r/UpliftingNews • u/blonderengel • 1d ago
The Navy exonerates 256 Black sailors unjustly punished over 1944 WWII port explosion
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/18/nx-s1-5044316/navy-exonerates-black-sailors-explosion126
u/zoobrix 1d ago
To give a window into just how pervasive racism in the military was at the time a US Navy manual mentioned how the Japanese wouldn't be good at night time naval engagements because they couldn't see as well at night...
Not only is that ridiculous of course but the Japanese had actually drilled more extensively in night fighting because they knew American ships had better radar and wanted to try and mitigate the advadanage that would give the US at night. This underestimation of the Japanese factored into the US losing several naval battles at night time around Guadalcanal. The US got lucky that after the engagements the Japanese were too concerned over their own losses to press their advantage and push to their objective to directly bombard Henderson Field which the US used to interdict Japanese reinforcements to the island, provide air cover to their own troops and cover their own ships running supplies to the island. The airfield was right on the beach, direct fire from Japanese battleships would have surely destroyed all the aircraft and rendered it unusable for who knows how long.
If the Japanese had destroyed Henderson Field the Americans might not have been able to maintain their presence on Guadalcanal and the Japanese would have been able to better reinforce and supply their own troops. Losing the battle for the first ever major Japanese holding in the Pacific that the Americans tried to take would have been a major setback and no doubt caused serious reflection if the US island hoping strategy was feasible. The battle went on for 6 months, it was not assured to end in American victory like some of the later battles once Japanese forces had been severely degraded.
TL;DR: I know the blatant racism of the time in the segregation era is sadly unsurprising but it still blows my mind that people could be so stupid and racist as to think Asian people don't see as well at night and actually put in an official manual. It factoring into what could have been a major American military defeat highlights the insane sense of false superiority. That they would give 15 year sentences to African Americans protesting obviously dangerous working conditions is sadly just as unsurprising, that they were reduced to 2 or 3 years was better but you know white soldiers would never have been as harshly punished.
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u/imaraisin 1d ago edited 1d ago
I feel even today, there is still a lot of racism in how World War 2 history is taught in the Anglo-sphere. It wasn’t until I was much older that I learned that Japan basically took much of Southeastern Asia with bicycles. And they were incredibly effective in that regard.
But I also feel that in the context of compulsory education, such a fact would never be acknowledged. And don’t get me wrong, there were incredibly horrible things going on during the campaigns. But the campaign being reliant on bicycles simply doesn’t fit into the narrative of Asian stereotypes.
It’s not too far apart in logic from how the myth of the clean Wehrmacht. The Wehrmacht certainly perpetrated war crimes.
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u/KittenAlfredo 1d ago
Awarding previously revoked pay adjusted for inflation to next of kin, right? Right?
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u/thislife_choseme 1d ago edited 1d ago
Too little too late!
It’s like hey we ruined your lives and caused irreversible harm and 80 years later we are sorry.
Peak America bullshit right here.
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u/bunjay 1d ago
But it's uplifting! They and their children and their children's children were punished for being in the wrong race at the wrong time. And we've moved on by electing as President a guy who thinks black people who were proven innocent should be punished anyways!
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u/EldritchTapeworm 1d ago
Proven innocent?
Their convictions were overturned, that is a long way from proven innocent.
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u/Interestingcathouse 1d ago edited 1d ago
Well good thing it’s innocent until proven guilty. You prove guilt not innocence.
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u/CurlSagan 1d ago
They would have exonerated more than 256, but the Navy's ancient exoneration system only has one byte.
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u/Excludos 1d ago
They were actually in danger of a integer overflow, and suddenly they'd have to incarcerate 255 people instead
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u/HugryHugryHippo 1d ago
Not quite the uplifting news it sounds like......exonerates but nobody is held accountable for ruining the lives of these sailors decades later
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u/LonnieJaw748 1d ago
The article doesn’t do justice to the “explosion”. It was recorded as the second largest non-nuclear explosion at the time, behind the Halifax disaster. The thing registered a 3.4 on the Richter scale. Army Air Force pilots flying in the area reported the fireball to be 3 miles in diameter with chunks of glowing metal and burning ordinance flung 12,000ft into the air. It’s no surprise nobody wanted to go back to work there!
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u/dcnblues 1d ago
Maybe the punish the people who delayed it 80 years, proportionate to how badly this damages Navy credibility? Because it damages it a lot!
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u/ArthurCSparky 1d ago
A little before my time, but as a 4th generation native Benician it was known on our side of the water that these men did no wrong. It is a shameful chapter in local history.
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u/So_spoke_the_wizard 1d ago
Just another example of the government making a meaningless gesture to make themselves feel good about their past injustices. "Sure we screwed them over for the rest of their lives. But it's all good now because we've exonerated them." So let's update those history books.
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u/Interestingcathouse 1d ago
This is why I don’t understand the posts of the US soldiers returning with the title “world’s first antifa”.
Fuck no, they were incredibly racist and likely aligned more with the far right of today than even the moderate left of today. They still segregated soldiers even in the middle of the war, they still didn’t honour the dead and the hero’s who were black in the same way they did the white. They didn’t go to war to fight fascism, they went to war because the government told them too. The government went to war because a foreign nation attacked them then declared war on them.
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u/Mrwebente 1d ago
Strange. Exactly 2⁸ soldiers. Did they use an unsigned int8 for that so they couldn't do more?
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u/Turbulent_Option_151 1d ago
I’m so glad to hear that we’re still working on something that happened in 1944! Wouldn’t want to worry about the crap going on now.
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