New Film Hart's War Highlights World War II Bigotry

Hillary Mayell
for National Geographic News

February 28, 2002

Not many would expect to get a powerful lesson on racism and prejudice
during Black History month from a Bruce Willis movie. But that's exactly
what his current movie delivers.

In Hart's War, a black
fighter pilot is falsely accused of murder at a German prisoner of war
(POW) camp during World War II. While the movie is a work of fiction,
the bigotry black soldiers faced both at home and in the armed forces is
devastatingly true.

The movie is based in part on the experiences of America's first black fighter pilots, the Tuskegee Airmen. Willis, who is a history buff, calls the struggles of these pioneers an amazing story.

Shocking might be another word. Black soldiers who risked their lives in service to their country overseas faced prejudice and rigid segregation policies when they returned home. Even prisoners of war were treated better in the United States.

"Black soldiers, many of whom had seen combat overseas, would find when they returned to bases back home that German prisoners of war were given freedoms that black military personnel were not," said Samuel Broadnax, a former fighter pilot who graduated from Tuskegee Flight School in 1945. "The POWs were easily identified; they had big "Ps" on their backs painted in white, and they could go into commissaries, and under guard, into stores and try on clothes where blacks could not."

The Tuskegee Experiment

Just getting the right to train as pilots had been a fight. In 1925, the Army War College released a study claiming that Black Americans were inherently unqualified, physically and emotionally, for combat. At the start of World War II, the armed forces were completely segregated, and in many branches, blacks were allowed only menial jobs.

The "Tuskegee Experiment" began in July 1941 with the founding of a flight school at Tuskegee University in Alabama. A letter-writing campaign, a lawsuit filed by a Howard University student, and pressure from groups ranging from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to President Roosevelt combined to force the Army Air Corps to establish a trial program.

Everyone expected the "experiment" to fail.

"The pilots received all their training at one base," said Broadnax. "The usual practice would be to finish one component of training and then move to another school for the next stage. Tuskegee was much more difficult than the flight schools at white colleges. But no one believed blacks could fly, and no one wanted them to."

Against all odds, the Tuskegee Flight School proved to be a resounding success. Its graduates, who became known as the Tuskegee Airmen, formed the 99th Pursuit Squadron, and later the 332nd Fighter Group.

The pilots fought in the air war over North Africa, Europe, and Italy. Their record was one of the best; those flying combat missions shot down 111 German aircraft, damaged 25, and shot up 150 enemy aircraft on the ground. One destroyer was sunk by machine gun fire.

In a record that was unmatched, not one bomber was lost in more than 2,000 bomber escort missions. The Germans feared the black squadrons, dubbing them the Black Birdmen. Sixty-six Tuskegee pilots lost their lives in combat, and 32 were shot down and became prisoners of war.

Despite their stellar war record, black servicemen, who also included bomber pilots, bombardiers, navigators, gunners, radio specialists, mechanics, and ground engineers, continued to face discrimination at every turn.

Joseph P. Gomer, a Tuskegee pilot who flew in Italy as part of the 332nd Fighter Group, recalled those times for his daughter. "We shared the sky with white pilots, but that's all we shared. We never had contact with each other. German prisoners lived better than black servicemen…and the Germans treated us better than the Americans did. Our service is something that never got into history books. It was just ignored."

Bigotry at Home

More than 4,000 German prisoners of war were held in prison camps in 45 states in the United States during World War II. According to many accounts, the food was good and the housing was frequently better than that for black soldiers.

The ranking German officer at one camp was assigned a house, a car, and a driver. POWs at Camp Clinton in Mississippi reported the scores of their sporting events in the local newspaper, said John Ray Skates, emeritus professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi and author of several books on WW II.

"There were numerous occasions when German POWs, especially from the many camps located in the Jim Crow south, were allowed in stores which denied access to black Americans," said Arnold Krammer, a historian at Texas A & M University who has written several books on the prison camps in the U.S. "When buses filled with German POWs went south, the occasional black MP guards had to move to the back of the bus, while the German prisoners remained in the seats of their choice. German POWs, debating with their guards, regularly used the issue of segregation in America to defend their treatment of the Jews. How tragic."

All military bases are surrounded by enclosures. The prisoners of war were for the most part allowed to wander freely around the base, said Broadnax.

Lt. Col. Charles Dryden (U.S. Air Force, retired), and one of the original Tuskegee airmen, writes bitterly of his experience in a memoir titled A-Train; Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman. "German prisoners of war, soldiers of America's enemy, could use all the facilities at the post exchange at Walterboro, South Carolina, and I, an American citizen who had fought the Nazis to defend America, could not. C-o-u-l-d n-o-t. COULD NOT!" [original emphasis].

Black soldiers stationed at Camp Phillips in Salina, Kansas, watched German POWs eat in restaurants they were not allowed to enter. And in April 1945, 101 black soldiers protesting a rigidly segregated system at Freeman Field in Indiana were arrested.

"The men, some of whom had seen combat, were placed under house arrest and kept behind barbed wire fence, while they could see prisoners of war walking around with no restrictions at all," said Broadnax.

"The part about a soldier being accused of murder—that's fiction. But the rest is true. There's a lot that hasn't been told yet. The movie should raise some questions in people's minds."

Tomorrow, another feature to wrap up Black History Month: A report on a new book about William Sheppard, an African American from Virginia who went to the Belgian Congo as a missionary in the 19th century but engaged in adventures so colorful he became known as "Black Livingstone." His eyewitness report of atrocities against the native Congolese also made him an early human-rights activist.

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