Black Soldier on okinawa with a bayonet lugged carbine

Youtube Combat bulletin 58 at 21.15 minutes you can clearly see the bayonet lugged carbine the soldier is carrying in the back of the jeep. Combat Bulletin No. 58 (1945) - YouTube

Good catch, Buzz! The adjustable rear sight is there, too. I think what everyone has been looking for are pics showing these in use in the ETO. Keep looking! - Bob

I have shown that picture several time in the past. The jeep was being pushed out of the mud by the dozer in the background. I agree; the picture clearly shows a bayonet lug on that carbine.

Thx to Buzz,
I was watching these videos all weekend.

:thup:

CH-P777

Just curious, why "Black Soldier ..."; instead of "Bayonet lugged carbine Okinawa"?

I didn't take it as anything racial, I just took it as who to look for in the video to see the bayonet lug on a carbine.PC culture is killing everything

Considering the military wasn't officially desegregated until 1948, this soldier's race could definitely be considered a historically significant detail.

That's the way I took it.

I was just curious, no other intention. Now I know.

Officials have asked the public to Be on the look out for two suspects who committed a home invasion earlier today. In other news...

I wondered how long it would take... Yes, race rather narrowed the field "back in the day". Today? It gets one a slap on the wrist, or a DOX, or much worse. Ahhh, the "wonderful" world of PC!

Russ

My Father having grown up in the south working the fields as a sharecropper with many different people of color and nationality always spoke highly of their work ethics. Of course like he said "If you didn't work you didn't eat". He served 2 tours (Engineers) in the Philippines and was always of the opinion that we would have lost WWII had it not been for the Black Engineers he served along with. He said they had something to prove and they did so. Along with many immigrants who served so bravely for their new homeland........ The United States.
Read about the ALCAN Highway and see what these Black Engineers, who were brought up from being stationed in the swampy tent camps of southern Louisiana accomplished without the machinery others had. Most of their work done ahead of schedule by hand and done so correctly that they were often sent to correct shoddy work done by those who had the tools and heavy equipment they needed. I believe this was one of if not the first time they were 'Allowed' to work on the same project that Whites were working on. Read about how the Blacks lived in tents in -40 -60 F and built many of the barracks the others lived in. All the while not being allowed to enter any of the small camps or the bigger cities so they wouldn't intermingle with the locals. My Father often spoke of serving in the Pacific with some of the Black Engineers who worked on the ALCAN. He shared stories told to him by these men that he related to horror stories in the bitter cold and swarms of biting, stinging insects. (Dad never did like the cold). He had a war buddy named Lamar, a Cajun Black who worked the ALCAN. Lamar would share stories, told with his Cajun Flair, he was a lifetime family friend who often brought his family to our childhood church services.
It took this country to long to understand they were worthy. But that was the Politics of War and Society at the time.
Eyes opened after the Buffalo soldiers, Tuskegee Airmen and others fought through 6 European countries.

But today with all this PC BS as I think TenOC is poking at, We can't say 'The guy over there, the Black guy' or 'The Brown guy' without offending someone.

If anyone had the right to be upset it was the Black service men and Women of WWII.
But they dug deep and moved forward. I, like my late Father am proud of their and every ones efforts on behalf on our country.

Color of the skin to me is just a way of pointing some one out of a crowd or trying to describe a person or their heritage.

I say again:
Bless those that serve :thup:

PS: It's hard to find stories or videos that give these men the real credit they deserve for their efforts on the ALCAN. In those early days they didn't want to credit them. Just in recent years are stories and books becoming available that point out their accomplishments. I was able to find a video below that describes a little of the conditions and credits their accomplishments. There might be better ones, but this is what I have right now.

Below are some bits from a recent book-
The Construction of the Alaska Highway, 1942: The Role of Race in the Far North

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejQ-QF2SvKM

My Dad joined up just after Pearl, the way so many young men did, and was quickly slated for the Engineers.. You see he'd been working for Pan Am for a few years as a jobsite supervisor with native crews building air strips in South America and Africa back when you might have a bunch of laborers with picks and shovels and just a few pieces of heavy equipment - a long way from anywhere (and if something broke down you repaired it with what was on hand..).

