On the other hand, blacks didn’t much care for whites either [RIOTS AND RACIAL DISTURBANCES, p. 59, US Army Ground Forces Study No. 36: The Training of Negro Troops, by Major Bell I. Wiley, 1946].

“The army stinks,” one wrote, and “is filled up with a lot of ‘Crackers’ who don’t know that the Civil War is over and from all indications never will!”

After the war there will be riots after Riots because we are tired of the so-called white Supremacy as they call it…We just want the right to live, work and advance as normal people do. The right to fight & die as true Americans should…You can’t keep us down, try as you

Of course, white GIs were men of their times. Note that whites from the South and North felt the same way, and in nearly equal numbers. They unapologetically believed in preserving America's white European character and maintaining segregation and traditional roles for women.

Those views, of course, are “racist” and “sexist,” and if openly expressed today would absolutely exclude those men from military service.

While Ruane’s piece maintains a facade of neutrality, note how it began: with a white soldier’s advocating “white supremacy,” not with the black soldier’s calling whites “crackers.” Whites, you see, are always the villains.

Besides that, though, consider this: the story continues the larger effort to diminish the dominant, heroic role white Americans’ played in winning World II, and to retcon the war to help erase white history altogether.

After all, the white soldier’s remarks Ruane featured in his lede were one of the “uncensored results of dozens of surveys the service administered to soldiers during the war.”

Message: we may have won the war, but the important thing to remember is that whites were racists!