y April 1944, my father had completed his training and was being shipped overseas from Newport News, Virginia. After a far-too-brief, two-day visit with my mother and sister, my father boarded a troop ship, ready to head across the Atlantic. A marching band rallied the spirits of the black soldiers, as they marched to the ship, the General William Mitchell, and filed on board.

The General William Mitchell, photograph by William Diggs, circa 1944. Courtesy of navsource.org

Fear of enemy submarines and nausea from stormy seas soon gripped the soldiers. Despite rolling waves that caused dishes to fly off dining tables, the ship made its way steadily from Newport News to Casablanca in North Africa.

For my father and the other blacks on board, it was a reverse middle passage. The slave ships that had brought their ancestors were followed by packs of sharks, waiting for slaves who'd lost all hope to climb the high, restraining nets and throw themselves in the sea. My father's ship faced a different ocean predator, the German U-boat. Like their ancestors, who had come from the opposite direction, the black soldiers on board my father's troop ship felt wrenched from their families and were troubled by fears and uncertain futures.

Without a convoy for protection, the ship, nevertheless, made it safely to the Moroccan port in about a week and a half.

s it turned out, the risk of being torpedoed, crossing the Atlantic Ocean, was the greatest danger my father faced during his entire war experience. The Army was reluctant to send black officers to the front, where they would have to command white troops, so, for extended periods of time, it kept them well behind the lines, unassigned, essentially doing nothing.

White officers, fresh from the States, came through various camps my father was stationed at in North Africa and, later, in Italy. After four or five days, they would be moved to the front. However, my father and other black officers, in those same camps, remained behind. Some of them wrote their Congressmen and the President to protest the discriminatory treatment. Others contacted the black press. But they continued to wait in re-supply posts and other areas well behind the front for a call that never came.