GI's on the beach

Serendipity; yesterday we passed the slighted remains of Second World War fortifications, and today, a short way along the beach, we encountered three World War Two American GI's amongst the dunes. At first I put our meeting down to us stumbling through a fissure in time and space back into the 1940's, although such notions were soon dispelled by the nearby film crew. Shame, I wouldn't have minded a bit of space time travel. Turned out it was Channel 5 were making a documentary about a particular African American GI in World War Two, I think I heard the name Walter Williams? If that's right, Walter Henry Williams Jr. is an American artist who served in France During World War Two. It got me thinking, you rarely see wartime footage depicting African American servicemen, even though there were some million black men who fought in American forces both European and Pacific theatres. Sign of the bias of the times? I think so. I'm not singling out the US, if you look at commonly played British footage of the period coloured faces are rare, although huge numbers of commonwealth soldiers saw action (10 million from across the Empire), if shown at all it's usually white commonwealth soldiers depicted. Recently you had the minor media furore when a Sikh shown in the film '1917', with calls that it was wrong and 'PC' gone mad, although historians pointed out it was historically correct. The whitewashing of history gives people a very skewed impression, underplays the importance and role of non white servicemen/women, which perpetuates and fuels the ignorance and hateful division indicative of current nationalism. An example of this ignorance, though on a very different tangent, was the propaganda of the far right in Britain of the early 2000's which was directed at Polish migrants, and used the image of a Spitfire as an iconically British symbol, though the Spitfire shown was clearly from one belonging to one of the 16 Polish squadrons who fought heroically through the Battle of Britain and throughout the war....pure ignorance, born of media depictions of the war, limited historical understanding and plain old bigotry.  Add colour to that cultural bigotry and the 'other' disappears almost completely from the history of World War Two; I suppose it made it easier for us to continue the segregation and abuse of minority communities, post war. I hope the documentary is well done, recognition and depiction of the coloured faces of World War Two has been too long coming, and essential if you are to understand history and it's webs of interconnection.