MacArthur's Luck: What's Real and What's Not? (2)

Imagining what happened when Captain Jackie Robinson and
his men spearheaded Task Force Carpenter and the 11th Armored
Division across the Rhine at Boppard-am-Rhine, 3 March 1945

Some people like their alternate history like war games turned into novels, without any real social questions or moral issues thrown into the mix.

The story of Task Force Carpenter in MacArthur's Luck, that scratch force of "Colored" units thrown together by Third Army staff to reinforce the 11th Armored Division's thrust to the Rhine is, some would say, a diversion from the main story--how Douglas MacArthur replacing George Marshall changed the outcome of World War Two.

To me that's sort of a narrow view. Many other factors could have changed that outcome, some obvious--like MacArthur's appointment--and some not--like tens of thousands of African-American soldiers kept out of the front lines by racial prejudice. Yes, there were exceptions, like the 761st Tank Battalion (Patton's Panthers) or the 92nd Infantry Division (Black Warriors), but the exceptions mostly just prove the rule.

The units cited in MacArthur's Luck for inclusion in Task Force Carpenter were all real, and among the many thousands of African-Americans available in the ETO. At a time when the front lines of Patton's Third Army were stretched so thin in February-March 1945 that even "Old Blood 'n' Guts" couldn't cobble together an offensive, easily the equivalent of one if not two divisions of African-American combat and engineer troops were available in the army's rear area.

He would have made one
hell of a combat officer.

What if Patton's staff had--as they do in MacArthur's Luck--gambled on their combat ability and thrown them into the breach? In the real world that couldn't happen until President Truman de-segregated the US military in 1948 and the first formally integrated combat units fought in the Korean Conflict.

But history might have been very different.

And Jackie Robinson? Well, that's just fun. In my world nobody tried to make him sit in the back of that bus, so he didn't get courtmartialed. Instead, he signed a waver for his injured foot and ended up in Europe ... just in time to make a different kind of history than he would in Brooklyn.