Today I saw a bit of the movie 'Overlord', which follows the adventures of a platoon of American paratroopers on the night before D-Day. The movie begins by showing the platoon on board of their plane and the sergeant in charge is an Afro-American man. It also shows another Afro-American soldier, a private, on the plane, who is one of the main protagonists in the movie.
Strangely, my first thought was "yeah right, as if an Afro-American man would be put in charge over an entire platoon of white soldiers in 1940s America." My question is, was this done by the moviemakers because of modern political correctness and inclusion, or is it realistic? And secondly, how likely was it that an Afro-American private was placed in a platoon full of white men, and was treated by them like one of their equals?
is it realistic?
No. The Army, the Army Air Corps/Army Air Forces, and the Marines were quite thoroughly segregated. The Navy and Coast Guard were a little less segregated - African-Americans served on the same ships as other sailors. However, in the years shortly before the war, and early in the war, they only served as mess-men, in the Steward's Branch. It was absolutely not acceptable for white soldiers to serve under African-American NCOs or officers. It was not acceptable to the Army for African-American enlisted men to serve side-by-side, either. James Daugherty, African-American veteran of the 92nd Infantry Division, which saw heavy combat in Italy, noted that the division was short of replacements. He asked a fellow soldier why they couldn't get enough replacements. The answer: "Look, bud, they don’t train colored soldiers to fight . . . they train them to load ships, and you don’t expect them to put white boys in a Negro outfit, do you? What do you think this is, a democracy or something?" (J. H. Daugherty, The Buffalo Saga, Xlibris, 2009).
In a long tradition going back to the Civil War and WWI, most African-American soldiers and sailors worked in non-combat positions, especially in labour units. This wasn't done for the safety of the men - for example, the Port Chicago disaster of 17th July 1944, when 2,000 tons of ammunition exploded while being loaded onto a cargo ship at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in Port Chicago, California, was partly due to poor safety precautions in the interests of haste. The explosion killed over 300 workers and sailors, most of them African-American. The usual excuses for keeping African-Americans from combat were that African-Americans were, on average, worse educated and therefore harder to train, and the problems that maintaining segregation in combat conditions would cause (African-American combat units in WWI had fought under French command rather than alongside other American units for this last reason). During WWI (in 1917), Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi had openly stated other reasons: one was to teach the African-American "that he is defending the flag, inflate his untutored soul with military airs, teach him that it is his duty to keep the emblem of the Nation flying triumphantly in the air, it is but a short step to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected." Labour duties, serving as mess-men in the Navy, and orderlies and janitors cleaning latrines for white officers wouldn't give them "wrong" ideas. (Both WWI and WWII were followed by multiple cases of lynchings of black veterans in the South, to "keep them in their place".)
In the Navy, African-American mess-men could and did sail into harm's way. Perhaps the best known is Doris Miller, who was awarded a Navy Cross for his actions during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Miller was a cook third class on USS West Virginia, and fired an anti-aircraft machine-gun at the Japanese planes until he ran out of ammunition, and then helped rescue the wounded captain and other crew members under fire. He was killed in 1943, serving on the escort carrier USS Liscome Bay which was sunk during the Battle of Makin. His memory was honoured by the navy, with USS Miller, FF-1091, in service 1973-1991, named after him, and the future CVN-81 is scheduled to be named USS Doris Miller.
highest rank he could achieve in World War II?
Very few reached high rank. Some of the African-American combat units in WWI had black NCOs and some company-grade officers (Second Lieutenant, First Lieutenant, Captain) and some white company-grade officers and all-white field-grade officers; these were the 366th Infantry Regiment and the 369th Infantry Regiment (the Harlem Hellfighters). Others had all-white officers. This meant that few African-Americans finished the war with high ranks, and inter-war advancement was limited. In 1935, there was only one black officer in the Army who was not a chaplain - this was Benjamin O. Davis Sr. In 1936, his son, Benjamin O. Davis Jr., became the second black non-chaplain officer. In 1941, there were under 4,000 African-Americans in the armed forces, and only 12 of them were officers.
With a head start over later recruits and conscripts, Benjamin O. Davis Sr. and Benjamin O. Davis Jr. finished the war as the two highest-ranking African-American servicemen. Benjamin O. Davis Sr. had joined the army in 1898, in response to the Spanish-American War. His unit was demobilised, and Davis was mustered out in March 1899. He re-enlisted in June in the 9th Cavalry Regiment, and reached the position of squadron sergeant major in 1900. He was ambitious, and aimed for a commission (perhaps inspired by his commander, Lieutenant Charles Young, the Army's only African-American officer at the time), achieving it in 1901. He served as a cavalry, as a military attache, many years as a professor of military science and tactics, and as a squadron (i.e., cavalry battalion) commander with the 9th Cavalry in the Philippines in 1917-1920, with the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel and permanent rank of captain. He became commander of the 369th Regiment in 1938, and was promoted to brigadier general in 1940. His son finished the war as a colonel (temporary), and commander of the 477th Bombardment Group, all-black, and training to be ready for combat at the end of August 1945 (the end of the war kept them from combat service). Prior to commanding the 477th, he had commanded the 332d Fighter Group, the famous Tuskegee Airmen. He reached the (permanent) rank of colonel in 1950, and Brigadier General in 1954. He retired in 1970 as a Lieutenant General (3 star general), and was promoted to General (4 star general) in 1988.
Other black officers finished the war as company commanders. For example, Frederic E. Davison, who was commissioned as an ROTC Second lieutenant in 1939, became an active-service platoon commander in 1941, finishing the war as a captain and company commander. After the war, he became the 3rd African-American general (after Davis Sr. and Jr.) and the first African American United States Army Major General (Davis Jr. having reached Major General in the Air Force) and division commander (commanding the 199th Light Infantry Brigade in Vietnam).