The Dirty Dozen

One of the best things about this historical novel is the author’s attempt to expose the stupidity and uselessness of being racially prejudiced. To start with, the author made Napoleon White, a black person, one of the prominent characters. White had gone to college where he’d gotten A’s and B’s. He had also been a football hero. He had enlisted in the Army where his brilliant performance earned him the rank of lieutenant. It was at this point that he had become a victim of racial injustice in a southern town. He had sought revenge and stabbed his attacker to death. He had been court-martialled and sentenced to death for murder.

But rather than let him hang John Reisman, the main character of the book, picked him to be among the dozen convicted men to be trained for a special mission in Europe during the second world war. Reisman, himself of Jewish descent, recognized the leadership qualities of White’s past and decided to rekindle them and make White a leader of the group (later nicknamed the Dirty Dozen). Ten out of the dozen men in this group were white. (The other member was a Ute Indian named Samson Posey.) The typical prejudiced white was a southerner named Archer Maggot. Maggot disliked White from the start. He was the one who made the first jeery remark about White the first time the men were brought together.

Compared to White, Maggot had no important leadership qualities. He was a minor academically, and his past had been a mixture of sexually corrupt activities. He had been convicted for rape. From the onset Maggot thought he could handle White like other “niggers” from his background. But as it were, he had been mistaken. The first time he made his remark—about whether White’s parents had been color-blind—he found himself challenged, and thrown down in a fight. Later, whenever he said anything purposely to offend White, White responded with an intellectual comment which Maggot usually didn’t understand. Sometimes White recalled a quotation from history; sometimes he imitated Maggot’s uneducated southern drawl, which infuriated Maggot. White usually got to lead the group during their training sessions and any attempt by Maggot to protest was met with a critical statement from their trainer (Reisman) or the other men, and sometimes hard punishment.

Maggot even found out the hard way that the Indian could play poker better than he. He tried to cheat but Posey caught him redhanded. When he wanted to fight, he got it. All his actions had been aimed at leading the other men against White’s leadership, but actually quite the opposite happened. The other men had no particular grudges against White and were willing to respect him as a leader. Some even turned against Maggot.

Eventually Maggot realized that his bigotry was getting him nowhere. He accepted White’s leadership though grudgingly. But if nothing else, he learned to keep his mouth shut as far as White was concerned.

March 3, 2015. Review initially written in 1985. Work first published in 1965. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).