Honoring Sergeant Carter (8 page)

When weeks passed and he didn't get a letter from Mildred—the Army's mail system was understandably erratic in the middle of a war—Eddie wrote longingly: “I haven't heard from you for so long that I am only able to picture you as a dream. Sometimes I wonder if I have ever been in the USA. Just like India and China—all are dreams.”

When Eddie was wounded, the War Department sent a telegram to Mildred advising that her husband was “slightly wounded” in Germany and that she could continue to send mail to him as before. Mildred sent back an anxious telegram to Eddie asking him to write immediately and telling him that she had written every day. Almost none of Mildred's letters to Eddie survived the war. One letter that did survive was written on April 10,
1945. Mildred voiced her anxiety about his love for her and her feelings of helplessness.

Impatient to get back to the action, after a month Eddie slipped out of the Army hospital and made his way back to the front lines. Russell Blair, by then promoted to captain, recalled this unexpected development:

“I didn't see Carter again until later in April. We were close to Bad Tolz down below Munich. By this time the German resistance was pretty much shattered, and some days we could move along at forty or fifty miles a day. One day Carter showed up back at the company. I was surprised to see him; wounded soldiers don't ordinarily get well that quick. I asked how'd he got back. He said he was released from the hospital in Luxembourg by his doctors. He looked fine. He didn't show any signs of having been wounded. We were glad to have him back, but a short time later we got a message from the hospital saying that he was AWOL. We wired back to the hospital that he was back on active duty at the front, and we didn't hear any more about that. We had a good laugh about it.

“I came to find out in talking with Carter that he had met a captain out of the Tenth Armored Division who was also at the hospital. The captain was getting released and returning to the Tenth Armored, which was located near us. Carter decided he was ready to return to duty, so he just caught a ride in the captain's jeep and got dropped off at our rear. Eddie Carter was one phenomenal soldier.”

After returning to his unit, Eddie fought with the Fifty-sixth Armored Infantry Battalion through the last mopping-up operations of the war. In combat the two white
officers of Eddie's platoon were wounded and he was made acting platoon sergeant. Meanwhile, the officers of D Company considered making a recommendation that Sergeant Carter be awarded a decoration for his bravery at Speyer. While there was no doubt that he deserved a medal, there was a feeling that, given the attitude in the Army, if he were recommended for a Medal of Honor he wouldn't get it. Some thought he would have a better chance of winning a Distinguished Service Cross.

While the officers mulled over their decision, the men in Carter's unit welcomed him back as a hero, a tough guy whom the Germans couldn't kill. But Eddie was focused as much on love as he was on war. In a letter on his birthday, May 26, he wrote that “after getting shot up and coming back to my same outfit everyone seems to think that I am a hero. I have told the boys that I am a hero to only one person, my wife.” He went on to tell her that the men kidded him “about not getting myself a woman,” and he claimed he sent one soldier to the hospital for suggesting that the 4-Fs (the civilian men at home exempted from military service) were “taking care of” Mildred. But decking the messenger couldn't banish the thought. Eddie ended with an appeal to Mildred that revealed his worry: “Remember that I am true to you only. I want to love you only. I can wait until I get back. Please try and wait for me.”

In the closing days of the war D Company arrived outside a river town near the Alps. Meeting no resistance,
Eddie's platoon advanced into the town and took control of a German hospital. The war seemed about over. The next day the company moved to the river to protect a bridge—and were shocked to discover that the Germans were not yet finished. Out of the blue a German Messerschmitt fighter plane suddenly came barreling over the bridge late in the afternoon. Men scattered and ran for cover, but antiaircraft gunners quickly drew a bead on the German intruder and brought the fighter plane down with a burst of fire. The pilot bailed out and was captured. This dramatic encounter was the Fifty-sixth Armored Infantry Battalion's last combat action of the war.

For the next few months D Company found itself shifted around Germany as part of what was now an army of occupation. It was charged with guarding German prisoners of war and captured ammunition dumps. Robert Cabbell, another member of the Fifty-sixth Armored Infantry Battalion, remembered that there were also lighter moments during this period. Cabbell said Captain Blair organized a company softball team, and the team even challenged the white divisional all-stars to a game.

In June, Eddie happily wrote Mildred that he had just learned his name was “way! way! way! up on top of the list” of men soon to be discharged from the Army. He said when he got home Mildred must stop working and he would take her on a two-or three-week honeymoon. But even as he wrote of coming home, Eddie had a momen
tary thought about staying in the Army. He dismissed it as a long shot. “I think enough of you and the kids to want to come home,” he said. “I must come home!”

