Chapter 14 War Ends and Soldier Comes Home
May 8, 1945 brought much joy and celebration to Riverside as the town received news of the surrender of Germany to General Eisenhower. It seemed an eternity for Grandma Taylor since June 6, 1944- almost a year earlier when American soldiers along with others stormed the beach of Normandy to begin the end for Hitler. She remembered going to the movie house and sitting in the balcony and seeing the news reel of the great number of men who lost their lives over in France to fight Hitler who had been responsible for the death of so many Jews in Germany, France and in other countries. Oh how the Church bells rang when they got the news. It was on the front page of the newspaper in large letters – GERMANY SURRENDERS TO IKE-. Everyone was so happy that all of them in Riverside took the day off and celebrated throughout the town.
Not soon afterward, Japan surrendered and the long hard war was finally over. Japan had agreed to surrender on August 14, 1945 with the actual papers signed on September 2, 1945 when the Japanese led by General Umezo formally surrendered to General Douglas McArthur who was then Supreme Allied Commander. While Japan had been loosing the war for some time, it was only after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Russian invasion of Manchuria did Japan finally agree to surrender unconditionally. Negroes and Whites had gone thousands of miles away from home to fight for freedom and they had won the war across the water.
However throughout the war, Negroes and Whites continued to be in segregated units. This policy of segregation had been structured during the Civil War and World War 1 and was reinforced at the beginning of World War 2 by the Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall who stated that time of war was not the time to have a social experiment with integrated military units. He furthered understood that the vast majority of the training would be done in Southern United States which was not willing to accept an integrated army. Therefore Negro soldiers were relegated to service and support units and this did not begin to change until near the end of the war when numbers of casualties caused the change. This was demonstrated in that the Quartermaster Corps was comprised of 15% Negro, the Engineer Corps 25% and misc Corps 27% while the infantry was comprised of 5% and the Air Corps and Signal Corps was less than 2%. This segregation did little to stop Negro heroism during the war which was exemplified by Dorie Miller who received Navy Cross for his heroics during the bombing of Pearl Harbor and who later died on Gilbert Islands in the South Pacific. Like most other Negroes in the Navy, he was the mess attendant on his ship before he took to the guns on that fateful Sunday morning on December 7, 1941.
Grandma Taylor remembers her father standing in the pulpit on that Sunday morning early in 1946 as he recounted the many tales of Negroes in the military as the Church welcomed home those members of the Church who had gone across the water to win freedom and were now home. She began to recognize something in his voice that she had not heard before. She heard a certain pride that would soon resonate throughout the United States. No longer would the Negro merely accept being a second class citizen. Led by many of the returning soldiers, change was in the wind.