Army & Navy – NAVY: Black Sailors

The leader, in this queer obstacle race, was a big black fellow, knotty of muscle, sleek of thigh. He leaped a seven-foot wall, writhed easily hand-over-hand up a rope, scrambled over a log breastwork, pawed up one side of a big rope web and down the other, snaked through a culvert pipe and broad-jumped a trench.

The big fellow stopped, wheeled around to see how the others were coming along. A chief petty officer yelled, “Keep going!” He kept going. So did the men behind him. They went like mad, clear to the end of the “Commando” physical-training course.

When it was over the big fellow and his brother Negroes came up panting. Asked the officer in command: “Which was that man who was way ahead?” The big fellow should have saluted. But it is hard for a man to remember the rules when he is only two days a sailor. He raised his hand and said: “It was me.” “Well,” said the officer, “that was fine.”

The other Negroes grinned.

First in a Quarter-Century. Last week the Great Lakes Naval Training Station graduated its first Negro gobs for World War II. Not since 1922 had the Navy taken in any Negroes. For Negroes, routine duty between wars had been in the messroom. But now well over a thousand have arrived at Great Lakes for their eight weeks of basic training. Other thousands are to follow.

The Negroes take to the training with gusto. They carry their shoulders square, their heads up. They have reason to: they have their own racial tradition in the

Navy, their own heroes of previous wars. They drill pridefully, rhythmically, marching up & down the parade ground chanting their own songs, composed by a Negro musician, second class.

They like action. The “Commando” course provides it. The Negroes would race through it as much as three times hand running and then ask, “Can’t we do it again?” So the skipper added a 100-yard sprint to try to tucker them out. He could not.

Command by Tradition. Commander of the Negro camp at Great Lakes is tall, amiable Lieut. Commander Daniel W. Armstrong, whose family tradition fits him for the job. His father, a brigadier general at 26, commanded Negro troops in the Civil War, later founded Virginia’s Hampton Institute (vocational training) for Negroes.

Daniel Armstrong grew up around the Hampton campus, graduated from Annapolis, spent most of World War I on a destroyer, was acting commander of a pitching four-stacker when he left the Navy in 1919 to enter business. He was a petroleum company executive when the Navy recalled him two years ago as an administrator and idea man. He originated the Navy E (for excellence) program for industry, then moved on to Great Lakes.

“What we’re doing here,” says Commander Armstrong, “is bending every effort to make these boys as good as any fighting men the U.S. Navy has. The country doesn’t yet know what a fine new source of fighting men the Navy has.”