 

D
og Company was deactivated in late July near Wallerstein, Germany. One of Captain Blair's last acts was to sign a recommendation for a Distinguished Service Cross for Sergeant Carter. Carter certainly deserved it, Blair remembered, for his bravery at Speyer and more. “He was one of the best soldiers I've ever seen,” Blair said. Blair was then sent to testify as a character witness in a military trial. By the time he returned to Wallerstein, D Company had been broken up and its members were on the way to other duty or to Le Havre for the return home. But the men of D Company did not depart without sending a final message to battalion headquarters expressing their appreciation to Vanderhoef and Blair:

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Blair returned to the United States to go to flight school and become an Army Air Force pilot. He served as a combat pilot in Korea and retired in 1957 as a lieutenant colonel. Vanderhoef also stayed in the Army and served in Korea; he retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1961.

The black combat volunteers had served honorably and well. In the final weeks of the war, General BenjaminO. Davis toured the field and found that, despite limited training and experience, the black volunteers' courage in battle gained them the respect of white troops and commanders. Complaints mainly had to do with lack of training for certain assignments, he found. In spite of the praise, as Ulysses Lee points out in
The Employment of Negro Troops,
in some units “there arose an undercurrent of misgivings about retaining these troops within units once the war was over and battalions and regiments settled into occupation and garrison duties.”

Many black combat veterans with relatively low combat duty points were reassigned to the old segregated service as stevedores, truck drivers, cooks, and engineers. Others, like Sergeant Carter, with high combat duty points were assigned to the Sixty-ninth Infantry Division for return to the United States.

For some of the black soldiers in the Fifty-sixth Armored Infantry Battalion, including Sergeant Carter, the return home would be traumatic in itself. Robert Hale, another volunteer in the Fifty-sixth, remembered being harassed by white soldiers as he and others in his unit attempted to board ship.

“We were at Cherbourg, France, about to get onto boxcars to ride to the port when we had a problem with some white guys in the Thirty-sixth Infantry Division. Some platoon sergeant brought his platoon down and mounted up his machine guns and started calling us every name he could think of. Some of our guys wanted to fight, but cooler heads prevailed, saying you can't fight machine guns with pistols or knives. Fortunately, our division commander came down and saw what was happening. He got the division commander of the Thirty-sixth to intervene. The Thirty-sixth commander said the sergeant was taking unauthorized action and reduced that sergeant to a private right there. It was sort of disheartening. As long as we were up on the front line with them we were buddies, but as soon as the war ended they became our enemies again.”

Things were not necessarily any better for black soldiers after returning to the United States. Evanda Kiel, who also saw combat in the Fifty-sixth Infantry, remembered being discharged from Fort McPherson in Georgia after the war.

“I was about to go into the bus station in Atlanta to buy a ticket to go home. I was greeted at the front door by
the military police and the civilian police. They shook their nightsticks at me and said, ‘You can't come through here, boy.' I was wearing my uniform and my combat infantryman's badge, so they knew I was a soldier returning from the war. I was proud of having served in the Army, but then I came back to this. That really broke my heart. I could have been killed for my country during the war, and I came back and couldn't walk through the front door of a public bus station. That was a disgrace.”

Eddie, too, would encounter problems as a black veteran returning home. He would discover that he was targeted for a special kind of trouble.

F
ollowing an honorable discharge from the Army on September 30, 1945, Eddie was welcomed to Los Angeles as a returning hero. In November, the Army announced that he had received the Distinguished Service Cross, and the story was widely circulated in the press. The next month he was invited to be an honored guest and recipient of an award at a Welcome Home, Joe dinner sponsored by American Youth for Democracy. Unknown to him, as I discovered in my research at the National Archives, this group was under surveillance by military intelligence as a suspected Communist Party organization. Others to receive awards at the dinner for their “contributions to American citizenship and democracy” included singer Frank Sinatra and syndicated cartoonist Bill Mauldin, as well as other veterans. Military intelligence thought it worth noting that one of the “embittered” veterans—who was not named in the report—attending the dinner denounced “the so-called democracy for which they fought” only to return “to find
America more prejudiced than before and intolerance at an all-time high.”

The Welcome Home, Joe affair prompted a reporter to write a feature story about Eddie. The story appeared in the
Daily World,
a Communist Party newspaper published in California. As I surmised from the newspaper clippings I found in Mildred's trunk, Eddie apparently never turned down a request for an interview, whether it was for the post newspaper at an Army base or an African-American magazine or a Communist Party newspaper.

Authored by Fred Vast and published December 13, 1945, the
Daily World
article gave an account of the battle at Speyer, as well as Eddie's experiences in Europe and since returning home. The piece included a photograph of Sergeant Carter in uniform wearing his decorations and a caption announcing that the “Negro hero” was honored at a Welcome Home, Joe dinner. Vast's account suggested that Sergeant Carter was awarded a DSC instead of a Medal of Honor because of racial discrimination. Asserting that Carter was told by the officers that he would be recommended for the Medal of Honor, Vast then pointed out that “Carter is a Negro and not one Negro received the top medal.”

