I'm certainly not standing here saying they were treated well at all times. My point is that the "greatest generation" was not uniformly WASPy.
Oh heck no they weren't. Look, it's no mystery that any group like this has cliques and lesser tribes and what not.
No different than high school as long as one overlooks the fact that everyone's life is on the line 24/7
(sarcasm)
You know, talking to these old ones, which I've had the honor and privilege to do many times, you get a sense of how many evolved as a result of serving together in wartime, and most of them did indeed do just that. Sometimes I embarrass or shock my wife when we talk to some of them at the VA.
I ask questions I bet a lot of them haven't heard in a long time, and for the most part they're happy to respond.
Some went into the service feeling one way and emerged feeling completely different, on many issues, and race is no exception.
You get a wry grin sometimes from a few of them, like when they say that before going in the service they'd never even met a black person, or a Jewish person, or any number of ethnic people, and they talk about how they got to know them, learn about the kind of lives they led growing up.
But then you run up against slow moving policy borne of bureaucracy, and you run up against closed minds up at the higher levels.
It's not so much that the soldiers couldn't figure out how to get along. When pressed to, they had to adapt.
The brass maintained the barriers, it is they who enforced nonsensical policy.
Individual airmen did not try to prevent the "Negro" airmen from training and flying, some pencil pushing top brass put up that fight, mostly in Washington.
Individual grunts from the hinterlands might have been taught by their elders that Jews had horns that they had to shave daily, but those same grunts learned quickly that this was a myth. When I say my father was treated like crap, I am not so much referring to the individuals he served with on the ground. Indeed, they valued the fact that he was adept at radio communications and was a native German speaker.
He ran into issues dealing with individual higher-ups who carried their bigotry to their desks.
But your point is very well taken.