Resisting racism within America’s WWII military: stories from the frontline

America’s World War II military was a force of unalloyed good. While saving the world from Nazism, it also managed to unify a famously fractious American people. At least that’s the story many Americans have long told themselves…

But the reality is starkly different. The military built not one color line, but a complex tangle of them, separating white Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans in various configurations—effectively institutionalizing racism and white supremacy throughout the military to devastating effect. The segregation impeded America’s war effort; undermined the nation’s rhetoric of the Four Freedoms; further naturalized the concept of race; deepened many whites’ investments in white supremacy; and further fractured the American people. 

Yet freedom struggles arose in response to the color lines, and succeeded in democratizing portions of the wartime military and setting the stage for postwar desegregation and the subsequent Civil Rights movements. From the women who were the first Black WAVES to a decorated Japanese American soldier and his friendship with a white comrade, the following slideshow is just a portion of the sweeping, yet personal, stories of resistance to racism within America’s World War II military.

Mitsuma Yokohari

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A twenty-one-year-old resident of the Granada detention camp, in Colorado, Mitsuma Yokohari enlisted in the newly formed Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team, on 10 February 1943. He was among roughly 1,200 incarcerated Japanese Americans to do so. With forced removal and confinement fresh in their minds, other Japanese Americans refused to volunteer on principle. One young man at the Minidoka camp in Idaho asked, “How could the government and army, after branding us disloyal, after stripping us of our possessions and dignity, and imprisoning us in barbed wire concentration camps, how could they now ask us to volunteer our lives in defense of a country that had so wrongfully treated us?” Twenty-one-year-old Mitsuma Yokohari signs voluntary enlistment papers to join the 442nd Combat Team at the Granada Relocation Center in Colorado on February 10, 1943. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, WRA no. E-741.