Memorial Day tends to be a moment when we reflect fondly on the Greatest Generation — especially those who fought for the United States in World War II — and on the U.S. military from that supposed golden era. The armed services were a force of unalloyed good. While saving the world from Nazism, they also managed to unify a famously fractious American people behind the war effort.

Yet the truth is more complicated and understanding it couldn’t be more relevant as we struggle to uproot white supremacy — including in the military. The simple but essential fact is that America fought World War II — the war designed to achieve Four Freedoms — with a military steeped in racism. And that racism did grievous harm to countless Americans of all races.

Despite numerous racist restrictions on their enlistment, more than 1 million Black GIs served during World War II. “Jim Crow in uniform,” however, tormented them constantly.

The military leadership asserted that America’s armed forces had to be strictly segregated and controlled top to bottom by whites, in part to cater to the supposed wishes of white troops. That meant shunting Black service members into separate outfits, whose most senior officers were invariably white, and limiting Black soldiers to the least-desirable and poorest-paying jobs. It meant blocking their promotions and their access to the higher officer ranks. It meant confining them to Jim Crow recreational spaces from Alabama to Australia. It meant a court-martial system that charged, sentenced and executed them at unjustly high rates. And it meant refusing too many of them the awards and honors that they had earned.

Military racism, not simply its civilian variety, also deprived Black people of vaunted GI Bill benefits. Well-documented discrimination in mortgage lending, job counseling, college admissions, hiring and more took its toll. But so too did a grossly unfair discharge system that disqualified a disproportionate share of Black veterans from receiving these benefits. And, of course, sweeping restrictions on Black enlistment during the war also became in effect sweeping limitations on African Americans’ access to GI Bill-provided home and business loans, vocational training and college tuition after it.

In response to this sprawling structure of white domination, Black service members and their supporters built a far-reaching and long-forgotten civil rights movement. In addition to heroic soldiering, they used both politics and the courts — lobbying, voting and litigation — and more militant tactics — boycotts, strikes and armed self-defense — to fight for equality. This movement demanded a military that lived up to America’s professed ideals.

Facing sometimes fierce opposition from the Roosevelt White House, Congress, the courts and the military, the movement still managed a few wartime victories. It helped desegregate some training posts, military recreational facilities and combat outfits in the European theater.

This movement’s most significant achievement may have been that it forever transformed some Americans’ feelings about military racism. Support for integrated military units, for example, moved from the margins toward the mainstream of liberal and left public opinion over the course of the war. Editorials, marches, mass meetings and the like soured a growing number of Americans on a segregated military. They argued it depressed some troops’ morale, dispirited allies abroad, widened petty racial divisions at home, trafficked in Nazi racial theories, further fractured the working class and trampled on the nation’s purported democratic ideals and war aims.

President Harry S. Truman often receives credit for the postwar desegregation of the military in 1948. But activist Black GIs and their allies deserve their fair share of credit for creating the political conditions in which Truman could act.

Truman’s executive order eventually led to the mixing of Black and white units. But what about those soldiers who did not fit neatly into either camp?

Sometimes the wartime military counted anyone not Black — including Asian Americans, Native Americans and Hispanic Americans — as white, offering them some share of the countless advantages accompanying that status. But, in many other instances, non-Black minorities encountered their own particular brand of racism. While lacking Jim Crow’s power and reach, it still produced numerous cruelties and inequities.

For example, for a period after the Pearl Harbor attack the U.S. military prohibited Japanese Americans’ enlistment. Once allowed to join the army, they were sometimes steered into segregated units and subjected to excessive surveillance and other injustices, including mistreatment from fellow soldiers and restricted commissions. Chinese American, Filipino American, Mexican American, Puerto Rican and Native American soldiers faced at times similar hardships.

And yet the war could disrupt these well-worn racist conventions in part because non-Black minorities were often permitted to fight alongside white troops. Serving together forged comradely bonds. Many years after the war, one Ojibwe man recalled “his first feeling of complete acceptance while serving in the Army during World War II.”

Even some Black troops occasionally expressed similar feelings, especially abroad, where they hailed the friendliness of foreigners and reported that “there are no color lines in foxholes.”

In the end, America’s World War II military shaped postwar race relations in a muddled mix of ways. On the one hand, some veterans of all colors returned home prepared to fight for a more democratic America, strengthening existing freedom struggles and preparing the ground for future civil rights victories, starting with the military’s own desegregation. This is a story we like to tell.

But too often forgotten is that military racism — so ubiquitous for the 16 million U.S. service personnel in World War II — also pushed America in less egalitarian directions. It reinforced the very idea of race. It encouraged many whites to double down on their racist investments, especially anti-blackness. And it etched ever deeper divisions among the American people, with enduring consequences.

Today, as the military wrestles anew with its own entrenched racism — in the form of barriers to promotion, the blinding whiteness of high command, white supremacy in the ranks and more — a few lessons from World War II can frame the battle and improve the odds of success.

Military racism unquestionably interfered with the efficient execution of the war, probably lengthening America’s time in the conflict and costing American lives. The military’s restrictions against the enlistment of African Americans and Japanese Americans, or against their and other minorities’ promotions and commissions, for example, robbed it of more than a half-million additional troops and untold numbers of people, who, had they been given the chance, would have excelled as, say, pilots or paratroopers or admirals. In contrast to what some like Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) claim in the present, and what segregationists long maintained during World War II — structural racism — not the efforts to root it out, undermined unit cohesion, morale and success.

Winning the battle against military racism requires recognizing how white supremacy may affect various minority troops differently. It also requires tailoring corrective measures accordingly but never in a way that leverages one non-white group against another.

Success often comes from the ground up. The decisive force behind the military’s most significant egalitarian shifts have come from grass-roots pressure, primarily from service members of color, especially Black people, in the enlisted and junior officer ranks and their civilian supporters. That history argues for following their lead in trying to make the military a more equal environment.

And the history is clear — military racism spares no one. To varying degrees, African Americans, Japanese Americans and other nonwhites suffered incalculably during World War II, and their harms lasted well into the postwar years. But white people also paid a price, sometimes the ultimate price.

Racist barriers in enlistment and elsewhere ensured the overrepresentation of whites among those who served in World War II, fought on the front lines and died. Viewed this way, military racism crowned few outright victors. And this is true of all forms of racism — past and present.

Thomas A. Guglielmo is author of “DIVISIONS: A New History of Racism and Resistance in America’s World War II Military” (Oxford, October 2021), and associate professor and chair in the department of American studies at George Washington University. DIVISIONS offers the first comprehensive look at racism within America’s World War II military.

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