Styler, the Army's commanding general in the West Pacific, addressed the troops on the radio, they drowned him out with boos. The armed forces were segregated at the time, and all 250 members of the all-Black 823rd Engineer Aviation Battalion in Burma sent a letter to Truman, saying they were "disgusted with undemocratic American foreign policy" and did not want to "take the field in league with the alien rulers against the freedom revolts of the oppressed peoples." In Guam, 3,500 Air Force troops staged a hunger strike, while 18,000 soldiers pooled money to send a cable to journalists making their case for repatriation. Three thousand joined them in Korea, and 5,000 in Kolkata. Then, more than 20,000 American soldiers marched in Manila, demanding to return home.Īnother 20,000 demonstrated in Honolulu.
During World War II, the United States had fought to end a brutal occupation by the Japanese. colony that had suffered untold repression and slaughter in the 50 years since Spain handed it over in the Spanish-American War. The first protests took place in the Philippines, a U.S. Now it was the troops' turn to put up a fight. Truman panicked at the "dangerous speed" of demobilization and ordered a slowdown in January 1946. That did not go over well with the soldiers' families, who bombarded their congressional representatives with photos of children missing their fathers and pairs of baby shoes with tags reading "Bring Daddy home." Washington relented, and soldiers packed their bags, until President Harry S.
government decided that rather than fully demobilize the military, it would maintain a troop force of 2.5 million. That same month, threatened with left-wing independence movements in its far-flung overseas territories and across Asia, the U.S. The story began just after the war concluded with Japan's surrender in August 1945. But few times have they flexed their political muscle as they did in 1946, when huge numbers of the very fighters who had just defeated the Axis powers directly challenged their commanders with a demand to return home and, miraculously, won. Veterans have often wielded outsize political influence - catered to as voters, recruited as candidates and rewarded with government benefits - and the number of veteran advocacy groups has exploded in recent years.
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