People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [249]
Many more than 43,000 refusers did not show up for the draft at all. The government lists about 350,000 cases of draft evasion, including technical violations as well as actual desertion, so it is hard to tell the true number, but it may be that the number of men who either did not show up or claimed C.O. status was in the hundreds of thousands—not a small number. And this in the face of an American community almost unanimously for the war.
Among those soldiers who were not conscientious objectors, who seemed willing fighters, it is hard to know how much resentment there was against authority, against having to fight in a war whose aims were unclear, inside a military machine whose lack of democracy was very clear. No one recorded the bitterness of enlisted men against the special privileges of officers in the army of a country known as a democracy. To give just one instance: combat crews in the air force in the European theater, going to the base movies between bombing missions, found two lines—an officers’ line (short), and an enlisted men’s line (very long). There were two mess halls, even as they prepared to go into combat: the enlisted men’s food was different—worse—than the officers’.
The literature that followed World War II, James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, captured this GI anger against the army “brass.” In The Naked and the Dead, the soldiers talk in battle, and one of them says: “The only thing wrong with this Army is it never lost a war.”
Toglio was shocked. “You think we ought to lose this one?”
Red found himself carried away. “What have I against the goddam Japs? You think I care if they keep this fuggin jungle? What’s it to me if Cummings gets another star?”
“General Cummings, he’s a good man,” Martinez said.
“There ain’t a good officer in the world,” Red stated.
There seemed to be widespread indifference, even hostility, on the part of the Negro community to the war despite the attempts of Negro newspapers and Negro leaders to mobilize black sentiment. Lawrence Wittner (Rebels Against War) quotes a black journalist: “The Negro . . . is angry, resentful, and utterly apathetic about the war. ‘Fight for what?’ he is asking. ‘This war doesn’t mean a thing to me. If we win I lose, so what?’” A black army officer, home on furlough, told friends in Harlem he had been in hundreds of bull sessions with Negro soldiers and found no interest in the war.
A student at a Negro college told his teacher: “The Army jim-crows us. The Navy lets us serve only as messmen. The Red Cross refuses our blood. Employers and labor unions shut us out. Lynchings continue. We are disenfranchised, jim-crowed, spat upon. What more could Hitler do than that?” NAACP leader Walter White repeated this to a black audience of several thousand people in the Midwest, thinking they would disapprove, but instead, as he recalled: “To my surprise and dismay the audience burst into such applause that it took me some thirty or forty seconds to quiet it.”
In January 1943, there appeared in a Negro newspaper this “Draftee’s Prayer”:
Dear Lord, today
I go to war:
To fight, to die,
Tell me what for?
Dear Lord, I’ll fight,
I do not fear,
Germans or Japs;
My fears are here.
America!
But there was no organized Negro opposition to the war. In fact, there was little organized opposition from any source. The Communist party was enthusiastically in support. The Socialist party was divided, unable to make a clear statement one way or the other.
A few small anarchist and pacifist groups refused to back the war. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom said: “. . . war between nations or classes or races cannot permanently settle conflicts or heal the wounds that brought them