According to the article, racial mistreatment figured prominently in Sergeant Carter's experiences. Eddie was quoted on the military's refusal to protect black soldiers stationed in Georgia for training. I knew from his letters
that Eddie was angered by the racism he encountered there. “Yet there was nothing we could do,” he told Vast. “There were no facilities for Negroes, so we walked the streets. For doing that we were always being attacked by white civilians and police. There were many beatings, jailings, and killings. Some of the boys were sent to the chain gangs for thirty to ninety days even though they hadn't done a thing. When they got out, the Army would court-martial them.” This was graphic corroboration of the accounts in letters Eddie had written to Mildred about the racial situation in Georgia.

As for his experience in Europe, “it was just the opposite,” he told the reporter. Despite hate stories spread by some white troops, European civilians, even Germans, were friendly and treated black American soldiers as fellow human beings.

Even some of the Southern white soldiers seemed to change their attitude in Europe. Some white troops told Eddie, “We didn't know how good you guys are. When we get home we're going to tell the people all about you.” But as he was leaving Europe at the end of the war there was trouble, Eddie recounted, when white soldiers tried to stop black troops from boarding the ship to which they were assigned. Eddie's story echoed Robert Hale's account of the hostility directed against black troops departing from Cherbourg.

Looking back on his wartime experience Sergeant Carter told the reporter: “We fought for the recognition of
our people, and we found democracy in the front lines. We fought because Hitler was the worst of two wrongs—worse than racial discrimination at home. We liberated Europe, but here at home we are not free. I just want a chance to earn a living, and I want to help finish the fight for freedom.”

 

W
elcome Home dinners aside, transitioning to civilian life was proving to be difficult. Eddie was happy to be back with his family, but it was not easy to find work. He finally landed a job as a cook in a private home in Beverly Hills. He also tried to get a loan from the Veterans Administration to set up a small paint-spraying business, but he had no success. Hopes dashed, he planned to save enough money to buy the equipment he needed for the business.

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Eddie was not alone in experiencing problems in the transition to civilian life. Discrimination was widespread and many black veterans were having trouble finding work. An
Ebony
magazine article entitled “Where Are the Heroes?”—about black military men who won recognition during World War II—noted that “most [of the black heroes] have drifted into the obscurity of small towns, army hospitals and schools.” The article continued: “Some are finding disillusionment in the discovery that medals are meaningless on a job hunt but most are acquainted with the hard facts of life in the U.S.A. and
pitching in to do their bit for a better tomorrow.” Eddie told the
Ebony
reporter that while some gains had been made for blacks during the war, there was still much room for improvement—“about 99 per cent.”

Having grown up outside the United States and having served in two armies before joining the U.S. Army, Eddie was unaccustomed to antiblack racial discrimination. He never got used to it. It angered him, and he found it difficult to conceal his anger. He could not adapt to a system whose racial etiquette demanded that black men bow and scrape before white people and then grin and bear it. A man of enormous self-discipline, he would bear it for the sake of his family, but he would not grin, he would not bow and scrape. In civilian life he discovered that he was just another anonymous Negro male. Despite its problems, in the Army, with its insistence on discipline and performance, he found a more congenial environment, one in which he might gain recognition.

Although Eddie was ambivalent about civilian life, he decided to give it a try. But he was not cut out for domestic service as a cook. He tried his hand at business, purchasing a surplus military landing craft for $200 and using its attention-getting quality to advertise local movies. Whimsically named the
Ruptured Duck,
the odd vehicle served for a time to take people out on fishing trips. Eddie, however, was not the kind of person to easily slap people on the back and keep them entertained with fishing stories. His days as a businessman were numbered, although
he remained in business long enough to become briefly an officer of the troubled Eastside Chamber of Commerce.

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The chamber of commerce was established in 1937 with the purpose of advancing commercial, cultural, and civic interests in the east section of the city. The organization also fought actively against racial discrimination in employment. Composed mainly of local black businessmen and a handful of whites, the chamber of commerce boasted a membership of two hundred by 1944. I knew from my research that the FBI took an active interest in the
organization that year. In fact, in its November 1944 report on so-called foreign-inspired agitation among blacks in Los Angeles, the FBI devoted considerable attention to the doings of the Eastside Chamber of Commerce. On at least two occasions FBI informants, identified only as T-7 and T-8, reported on the chamber of commerce's activities.

According to the FBI report, on October 20, 1944, informant T-7 advised the FBI that the Eastside Chamber of Commerce was vitally interested in improving health conditions in the black community, especially with regard to venereal diseases. Apparently, military authorities were disturbed by an “alarming increase” of venereal disease among servicemen. Concluding that the “breakfast clubs,” which operated during the hours from midnight to 8 a.m., were the main cause of the spread of venereal infection, the military had placed a number of these clubs off limits to military personnel.

