Finally Is Given Honorable Status but Can’t Collect Damages : WWII GI Still Battling Over ‘Bad’ Discharge

Thomas Flanagan thought his arduous 43-year battle over an undesirable discharge from the Navy would be over by now.

After all, back in 1979, the Naval Discharge Review Board acknowledged that he had been unfairly rousted out of the service, ruling that he was not a “ring leader” of black sailors who incited a race riot, as charged.

But Flanagan believes that the board’s action is not sufficient compensation for almost four decades of humiliation and lost earnings. “I’m still not free,” Flanagan, 63, said in an interview from his home in Los Angeles. “All these years of washing dishes--I could have been somebody.”

Part of Lost Legion

Instead, he still feels he is a part of the lost legion of “bad-paper vets” who are trying to find a way back to honor. Like Flanagan, some--no one knows exactly how many, although estimates reach into the thousands--were black men caught in racial conflict during the 1940s and 1950s. Others were homosexuals, who in those years were drummed out of the service routinely.

The six-year statute of limitations has long since overtaken Flanagan’s right to sue the Navy for back pay and damages, but Rep. Mervyn M. Dymally (D-Compton) is seeking to restore that right by sponsoring a private relief bill, specific legislation that affects only one person. “To give him relief,” Dymally said in an interview, “is just common human justice.”

But the Navy opposes the measure, and the bill faces other tremendous institutional obstacles. Although extremely narrow in scope, such bills, like all others, must be passed by both houses and be signed by the President--often a tough course for measures that amount to a last resort for service to individual constituents. The bill would allow him to seek financial compensation through the courts for all the years his bad discharge had prevented him from obtaining a descent job or veterans’ benefits.

And Flanagan believes that time is running out. “I’m standing tall,” he said, “but this is 1986, and I’m not going to live forever.”

On Liberty in Vallejo

His story began Dec. 27, 1942, when he was 19, stationed at the Naval Ammunition Depot at Mare Island, Calif. Flanagan, an enlisted man who had been in the Navy four months, was on liberty in nearby Vallejo and was shooting pool in the Knotty Pine Bar, he said, when he heard shouts and gunfire outside.

He looked out the door, he said, and saw white Marines and shore patrolmen firing into a crowd of black sailors. The next day, he reported the incident to his commanding officer, asking what would be done about it, he said.

About a week later, according to court documents, the commanding officer summoned Flanagan and gave him a choice: accept an undesirable discharge or face court-martial for mutiny, a capital offense.

That same day, Flanagan was placed on a train out of town. Later, he learned that his undesirable discharge was based on the charge that he had “promoted ill feelings and racial prejudice and that he had been a ring leader in stirring up trouble and discontent among blacks.”

Flanagan adamantly denies the charge. “They shot into that crowd, and I saw them,” he said in the interview. He said the whites were avenging a confrontation in which a black sailor had stabbed a white Marine.

Bad Discharge Stuck

Nevertheless, he said, the bad discharge stuck “like a red mark around my name.”

It wasn’t until 1978, when the Red Cross was publicizing its program of helping veterans upgrade discharges, that Flanagan took action. With the help of the Red Cross, he persuaded the naval board to change his status in 1979 to honorable discharge, providing him veteran benefits for the first time.

But, as far as Flanagan was concerned, that was only the beginning. He pursued the case in 1983 with the American Civil Liberties Union, which sought damages and back benefits but failed in the U.S. Claims Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals. Both federal courts accepted Flanagan’s version of the incident but ruled that he sued too late.

Wade Henderson, associate director of the ACLU, said it would have been “absolute folly” for a black man to sue the Navy during the hostile racial and social climate of the time.

“Telling Flanagan he should have done that is like telling the Japanese-Americans that they could have made claims against the government for being interned during World War II,” Henderson said.

Turned to Congress

Gary Williams, Flanagan’s ACLU lawyer in Los Angeles, said his client is an example of “people who tried to serve their country and were victimized.” After being stymied in court, Williams turned to the Congress, which he said “has a moral obligation” to help people like Flanagan.

In the last session, however, Dymally’s private relief bill did not even make it out of a House Justice subcommittee; it got bogged down while members waited for Navy comment and was finally crushed under legislation with higher priority.

Such a fate is not unusual. During the 99th Congress, congressional researchers said, 599 personal relief bills were introduced, but only 75 were passed--most of them dealing with immigration cases.

“Private relief bills remind me of something out of Dickens,” David Johnson, Dymally’s administrative assistant, said. “They get wound up in the system and get passed on generation after generation.”

In outlining the Navy’s position on Flanagan’s legislation, Navy Capt. John Fedor, deputy chief of legislative affairs, wrote on May 16, 1986, responding to a subcommittee request for an assessment of the legislation’s impact: “While it is unfortunate that Mr. Flanagan did not file his claim within the statutory six-year period, that situation is not unique to his case, nor do the facts of his case equitably demand that it be treated uniquely.”

‘Subverting the Principle’

The letter continued: “If the proposed relief were granted in this case, it could establish a precedent for unjustifiable preferential treatment, a significant step toward subverting the principle that laws should be applied uniformly to all persons.”

But Fedor, like the two courts, never disputed the fact that Flanagan had been wrongly given a bad discharge.

Flanagan, citing the statute of limitations, called the argument a “technicality they’re trying to use. I’m denied due process of law.”

However, as Fedor pointed out, Flanagan’s case is not unique.

Perhaps the most notorious is the one detailed in the book “The Brownsville Raid,” by John D. Weaver.

Weaver described the cases of 167 black infantrymen stationed at Brownsville, Tex., who were all dishonorably discharged in 1906 by then-President Theodore Roosevelt in an incident involving the shooting death of a town resident and charges that a black soldier had tried to rape a white woman.

The men, part of the all-black 25th Infantry, were “framed” and turned out of the Army when they failed to turn in a non-existent guilty man from their ranks, Weaver said in an interview from his Los Angeles home.

‘Mealy-Mouthed Document’

In 1972, amid a growing awareness of racism in the military ranks, the secretary of the Army exonerated the men in a “mealy-mouthed document,” Weaver said, but by that time only one veteran from the contingent was still alive. Under special legislation, the government awarded $25,000 to the man--who had been working in only menial jobs, such as shining shoes, since his discharge, Weaver said.

Weaver, a soldier himself from 1943 to 1946, said that, during that period, “the Army was a segregated institution, and we were not too far removed from the climate that permitted Brownsville.”

After finally recognizing the problem in the 1970s, the government opened the door for appeals of bad discharges, said J. Alan MacInnis, discharge review coordinator for the Red Cross.

Since 1975, MacInnis said, the Red Cross has handled an average of 4,000 cases a year. About one in three won appeals from the World War II and Korean War eras because there was a “plethora of unfairness” during those periods, he said.

Special Laws Asked

As for those who fail to get their discharges upgraded, some advocates back laws forbidding prospective employers to ask what kind of discharge a veteran has unless the job involves national security.

If that had been the case for Thomas Flanagan, he wouldn’t have felt compelled to lie about the bad papers when he applied for jobs.

Flanagan said he is seeking the right to sue largely because he wants his 12-year-old son, Thomas, provided for.

“I’m entitled to it,” he said. “I want people to know what happened to me. I don’t want to be swept under the rug any more.”