V for victory

American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Military from the Revolution to Desert Storm.

By Gail Buckley.

Random House; 532 pages; $29.95

IN MOST of their country's wars, American blacks fought for a “double V”, a duplicated letter that stands for two victories. The first victory was against the designated enemy. The second was against their own side's racism. It is bad enough that American forces were segregated until after the second world war—that during that war black soldiers were still housed in separate, inferior quarters; that they were given separate, and often vastly inferior, training and weapons; that in some army camps, they even had to sit behind German and Italian prisoners-of-war for entertainment events, including United Services Organisations (USO) shows. It is still worse that black military heroes were airbrushed out of their country's history in much the same way as purged communist leaders were in Stalin's Soviet Union.

Gail Buckley sets out to correct this injustice in a book that has taken her 14 years to research and write. Like her mother, Lena Horne, who sang her heart out for the troops, Ms Buckley is as patriotic as they come. She is a journalist, not a professional historian, and her lack of thoroughness sometimes shows—she thinks, for instance, that Alf Landon, not Herbert Hoover, ran against Franklin Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election, and more than halves the time that Joe Louis took to defeat Max Schmeling in 1938.

But she more than makes up for such slips by telling an important story well. She shows that blacks have had a significant role in nearly all America's wars, starting with the one against George III. Soon after George Washington, a Virginia slaveholder, took command of the Continental army in 1775, blacks were forbidden to serve. Military exigencies forced a change of tack. Midway through the war of independence, some 15% of the Continental army were black men and, wrote a contemporary observer, “they mix, march and sleep with whites.”

But George Washington's was the last mixed American army for 175 years, though even during the American civil war, a conflict in which both sides started out committed to wage a “white man's” war, pressure of events in the end forced the recruitment of blacks. To the horror of the confederacy, the union eventually went so far as to send armed black soldiers into battle, most famously Colonel Robert Shaw's 54th Massachusetts regiment, whose heroism was celebrated in a relief by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and in a Hollywood film, “Glory” (1989).

In her effort to restore balance to American history, Ms Buckley reminds us of the racial prejudices of the good and the great. She notes how Thomas Jefferson found blacks inferior in “endowments of both body and mind”, how Abraham Lincoln encouraged American blacks to emigrate to Liberia and Haiti, how Ulysses Grant's son promised his father that “no damned nigger will ever graduate from West Point”, and how Dwight Eisenhower, as president, lent an ear to the argument of segregationist politicians that the doctrine of “separate but equal” was necessary to national defence.

But in noting the beams in their eyes, Ms Buckley is unaware of a mote in her own. Native Americans get shockingly short shrift when she brags that in the winning of the west one out of every five soldiers was black. She seems to share an older vision of America's manifest destiny and to treat the elimination of the country's indigenous people as a regrettable but necessary step in the advance of western civilisation. Is it progress when prejudice crosses the colour bar?

That apart, “American Patriots” has, in a sense, a happy ending. After its harsh birth in Korea and its stormy Vietnamese adolescence, America's fully-integrated army finally came of age in the Gulf war, the climax of Ms Buckley's story. Blacks, about 12% of the American population, provided not only the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, now secretary of state; they made up 30% of the army, 22% of the navy, 17% of the front-line marines and 13% of the air force. And, Ms Buckley adds, of the 266 American soldiers killed in the Gulf, 15% were black. Robert Talley, an 18-year-old black army private killed by “friendly fire”, was the youngest soldier to die there; Sergeant Joseph Murphy, a 58-year-old black veteran of the Korean war, the oldest. In America's armed forces, Jim Crow at last was dead.