thedrifter
06-05-07, 06:19 AM
Elmer Smith | Blacks written out of history
THERE WAS something funny about the men I used to watch lining up in their parade gear outside the Capt. William M. Slowe VFW Post on military holidays.
It wasn't just their ill-fitting olive-drab uniforms. I was conditioned to believe that combat soldiers didn't look like them.
There wasn't a man among them who looked like John Wayne or Burt Lancaster. They looked like trolley-car conductors and the men who delivered our mail. In fact, that's who they were.
I lived across the street from the Slowe Post, which is still in the 5200 block of Race Street. I used to see these same guys going in and out of the post most nights to toss back a few. To see them in regalia on the July Fourth or Armistice Day was like a masquerade.
By the time I was 10 or 12, I had learned that a lot of men who looked like them had fought and died in foreign wars. I learned that America has never been to war without men who looked like those men.
I remember them because tomorrow will mark the 63rd anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy. It was the pivotal front in the allied liberation of France, the beginning of the end of the war in Europe.
Of all the battles fought in all the wars in which Americans died on foreign soil, the "Longest Day" seems to symbolize their sacrifices more than any other.
I have stood on the bluffs at Coleville-Sur-Mer with the amphitheater of the American Cemetery at my back looking out at Normandy Beach. They've kept some of the German bunkers intact to help you visualize the carnage of well-fortified gunners picking off the first wave of the landing force at will.
Even so, the contrast of that mental picture with the serenity of the cemetery was almost too stark for me to process.
More than 57,000 men were involved in the various battles of June 6, 1944. More than 1,500 U.S. soldiers died on the beach, most in that first wave.
Darryl F. Zanuck's production of "The Longest Day" and Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" will be beamed into a million living rooms this week. They will be viewed by children as young as I was who will be as misinformed as I was about the contributions of African-Americans to that battle and the war.
They continue to be written out of history. Anyone watching "Flags of our Fathers" would have no idea that 1,000 black Marines took part in the assault on Iwo Jima just as viewers of Spielberg's film would not know that black men fought and died at Normandy.
Former Daily News staffer Yvonne Latty had no trouble finding four black survivors of the D-Day invasion for her book "We Were There." Spielberg could not find it in his heart to depict even one black face.
"Waverly Woodson was a black Philadelphian and a medic who saved lives on Normandy Beach even after he was wounded," Latty said. "Men like him get ignored.
"I wrote a piece for USA Today about "Flags of our Fathers." You wouldn't believe the venom.
"I got called a lying *****. It became a free-for-all. America is just not ready to hear this."
When Latty and others cautioned then that they were about to overlook the history of black involvement at Iwo Jima, Warner Brothers said they had faithfully depicted James Bradley's book, inaccuracies and all.
Where was Hollywood's slavish adherence to the written account when Oliver Stone recently changed the race of a black Marine, whose heroic rescue efforts at Ground Zero were whitewashed for public consumption?
I will never forget the heroism of the white soldiers who died defending my freedom at Normandy.
But I exercise that freedom by also remembering the sacrifice of the forgotten men who died with them. *
Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512.
Ellie
THERE WAS something funny about the men I used to watch lining up in their parade gear outside the Capt. William M. Slowe VFW Post on military holidays.
It wasn't just their ill-fitting olive-drab uniforms. I was conditioned to believe that combat soldiers didn't look like them.
There wasn't a man among them who looked like John Wayne or Burt Lancaster. They looked like trolley-car conductors and the men who delivered our mail. In fact, that's who they were.
I lived across the street from the Slowe Post, which is still in the 5200 block of Race Street. I used to see these same guys going in and out of the post most nights to toss back a few. To see them in regalia on the July Fourth or Armistice Day was like a masquerade.
By the time I was 10 or 12, I had learned that a lot of men who looked like them had fought and died in foreign wars. I learned that America has never been to war without men who looked like those men.
I remember them because tomorrow will mark the 63rd anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy. It was the pivotal front in the allied liberation of France, the beginning of the end of the war in Europe.
Of all the battles fought in all the wars in which Americans died on foreign soil, the "Longest Day" seems to symbolize their sacrifices more than any other.
I have stood on the bluffs at Coleville-Sur-Mer with the amphitheater of the American Cemetery at my back looking out at Normandy Beach. They've kept some of the German bunkers intact to help you visualize the carnage of well-fortified gunners picking off the first wave of the landing force at will.
Even so, the contrast of that mental picture with the serenity of the cemetery was almost too stark for me to process.
More than 57,000 men were involved in the various battles of June 6, 1944. More than 1,500 U.S. soldiers died on the beach, most in that first wave.
Darryl F. Zanuck's production of "The Longest Day" and Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" will be beamed into a million living rooms this week. They will be viewed by children as young as I was who will be as misinformed as I was about the contributions of African-Americans to that battle and the war.
They continue to be written out of history. Anyone watching "Flags of our Fathers" would have no idea that 1,000 black Marines took part in the assault on Iwo Jima just as viewers of Spielberg's film would not know that black men fought and died at Normandy.
Former Daily News staffer Yvonne Latty had no trouble finding four black survivors of the D-Day invasion for her book "We Were There." Spielberg could not find it in his heart to depict even one black face.
"Waverly Woodson was a black Philadelphian and a medic who saved lives on Normandy Beach even after he was wounded," Latty said. "Men like him get ignored.
"I wrote a piece for USA Today about "Flags of our Fathers." You wouldn't believe the venom.
"I got called a lying *****. It became a free-for-all. America is just not ready to hear this."
When Latty and others cautioned then that they were about to overlook the history of black involvement at Iwo Jima, Warner Brothers said they had faithfully depicted James Bradley's book, inaccuracies and all.
Where was Hollywood's slavish adherence to the written account when Oliver Stone recently changed the race of a black Marine, whose heroic rescue efforts at Ground Zero were whitewashed for public consumption?
I will never forget the heroism of the white soldiers who died defending my freedom at Normandy.
But I exercise that freedom by also remembering the sacrifice of the forgotten men who died with them. *
Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512.
Ellie