Were Blacks in Troubled WWII Regiment Sent to Front as Punishment?

The all-black 364th regiment of World War II had a history of causing trouble: brawling, crashing base dances and even taking on civilians. In short, fighting with everybody but the enemy.

More than 50 years later, a black history foundation wants to find out if hundreds of soldiers were yanked from the outfit and sent in harm’s way for speaking out against the Jim Crow laws of the time. Meanwhile, the rest of their comrades sat out the war in Alaska, where American forces had already beaten back the Japanese.

The Army transferred nearly 300 of the 3,000 black soldiers to other regiments, possibly in a move to weed out troublemakers after the unit was blamed for riots and even killings in Arizona and Mississippi, according to the National Minority Military Museum Foundation.

“We would like to know where these men were sent and the casualty rate among this group of individuals,” said spokesman Charles Blatcher, who has asked the Army to support his effort to delve further into military records.

The Oakland-based foundation began looking into the 364th after Carrol Case wrote in “The Slaughter: An American Atrocity” that the Army covered up a massacre of more than 1,200 of the unruly unit’s soldiers at Camp Van Dorn near Centreville, Miss., in 1943.

The foundation determined that Case’s claim is “not sufficiently supported by historical documentation,” Blatcher said.

The Army came to similar conclusions after looking into Case’s claim at the request of Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and the NAACP.

But the foundation’s research raised other questions--particularly about what happened to those soldiers who challenged authority in the segregated Army.

Anthony Snivley is one soldier the foundation managed to locate. Snivley was transferred from the 364th and wounded in action in Europe after writing a letter to a Philadelphia newspaper complaining of the treatment of black troops at Van Dorn.

“I have heard of what may happen if I write, but I am not afraid of the consequences if my story can bring to life the truth of the matter,” Snivley said in the letter to the Philadelphia Tribune.

Snivley told the foundation he had no knowledge of any massacre. He also said he felt he had never suffered punishment for writing to the newspaper.

Still, the foundation wants to determine if the transfer was “coincidental or an act of reprisal for speaking out against mistreatment,” said Blatcher.

That questions remain about an entire black regiment doesn’t surprise Blatcher.

History has largely overlooked the black soldiers, said the Vietnam War Navy veteran who acted as a historical consultant on the Defense Department documentary “African Americans in World War II: A Legacy of Patriotism and Valor.”

Even today, major war movies such as “Saving Private Ryan” and “Patton” lack references to black soldiers. But black soldiers did fight at Normandy, and it was the mainly black “Red Ball Express” that kept Patton’s tanks fueled and rolling.

One thing all parties agree on is that the 364th was a problem outfit when it arrived at Van Dorn from Phoenix in the summer of 1942.

One officer, one enlisted man and one civilian had been killed and 12 enlisted men were wounded when 100 members of the regiment clashed with black military police in Arizona. Army records list half a dozen other conflicts at Van Dorn in the months that followed, said foundation chief historian Michael Clark.

Like many other mainly northern units, the 364th showed resentment the moment it arrived in the Deep South, said Daniel Kryder, an associate professor of political science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who closely examined the black press, the NAACP papers and War Department archives of the time.

The troops disobeyed rules at the segregated service club, broke into equipment rooms and visited Centreville, a nearby town of only 1,200 citizens, “with an air of defiance,” Kryder said.

In May 1943, a soldier from the regiment was shot and killed on a Centreville street by a white sheriff who had come to the aid of a military police officer. The MP had confronted the soldier for not having a pass.

Tension peaked in early July when hundreds of 364th soldiers crashed a dance at a service club for blacks, coming in through windows to avoid an entrance fee. The regimental guard, military police and a battalion of the 99th Division were needed to quell the disturbance that followed.

The Army’s inspector general looked into the unrest at the Mississippi base and found that “Negro troops voiced considerable resentment toward Jim Crow laws and the attitude of white civilians.”

The inspector general’s investigation found civilian attitudes toward black troops also posed a “danger of racial disturbances.” However, it found relations between black and white soldiers to be generally good.

The report noted that there were no major disturbances among the other 3,653 black troops at the camp, and called the 364th a “threat to the normal peaceful conditions at camp Van Dorn.”

One of the biggest complaints by the soldiers was that they were not getting their far share of combat assignments and were receiving little credit for the fighting they did.

“In the news notes and commentaries on battles overseas, we seldom see or hear anything about Negro soldiers,” one black officer is quoted as saying in the report.

Some things, Blatcher noted, never change.