Mutiny on the Booty

[excalibur]

It was covered up and we know why.

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Here’s the short version: In spring 1942, about 600 Negro soldiers with the 96th Battalion, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, were in north Queensland to construct an airfield. And on the night of May 22, an unknown number of them decided to train their guns on the tents of their white commanding officers. Robert Sherrod was a reporter for Time and Life whose firsthand coverage of the Pacific theater is considered some of the finest wartime journalism of the 20th century. Sherrod was embedded with U.S. troops in Australia at the time of the attempted mutiny, and he wrote a detailed report about the incident, which he passed along to then congressman Lyndon Johnson. Johnson told Sherrod that he subsequently destroyed the report, as releasing it could make blacks uppity and whites lynchity. However, thanks to the efforts of Holyoak, a copy of the report was discovered in the LBJ archives, although there’s some disagreement over whether it’s the actual report Sherrod submitted or LBJ’s retyped condensation of it.​

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What’s not in dispute is that the incident was purposely hushed-up.​

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One of the biggest stories of the war which can’t be written—and which shouldn’t be written, of course—is the mutiny among American Negro troops which took place near Townsville on May 22.

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That’s how the report begins—an admission that the matter must never be spoken of publicly.​

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A company of Negroes got their rifles and determined that they would kill their commanding officer, a Captain Francis Williams of Columbus, Ga. They fired several hundred rounds of ammunition at his tent (he was in a slit trench, later escaped without facing the almost certain death which it was his duty to face as an officer.) When other officers tried to escape the camp to obtain help, they were fired upon (in a half track) with a fifty-caliber machine gun.

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According to the report, only one white officer was killed, and if further proof is needed of the poor marksmanship skills of the Negro grunts, Sherrod mentions “a Negro Sergeant named Rufus James whose pipe was shot out of his mouth” by accident.​

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That shouldn’t be funny, but it’s fucking hilarious. It’s impossible to imagine that scene without thinking of Rufus James calmly puffing on his pipe, surveying the carnage, only to have it blown out of his mouth, his eyes bulging Mantan Moreland-style as he exclaims, “Oh lawdy, feets don’ fails me now!” as he hightails it out of there.​

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Not mentioned in the report but spoken of by Aussies who were alive at the time is that following the attempted massacre, black troops raided nearby homes and tormented the locals.​

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Still, the Socialist Worker was correct that the “background,” the (actual) motivation behind the mutiny, was left out of most media reports. It was, however, given great attention by Sherrod:​

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Opinion over here is almost unanimous: Those Negros—there are probably 10,000 of them now—should never have been sent to Australia. There are no women here for them, and some ugly situations have resulted. Everybody here feels that some black women would solve the problem. Neither the aborigine women nor the New Guinea women (there are about four companies of black engineers in New Guinea) will have anything to do with American Negroes. Incidentally, many Negroes have been able to get away with the story—told to lower class white women—that they are American Indians.

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It wasn’t racism per se; it was resentment. Even the aborigine women (and abbos are literal cavemen) didn’t want anything to do with American blacks. That’s gotta sting. Imagine the ignominy of having to pretend to be Injun just to get laid. “No, I’m not related to the people who gave the world jazz, blues, ragtime, and spirituals; my DNA is from the drunks who scalped children and lost a continent because their immune system’s so fragile you cough on ’em they die.”​

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Sherrod’s report concludes, “Oddly, the better educated Negroes are the most rebellious—the mutiny of that company of Southern Negroes was led by two or three Chicagoans.” No, not “oddly” at all. Of course it was the more assimilated, educated blacks who led the mutiny.​

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No different from today. Ivy League blacks. New York Times blacks. Mixed-race blacks.​

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Back in 1942, when a bunch of black soldiers decided that a racial massacre was their just compensation for not gettin’ da booty, one might’ve said to the prospective mutineers, “Hey dudes, a lot of soldiers ain’t gettin’ any right now. White soldiers in places like Stalingrad, Singapore, Bataan, Tobruk, El Alamein. Getting laid is not a guaranteed perk of serving in the Army. At least you’re not on a death march or in a POW camp. You’re in Queensland, with no Tojos or Nazis shooting at you. Enjoy the nice weather and free food and quit bitching.”​

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The point being, grading on a curve, with all the suffering going on in the world in 1942, those Corps of Engineers Negroes did not have it bad at all. But they felt slighted, not just by white women but by hominids the 2001: A Space Odyssey monolith long ago abandoned as hopeless. And those perceived insults overshadowed the fact that the soldiers’ circumstances were not actually very dire.​

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Kinda like living a nice 2021 middle-class life but considering yourself “still enslaved” because you can’t see the big picture for all the phantasmic “microaggressions” that cloud your vision like eye floaters.​

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Mutiny on the Booty - Taki's Magazine

Sometimes authors repeat themes because they’re lazy. Other times it’s because the themes don’t stop repeating.

www.takimag.com

 

[cnm]

Nah, the Oz are pretty racist, really. Known for it.

 

[DGS49]

Why assume it was lack of nookie that prompted the uprising? Maybe the C.O. was a racist cracker who treated them like shit?

And of course one must ask, Did this actually happen?

 

[whitehall]

What's the point? Did a Brit dig up old unverified records to try to dishonor the memory of Black troops who served honorably in Australia? Only a democrat like LBJ would invent a word like "lynchity".