Fighting Nazis — then hatred
Vet: WWII kindled civil rights push
No history of World War II can compare with the tales of U.S. Army Pvt. Ozzie Fletcher.
The native New Yorker, now 97, recounts a historic journey that began in the old Whitehall St. Induction Center in 1942, wound its way through Fort Dix in New Jersey, a 43-day trip across the Atlantic to Ireland, a yearlong trek though England and a spot in the English Channel on D-Day.
As Fletcher tells it, the war changed not only the course of the world but the lives of the African-Americans fighting for the racially divided U.S.A.
“The success of D-Day caused black people, specifically American blacks, to contest the segregation we had to endure,” he recounted during an evening inside his Brooklyn home. “A lot of blacks came back to America with a spirit to fight their own fight.”
But his memories go beyond the fighting. He recalls learning to speak French, and singing along to the French Resistance anthem “Le Chant des Partisans.” He recounts collecting a $50 monthly paycheck, and seeing the French civilians welcome the American fighters with food, clothing and equipment in the days after June 6, 1944.
Not all the recollections are as benign: Though wounded three times during his years in the service, Fletcher says racism stopped him from collecting a Purple Heart.
“Whites were wounded in war,” he explained nearly eight decades later. “But Negroes were injured. And as an injured soldier, you were not entitled to a Purple Heart.”
Fletcher grew up on the streets of the Bronx and Manhattan.
In 1942, he was accepted into the City College mechanical engineering program, but his draft number soon came up, and his college career postponed.
The new draftees “would go down to Whitehall St. in Manhattan where blacks went one way and whites another,” he recalled. “We were all given an Army serial number. We were asked to bring with us two pencils, toothbrush, underwear, and shoes. We were given a month’s notice before being sent off.”
After three months of scuffling around stateside Army bases, Fletcher and some 250 other men in his company sailed out of Portsmouth, Va., to Europe aboard a segregated ship.
“We didn’t stay on the deck when we departed, waving handkerchiefs,” he recalled of the black soldiers. “We were on the bottom.”
Fletcher spent a good part of 1943 trekking through the Midlands of England: Liverpool, Leeds and Grimsby. He recalls posing for his first photo in uniform during this time.
In 1944, as ships made their way off the southern English coasts toward the landing beaches in Normandy, Fletcher remembers the black soldiers were ordered to load ships that were headed into battle. Then everything changed in an instant.
“It was on D-Day that [Gen. Dwight] Eisenhower decided that we would dance with the Germans,” he recalled. “The Germans were no chumps. … On DDay ships were waiting in the channel to go on the coast of Normandy and orders were coming down.”
Fletcher’s ship stayed on the English Channel during the initial Allied onslaught, and he didn’t reach land until about 10 days after the first wave.
“We did not come ashore shooting,” he explained, “but carrying supplies.”
He was on the lookout for German soldiers, but instead found himself surrounded by French working girls.
“Bordellos started forming damn near when D-Day started,” he recalled. “American soldiers made signs with ‘Negros not allowed.’ But the French women started painting over the signs because they were not going to follow American rules.”
Fletcher returned to New York in March of 1946 and spent his life serving the city. Fletcher was a sergeant for the NYPD, a high school teacher and a community relations specialist in the crime prevention division of the Brooklyn’s district attorney’s office.
Three-quarters of a century later, Fletcher is resolute about what the youth of today should know about the second World War.
“Kids should know that our invading France to take down Germans on D-Day was the turning point in the war,” he declared. “And that meant the Jewish would be saved,” he said.