Background
In July 1944, the 3rd Marine Division took two weeks to recapture Guam from the Japanese Army in a campaign that cost 1,600 Marine lives.
After the battle, Guam was turned into a base for Allied operations. Five large airfields were built by Seabees, and B-29 bombers flew from the island to attack targets in the Western Pacific and on mainland Japan. Guam continued to station enlisted men from the 3rd Marine Division. But racial tensions began in late August when the all-black 25th Depot Company of the United States Navy started loading operations at the newly-created naval supply depot.
A black Marine stationed on the island compared the island to "a city deep down in the South" because of the bigotry he encountered. He said:
Where there are women and white and Negro men, you will find discrimination in large quantities. On Guam, discrimination against blacks involved attempted intimidation by whites who shouted racial slurs, threw rocks, and occasionally hurled smoke grenades from passing trucks into the cantonment area for black sailors of the Naval Supply Depot.
Over the next three months, these racially-motivated incidents caused tensions to rise between the two groups until they erupted into a race riot on Christmas Eve, 1944.
Read more about this topic: Agana Race Riot
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