America's First Black Marines
by Melton A. McLaurin
The companion book to the American Public Television documentary
The following excerpt is from The Marines of Montford Point: America's First Black Marines published by The University of North Carolina Press
Archibald Mosley
from the chapter World War II
When the battle was over and we had victory in Iwo Jima, we were sent to the homeland of Japan to Sasebo and Nagasaki, Japan, to clean up the ash from the dropping of the atomic bomb. When we got there, I have never seen before and have never seen since such a devastating sight. Things were destroyed and torn down, burnt. The best way I could even describe the ground is like when I was a little Boy Scout and we were doing Boy Scout camp and you made a bonfire to roast hot dogs and marshmallows that you put them on a stick. Well, when you put the fire out and you kick the ashes and all away, the ground looks crushed and burnished. That’s the way the whole land it looked when we got there. I haven’t been able to go back and see it since. But I’m wondering how many years it took for that soil and that land to come back. Because when we got there, you couldn’t have, being a southern Illinois boy down in foreign land, I bet you’d have to plow and fertilize land before we could grow some corn again, after the way that land looked.
Not only the land and the buildings and everything burned, but even some of the people. While we were there, I remember we were there during November [1945], because we had Thanksgiving dinner there. Turkey, and I couldn’t enjoy my turkey Thanksgiving dinner, you know, you have this platter and plate they put it on. It’s because I looked out the tent and out there in the back I saw little Japanese kids going in the garbage cans, where we were emptying our platters into, getting drumsticks and all and, and eating on them and so forth.
But some of them, the sides of their faces were scarred, where you would see they were burned, and so forth. And even the hands of some people were burned and all. And one conclusion I came [to] from that is, and it might be why I became so sympathetic and wanted to choose an occupation of the ministry. And after finishing college, go to a seminary and study for the ministry is to have some compassion on people because it’s one thing that visit to Japan taught me—that war is hell.
Why human beings would ever want to go to war, drop bombs and all on one another and cause the next generation and children and all to suffer? The Marine Corps made me tough, it made me violent, yes. But because I was conditioned, programmed into it. And that’s one of the things you program us into war and fighting, but when we were discharged, nobody deprogrammed us. The only deprogramming I got would be from a loving wife that has been with me for fifty some years.
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Both the film and the book are based on more than forty-six hours of taped interviews with sixty Montford Point veterans. The film...uses thirty-five minutes of those interviews. The book...provides about five hours of the very best material from the interviews.
--Melton A. McLaurin, from the author interview