THE racial divisions that underlie much of the violence in the U.S. are beginning to follow the flag. Black and white strife of the sort that has swept such Stateside bases as Camp Lejeune and Fort Bragg is turning up at U.S. military facilities overseas. The situation is so volatile among the 185,000 G.I.s stationed in West Germany that the Pentagon has decided to dispatch a team of military and civilian experts to investigate. When the team arrives this week in Europe, it will have plenty to study.
Upraised Fists. The Washington experts will review race relations in all the services, but will concentrate their efforts on the 165,000-man Seventh Army, which is the U.S.'s main ground contribution to NATO's shield in Europe. Until recently, the Seventh Army has had a reputation as a highly disciplined elite unit. But during the past six months the Seventh's image has been rudely shattered by the emergence of racial invective in the barracks plus bitter, sometimes bloody strife between black and white G.I.s. In Friedberg. a mob of 25 club-swinging black G.I.s roamed through the downtown bars, injured three white G.I.s, who had to be hospitalized, and terrorized most of the German citizenry. Another crowd of black troops descended on a civilian police station in Schweinfurt and forced frightened local officials to release a black G.I. who they claimed had been unjustly arrested. White prisoners beg for transfers from the big Army stockade at Mannheim, where friction between white guards and angry black prisoners has sparked at least three riots.
At most of the Seventh Army's 60 bases from Bonn to the Bavarian Alps, young black soldiers toss the upraised-fist salute to their brothers and willingly accept courts-martial as the price of their nonregulation Afro haircuts.
For a while they bombarded their white superiors with petitions complaining about inequities, real and fancied; now, believing that their grievances are ignored, they have largely stopped. Black noncoms, especially career soldiers who tend to side with the Army, cool the agitators as much as they can.
The Seventh's racial troubles are by no means caused only by black soldiers, who account for about 12% of the U.S. troops in West Germany. The blacks complain of harassment by white MPs and taunting by NCOs who threaten to "get me a nigger." Last week a Ku Klux Klan-style cross was found burning outside a Mannheim barracks: there have been at least two similar incidents at other Seventh Army bases. The Communist East German daily Neues Deutschland has seized on the cross burnings to portray the U.S. Army in Europe as a sort of K.K.K. expeditionary force.