I was wonderign about that, I had the impression that African Americans in the 1940’s only served in the Marine Corps the same way some women did, i.e. clerks.
They weren’t allowed in Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs) or the Marine Aircraft Groups (MAGs) which is what went to fight in the island hopping campaign.
For Eastwood to have included an African-American, he would have had to rewrite history, something he and the authors of the book tried very hard to stop. Kinda like how, when Lee made Malcom X, he sorta conveniently forgot that whole part about X’s transformation, shortly before his assassination, from radical to more reasonable activist. He chose to completely downplay this aspect of Malcom X in order to perpetuate the militant “by any means necessary” character that he wanted him to remain.
Given that there were like 40,000 troops on the Island and both movies only depicted limited units, iirc. Statistically, I see no reason to include a “token” minority unless there were historical evidence that one of the major characters in the story were indeed black. The odds would be against it.
And also, weren’t all units segregated at that time? Unless an all-black unit was the focus of the story, including random blacks in the ranks would have been ahistorical
:
