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.

Russell Buss and Jack Kawamoto

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In combat together in Italy, Russell Buss and Jack Kawamoto, a member of the 442nd Combat Team, were reunited at Dibble General Hospital in Palo Alto, California, in July 1945. Buss remarked, “The Nisei is a brave, and excellent soldier. There are none better—none braver. I am proud of my Nisei buddies.” While Japanese American soldiers continued to face discrimination throughout the war, comradeship born on the battlefields of Europe did sometimes narrow the divide between themselves and white Americans. In contrast to their mistreatment of Black troops, army authorities encouraged these connections by mixing Japanese American outfits with white ones and by lauding Japanese Americans’ fighting. Russell Buss (left) and Jack Kawamoto (right) are reunited at Dibble General Hospital in Palo Alto, California in July 1945. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, WRA no. -74.