He was assigned into the Airborne gliders as an Engineer and as he said "Thank God they cancelled that program" since it had a very high casualty rate... just getting those flimsy gliders on the ground. His next assignment was as a drill sergeant stateside - then he got a chance to go to OCS (this was a country boy's dream come true - particularly coming out of the south during the Depression..). At any rate by the time he came out the war was ending so his first assignment as an officer was to an Engineer company in Germany (1946) at a time when all the workers were black and the NCO's and officers were white... and like all the other Engineers they helped re-build Germany... My Mom was actually one of the first Army wives who made it to Germany after the war ended - and I was born in an Army tent hospital in 1948...

Every bit of this belongs to world long gone - and never coming back - but it's part of who we are. Watching what's happening today it looks to me like we're just squandering our inheritance... And for those that think in racial terms - that war, 75 years ago was the start of the sweeping changes in civil rights that were only dreamed of back then... To this day I marvel that Harry Truman had the guts to de-segregate the armed forces back in 1948... What courage that must have taken.

My Dad stayed in and made a career with the Engineers, retiring out after 28 years. Wish he was still around...

I used the term black soldier because of the historical context. Also I have read in other forums that negro troops, yes I am using the term in it's historical context were issued second line weapons and equipment. This film shows that when it came to issuing weapons this was certainly not the case.

Just to keep the PC folk's from whining :rolleyes:, here's some "people" with there bayonet lug's on carbines during WW-2.

Here's a pic. of an adj. rear site in the ETO.

Hate to keep bugging everyone here, but here's one more pic. of a GI with a bayonet lug on his carbine, this pic. was in a mag. on 6 sept 1945, the war ended on 2 sept. 1945 in Japan.
I think we can safely say that adj. sights and bayonet lug's were used during WW-2 in the ETO and the PTO. ;)

I still don't see anything illustrating usage of the bayo lug in Europe.

The Indians are ok with the outcome because it freed them from English occupation, but I won't ever be able to forgive England and France for starting that war. What a monstrous act. England and America are reaping the whirlwind directly because of it and it will be the near complete elimination of a race of people, probably within 150 years. Maybe this is all just a computer simulation anyway.

The 83rd Infantry Division's official history, Thunderbolt Across Europe was published in 1946. It contains a passage describing replacing all of the division's carbine flip sights with adjustables about the time they crossed the Rhine. The story was related in CCNL272, over 20 years ago.

So, your picture here, picture there method of "research" fell behind by over 5,000 examples almost 75 years ago.

More recent research shows rear sight MWOs being performed in 15 ETO divisions in late winter and early spring of 1945. How many pictures of those have you found of those thousands upon thousands - half a dozen? Your method is good for trivia contests, but not much else.

deleted.

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Originally Posted by lboos

Here's a pic. of an adj. rear site in the ETO.

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Love the way the middle soldier has the n-bloc clip attached to his battle gear.

I was raised in Petaluma, Calif. It was a small town just north of SF. I had never spoken to or shook hands with a black person. There were none around. When I was drafted in 1965, I met a few black folks and there were 3 in my platoon. I got along well with them,they were just like the other guys, some good, some not so good. When I went to 5th Inf in Colorado, I was seeing the first signs of discrimination and wondered why this was happening. It was kind of disgusting to see a new black Lt trying to get through a company full of sleepy soldiers at revelly. I had been in the army for 6 months and it was good infantry cadre at Ft Ord, I knew that someone was supposed to call everyone to attention and salute the officer. None of these lifer bozos was about to do the right thing so I just did it for them: a private E2 in a sea of lifer sergeants. The poor shavetail was relieved to find someone to do it right and I just thought that two years of these lifer dopes was going to be a chore. I guess to thank me for my service, they put me in a room with 5 black guys and I was just fine with that. These guys were from the deep south and were just the nicest people to be around. We went to a Jimmy McGriff concert at Colorado Springs and I was the only white guy in the place, a speck of salt in a bowl of pepper.
Six months later and I'm in Vietnam. The unit was 52% black and the shoe was on the other foot. There was plenty of racism from both sides. There were fights, stabbings and enough racism to turn a good attitude into a bad one. The guys from Chicago and NY were lazy dangerous people. If you've ever seen Platoon, the way they went after each other was what our battalion was like. I couldn't wait to get away from that place and the fools white and black . I see our present situation and it is familiar: scared white folks washing the feet of black folks while they rob and burn our cities. It's a movie I've seen too many times, same people doing the same sh.. for the same reasons. God help us.