This move by the military provoked a howl of protest from local tavern owners and civic leaders, especially when it became known that the military was considering placing the entire Central Avenue area, a thriving black business district, out of bounds. Meetings between community leaders and the military were hastily arranged. It was brought to the military's attention that such a change in policy might lead to black servicemen seeking recreation in white areas of the city, which, as the FBI report observed, would likely lead to racial unrest. The timely intervention of the Eastside Chamber of Commerce, in
collaboration with military and naval authorities, produced a solution. Of course, any solution had to be in accord with the military's belief that it was best to keep black soldiers “within their element.” After some discussion, the military and the businessmen agreed to a set of guidelines for bar and tavern owners to follow with regard to serving military personnel. Printed in the form of a circular, the plan was distributed to business owners in the Central Avenue area, to the apparent satisfaction of all concerned.

The FBI report shed light on the uneasy relationship between the military and the black community, but informant T-7 had a more direct interest in the Eastside Chamber of Commerce: sniffing out potential radicals in the organization. The chamber of commerce's policy was to accept businessmen as members regardless of their personal political beliefs, so long as they had no criminal record and did nothing to cause problems for the community or the “colored race” as a whole. This apparently left the door open for radicals to slip in, people whom T-7 referred to as “striped”—“radicals whom some people might consider as Communists.” These members, however, kept their activity on such a plane as to not reflect on the chamber of commerce or the community as a whole and were therefore allowed to maintain their membership. The names of these “striped” members were not given in this summary report, though presumably T-7 passed them along to the FBI. There was no explanation
of what they might have said or done that led T-7 to label them in such a way. Nor was there any suggestion that the FBI questioned T-7's characterization of these individuals. Apparently T-7's word alone was good enough for the FBI.

Informant T-8 was charged with the more mundane task of gathering statistical information, such as membership (200), annual dues ($12), and budget ($15,000, financed through subscription pledges).

Whether T-7 and T-8, or their equivalents, were still spying on the Eastside Chamber of Commerce in 1946, when Eddie was a member, is something I do not know. I found no records in my research to suggest that the chamber of commerce was under surveillance at that time, but given the FBI's intense interest in the threat of “racial unrest,” it would seem likely that the agency was still keeping watch. By May 1946, Eddie was the chamber of commerce's director of public relations. Apparently, trouble of a financial nature had developed in the organization and an investigating committee was appointed to look into it. Two of the officers were queried and, according to accounts I found in the
Official East Side News,
refused to turn over records of bank balances and other information. The two officers were suspended by the executive committee in a meeting that Eddie was reported as attending.

Eddie and another board member were named to occupy the two ousted men's positions while the books
were being checked. At the same time, it was announced that Sergeant Carter had agreed to become chairman of the Veterans Bureau of the organization. Eddie was highly regarded in the chamber of commerce. After all, he was a hero of many European campaigns and winner of the Distinguished Service Cross. According to the announcement, Sergeant Carter's first move would be to build a strong interracial veterans committee and to stage a big fund-raising supper to help build the committee. Perhaps Eddie's experiences in the war made him feel that black and white veterans might be able to work together and set an example for improving relations between the races.

He didn't get very far with his plans. His business ventures were not going well and he was worried about how he could support his family. With millions of white veterans returning from the war, black workers were pushed out of the skilled jobs they had gained as a result of President Roosevelt's desegregation of the defense plants. I'm sure Eddie did not relish the thought of seeking work as a common laborer or household servant.

At the same time, racial assaults on black people had increased after the war. For example, a huge battle was taking place in Los Angeles and throughout California over racially restrictive housing covenants that sought to prevent black families from buying homes in white neighborhoods. Black families that dared to challenge the covenants by moving into white neighborhoods were met
with cross burnings, and other acts of intimidation. The black community was fighting back with lawsuits, protests, and various mobilizations—and in 1948 the California Supreme Court would finally outlaw restrictive covenants. It was a tense time as black veterans and civilians fought back against racist attacks. Government informants were busily looking for “subversives” in community organizations all over the place. Although I couldn't prove it, I had a strong feeling that Eddie's involvement in promoting an interracial veterans committee would have been viewed as suspicious by the authorities.

 

W
hile Eddie may have seen in his interracial veterans committee a way to help the struggle against discrimination and mistreatment, his pressing need was for income to support his family. Once again, in the Army he would see a way to support his family in a manner that he felt was dignified and honorable. While the medals he had won meant little in civilian life, in the Army they were badges of recognition. In September 1946, he reenlisted, and by mid-October he was stationed at Camp Lee, Virginia, assigned as a staff sergeant to the First Group's Special Service. It didn't take him long to come to the attention of the camp newspaper. An article about his exploits in the war appeared on October 30 in the
Lee Traveller.
The article was completely laudatory and gave no hint of gathering clouds.