Vincent Tubbs reflects on coming home from the war
Vincent Tubbs' dispatches from the Pacific often focused on everyday life -- from the vagaries of his 30-day voyage to Australia on a liberty ship to a vivid description of his experience with malaria.
As with others in the select group of war correspondents for Black newspapers reporting from abroad, though, he always had an eye out for stories and angles his readers wouldn't get from overwhelmingly white metropolitan newspapers.
He had a one-on-one interview with Gen. Douglas MacArthur -- who he described as "the greatest man I ever met" -- and his focus was getting MacArthur's assessment of Black troops under his command. ("I have worked a great number of years, more than forty to be exact, with colored troops, and have always found them to be good soldiers.")
Tubbs, born Sept. 25, 1915, spent a year and a half covering the Pacific for Baltimore's Afro-American newspaper. Many of his stories chronicled the men who performed critical work behind the scenes -- seabees, stevedores, truck drivers -- but whose efforts were often overlooked in favor of dispatches from the front lines.
As he returned to the U.S. in late summer 1944, flying from Hawaii to San Francisco, he reflected on what he had seen across the Pacific:
One could almost hear the martial bands playing “God Bless America” with Kate Smith singing it -- and you sort of hummed in your mind; yet without making a sound:
“From the mountains, to the prairies, to the oceans, white with foam ... my home sweet home.”
That's how it feels to come home to America again after nearly two years in the jungles of the Pacific. From the air you could look down on big sprawling San Francisco and see victory -- the warehouses, the docks, shipping coming and going, the factories and shipyards. On the ground you see the people -- women in overalls, men in shipyard helmets not too much unlike those on the heads of the soldiers at Saipan.
There's something almost discouraging about the way the people move about as if there wasn't an artillery shell screaming through the air this very minute and a man about to die under its burst; but you remember that's the way of America. Big, bad and bustling, strong, virile and unaffected -- taking everything with but a slight change of stride, but moving unwaveringly towards the day when all the men out there in those Pacific hellholes can come home.