In Normandy, on the morning of June 6, 1944, more than 155,000 Allied soldiers rushed to the landing beaches. Among them, around 2,000 are black. Thousands more will follow. For a long time, official accounts left them aside. However, the story of these soldiers is far from banal.
Among the black soldiers participating in this unprecedented military operation was Canadian Lester Brown. After setting foot on Juno Beach, this soldier will be part of the platoon responsible for taking Bretteville-sur-Laize. In 2009, in an interview, he claimed to have been treated fairly by his comrades in combat, black or white. Brown will find himself caught in a Nazi ambush. Hit in the knee, then in the face, he will be evacuated.
When, immediately after the war, the writer Claude Roy left to teach in America, he had in his mind thousands of terrible images of this war which had just ended. He saw the war very closely. Weapon in hand, notebook never far away, he participated in the liberation of Europe in the wake of the Normandy landings. Among the multitude of things he noted during his stay in the United States, there was the story of a black soldier. This man, decorated for his participation in the liberation of France, suffered a tragic fate as soon as he returned to civilian life. One day, he simply got on a bus in his American hometown. He was immediately criticized for sitting on a seat reserved for whites. He is badly beaten. He’s bleeding. With his skull split, the unfortunate man ends up in the hospital. In this racial battlefield that is America, his military medal does not earn him the slightest consideration at a time of segregation, reports a stunned Claude Roy.
Segregation
In Cherbourg, a large part of the American workforce is black. There are 20,000 Afro-American soldiers who will pass through these places, reports Professor Alice Mills. A visiting scholar at Harvard, she observed that, generally speaking, these soldiers were well received in France. “A few Norman women from different villages and hamlets, however, told me they were afraid. Some because the black soldiers were very tall, others because an American officer [blanc] had warned the mayor of their village that blacks were ferocious and hit women […], another, finally, because she had seen a black soldier hanged for rape. »
These black soldiers who crossed the Channel in 1944 to oust the Nazis were initially housed in separate camps. They are willingly segregated. The American high command even recommended that the Free French forces proceed in the same way with the blacks in their units, even though their officers were almost all white.
Upon returning from the war, several Afro-American soldiers were refused the decoration usually given to other soldiers, for reasons relating to racial segregation.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that military justice is literally targeting them, even if researcher Alice Mills, by collecting a number of testimonies in Normandy, was able to show that relations with the population had overall been rather good. .
J. Robert Lilly, professor of sociology at Northern Kentucky University, estimates that four times as many black soldiers are executed compared to white soldiers in the theater of operations, in the name of rather expeditious military justice. Yet black soldiers account for a small fraction of the military’s overall strength, he notes.
Seventy soldiers were executed before American courts martial: 55 blacks and 15 whites. Other executions of black soldiers also took place within their army. In terms of executions, they appear to be subject to capital punishment in an infinitely higher proportion than the place they occupy in the military ranks. In fact, 79% of death sentences are handed down against blacks, even though they only account for 8.5% of the force in the army.
Historian Alice Kaplan was able to find witnesses in France of executions by hanging of black soldiers after the landing. Among them, recalls the historian, is the soldier James Hendricks. Sentenced to be executed in the fall of 1944, he was supervised by two colossi of the military police. They allow him to smoke one last cigarette before he is hanged. Like other families of convicts, that of Private Hendricks will never know what happened to him.
Stories
In 1944, the writer Louis Guilloux, involved with the American army, observed with suspicion this way of administering justice against black soldiers. Guilloux feels like he was in some way the accomplice of a justice that was not justice. It will take him thirty years of investigations and reflections to be able to explain himself. How could this injustice, amidst the noise and fury of war, leave almost no trace in people’s consciences? In Okay, Joe!Louis Guilloux combines the facts, with a sense of reporting, while partly telling his own story.
“How can we denounce the racism of those who free us from Nazism? » asks the Prix Goncourt Éric Vuillard, as he prefaces the work of Louis Guilloux. In other words, how can we manage to combine the principles of racial segregation and the principles of a rediscovered democratic life in the same place? The war has not finished questioning us about human contradictions.
In the Canadian army, there are fewer black soldiers. Were they treated better? The Black Canadian Veterans site recalls the lives of many of them. A similar site, The Memory Project, offers other testimonies from veterans from all walks of life.
Black Canadian volunteers were, in fact, prohibited from enlisting in the navy and the Royal Canadian Air Force. Witnesses recall this. His Majesty’s High Command considers that their presence in these army corps is likely to lead to clashes. So that leaves the infantry. And even on this side, the path is initially closed.
Eva Roy will be one of the few black Canadian women to be sent overseas for service. Less than 10% of Canadian women in the army will cross the Atlantic. By joining the Women’s Service of the Canadian Army, known by the English name Canadian Women’s Army Corp, Eva Roy will be one of only three Canadians of African descent to serve in Europe during the war. It is easy to understand, between the lines of her story, the vexations she experiences.
In enemy hands
In France, during the stampede of June 1940 which led to the occupation of part of the territory by the Nazis, several black soldiers were executed. They are the subject of racist massacres. Nearly 17,000 of them were killed by Hitler’s soldiers in the spring of 1940. And at least 3,000 were simply murdered because of the color of their skin.
Black soldiers, regardless of their country of origin, were beaten and tortured when they found themselves in the hands of the Nazis. In 1944, following the landing, these soldiers were particularly targeted. This is the case of soldiers who belong to the 333e artillery battalion. Eleven of them were executed in Wereth, Belgium.
Senegalese and Algerian riflemen, Moroccan goumiers, pieds-noirs, Pacific and West Indian porpoises will participate in the Second World War. The Free French Forces at one time had around 60% of soldiers from this colonial world. Despite their decisive importance, they remain under the yoke of racial segregation.
After they had helped mainland France to liberate itself, the French army will decide, at a time when liberation is assured, to send them back to their countries in order to replace them with soldiers from the mainland. The operation is known as the “Whitewashing of the Free French Forces”. In 1944, after the landing in Normandy, French soldiers and gendarmes fired on Senegalese riflemen who, crowded into a camp near Dakar, demanded that their pay be finally paid to them.