‘I was scared as hell, you know…’: African American POWs in Europe and the shaping and reshaping of U.S. national memories of the Second World War

Abstract

This article joins debates about prisoner of war experiences in the Second World War, with a focus on detainees’ narratives and memories. The research finds that both racial identity and the availability of public accounts can have a profound impact on the way narratives about wartime captivity are shaped and re-shaped. Drawing on oral history interviews with veterans who were part of segregated units, and who were captured and imprisoned as POWs, the article brings to light previously unheard stories, and shows the extent to which this heterogeneity affected ‘memory composure’ within the Long Civil Rights Movement framework.