Art Carter's unfiltered view of war
After spending nearly a month at sea to reach the war, Art Carter was in no mood to wax poetic about the journey that had brought him SOMEWHERE IN NORTH AFRICA, as the dateline on his story in the Dec. 11, 1943 edition of Baltimore’s Afro-American newspaper proclaimed.
Far from the pleasurable voyage the crossing might be in peacetime, Carter wrote, the convoy experience near the end of 1943 was “a damnable series of incidents that defy description.” He continued:
It is a three-way activity of wondering, watching and waiting.
Every waking hour is spent wondering why in the name of goodness you, of all people, should be in this precarious predicament: watching for any sign of what you know may happen any minute, and waiting for it to happen, yet hoping and praying that it doesn’t.
The mixture of helplessness and boredom endured throughout the 25-day journey rendered the sight of land “a glorious feeling; a feeling like nothing I’ve ever experienced before,” and it was there in North Africa, and later in Italy, that Carter produced the most memorable work in his nearly 50-year career.
Arthur Mantell Carter was born Sept. 2, 1911 in Washington, D.C. and raised in the city, eventually attending Howard University. During his time at the school, Carter did some work in the athletic department, typing up news releases and distributing them to newspapers.
He got a job with the Afro-American chain in 1937, and his first beat was Howard football. He wrote the first installment of what would eventually become his regular sports column that November and by 1939 was sports editor overseeing the entire group of newspapers.
Carter shipped out to North Africa in the fall of 1943 more out of necessity than desire: “It was either be a war correspondent or go to war as a soldier,” he said in a 1986 interview.
Upon arrival, though, Carter did the work. He lived alongside the subjects of his stories, packing as many names and hometowns as he could into his dispatches for the weekly paper back home.
“Instead of hanging around headquarters waiting on daily reports, we ate and slept with the outfits,” Carter said. “We were able to gather more intimate reaction. We personalized the war.”
Carter is best known for his coverage of two Black units in the Mediterranean theater: the 99th Pursuit Squadron (later dubbed the Tuskegee Airmen) and the 92nd Infantry Division. While their exploits occasionally merited a brief mention in mainstream newspapers, publications serving the Black community — and there were many — trumpeted news of those units with banner headlines on a regular basis.
Of course, the correspondents telling the stories became household names among the readership, too. One memorable dispatch from September 1944 featured a headline that screamed “Art Carter Tells How He Cheated Death” stripped across the front page of the Afro-American.
It told the tale of a harrowing experience Carter and fellow correspondents Ollie Harrington of the Pittsburgh Courier and John Jordan of the Norfolk Journal and Guide had endured to cover the 92nd in action in Italy. One morning near Vorno, not far from Pisa, Carter and Harrington had been chatting with Capt. Charles F. Gandy, a D.C. resident who was telling them about his wife, Geraldine, giving birth to a 9-pound boy back home.
In the midst of our congratulations, a panting runner reported to the captain that the forward member of the patrol had been wounded by enemy machine-gun fire and that he had been unable to evacuate him because of continuous firing.
Swiftly Captain Gandy organized another patrol, armed to the teeth with M1 rifles and grenades, and was off to the front to investigate, and therein began four hours of hell that Harrington and I shall never forget.
We climbed on the captain’s jeep which sped crazily through the twisting roadways until we reached a point about a mile from where the shooting occurred. From there we set out on foot, moving slowly, secretly through the brush, watching the sway of every tree, branch and twig.
It was a deathly, grim sort of business as none of us knew what loomed ahead, or behind, yet soldier-like we moved onward.
We had crept through two cornfields, crawled down a long winding roadside and were prowling behind a cluster of farmhouses when suddenly the ratatatat of machine guns broke the stony silence, and whistling bullets began zooming over our heads — now deep in a roadside ditch.
This was IT! Just forty yards away, hidden in an innocent-looking farmhouse, the enemy was blasting away with rapid-fire guns. Our wounded comrade lay around the corner, bleeding profusely from a horrible wound in his belly.
A medic, Pvt. Enoch Jones, managed to pull the wounded man to safety even as the Germans continued to fire, and he and three litter-bearers carried the soldier to the rear. But the rest of the party, including the correspondents, remained pinned down for three more hours, the slightest move drawing a stream of fire from the enemy gunners.
Mortars eventually forced the group to move out, which encouraged snipers to take shots at them when they were forced to emerge from the ditch. But the entire party managed to make it back unscathed.
Each of those men in that daring patrol must have undergone a thousand mental deaths in that brief span of time, but they were surprisingly cool and got out determined to go back and “blast hell out of the krauts.”
I got the impression that the Nazis will take an awful beating each time they meet them face to face.
Carter didn’t bother with applying such bravado to himself, describing the experience as a “hellish three hours of spine-tingling fear.”
This was my most gruelling experience in a dozen or so narrow escapes as a correspondent, and my curiosity of what a patrol does is cured.
Now all I remember is the final warning the boss gave me before leaving the States: “A dead correspondent can’t write.”
When Carter returned to the U.S. just before Christmas 1944, Afro-American colleague Ralph Matthews asked him to name the single most impressive person he met during his 14 months covering the war. Carter asked to sleep on it before getting back to Matthews the next day with his answer: Capt. Charles F. Gandy.
By that point, Gandy had been dead for more than two months. He was killed in action on the Gothic Line on Oct. 12, 1944 and now rests at Arlington National Cemetery.
Carter rose through the ranks at the Afro-American chain after the war, eventually finding his niche as an editor. In that role, he planned and participated in coverage of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ‘60s, saying later that his experience as a war correspondent helped him in that endeavor. While working mostly from the office, he occasionally traveled to cover stories, including reporting from Montgomery during the bus boycott in the spring of 1956.
Among the stories he filed was a profile of 27-year-old Rev. Martin L. King, who told him: “I still have hope everything will work out for justice. We can only hope and wait. Right now we are stronger than at any time and there are many of these people who may never ride the buses again. Whatever we do, however, we will do with dignity and love.”
Carter was named editor and publisher of the Washington Afro-American in 1970 and maintained that role through his retirement in 1986. He was a member of the Pulitzer Prize jury for the 1973 and 1974 awards and in 1985 received a lifetime achievement award from the D.C. chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists — an organization Blacks were not permitted to join when he got into the business.
On May 22, 1988, less than two years after retiring, Carter died of cancer in Washington. He was 76 years old.