There was chaos to be sure. The 364th’s Morning Reports, a kind of company-by-company daily attendance sheet, note dozens of soldiers as AWOL following the Walker shooting and its aftermath. Files in the National Archives trace some who made their way north, seeking from their local induction boards asylum from what they called a life-threatening situation. A white officer in Walker’s company interviewed by The History Channel estimated 60 of his men – about half – were among those AWOL.

  Some white soldiers on this sprawling base heard stories about the violence and wrote letters about it. These letters are among the military’s Counterintelligence Corps files unearthed by Ridenhour.

  In a letter dated June 6, 1943, and intercepted by military intelligence, Pvt. Harold F. Jones of the 394th wrote to a friend about racial violence that broke out with the arrival of the 364th: "… they started tearing down their barracks and PXs. Finally they worked over some MPs and killed two white officers. That night they captured five officers and held them in their barracks as hostages. Two battalions of the 5th Infantry were sent in. … Our officers told us they carted 30 dead niggers to the morgue … but I don’t know if that’s true."

  Another member of the 394th wrote on June 5. "… a nigger regiment kinda took things in there [sic] hands and overran a few places. Result. They settled there [sic] hash with gunfire. A few of the niggers were killed. They killed a few white officers though. … The Fifth Inf. was sent in to take over the riot and the niggers held them off by holding a bunch of officers as hostages."

  A soldier in the 163rd wrote home in June: "… there have been about 20 or 25 Negros [sic] hurt and kild [sic]. They [sic] have been 5 or ten shot right through the head … and we are going to give them hell when they come around us."

  A June 1 letter written by a member of the unit in question, the 364th, stated: "We are catching hell here. Two of our men have been kill [sic] and we have only been in this camp for six days. Something worse is going to happen soon."

  There are more such letters in the National Archives and the files of the NAACP. Ridenhour recorded similar tales of deadly skirmishes during his investigation.

  Whatever was touched off throughout the South in June 1943 was of grave concern to the Army. "The Negro situation is fast approaching a critical stage," states a confidential memo from the Fourth Service Command in Atlanta.

  Following the first days of violence at Camp Van Dorn, the patchwork of official records unearthed so far does little to sort fact from fiction. Here is a small sample of the problems:

  • Military personnel records crucial to the incident, along with millions of others, were destroyed in a fire in 1973.

  • Intelligence files Ridenhour sought from the National Archives did not arrive for six years. When he finally received them, they were incomplete and heavily edited.

  • The 364th’s Regimental Journal shows no entries from the day the 364th arrives in Mississippi until Nov. 4, 1943 – almost the entire period in question.

  • The journal pages, starting in 1942, are signed by a Sgt. Malcolm LaPlace, who told Ridenhour – and whose service record confirms – he wasn’t in the service in 1942.

  • After the Army’s initial research in 1999 proved "inconclusive" it received a waiver of privacy concerns and based some of its conclusions on records that are beyond the reach of the public.

  In short, the records are a mess, neither proving nor disproving much of anything – yet.

  What about newspaper accounts? The black press had full access to the camps, black soldiers and accounts of racial violence, according to current Army spokesmen. But on July 19, 1943 – just two days after a round of secret court martials tied to the Walker shooting and its aftermath ended at Camp Van Dorn – the Secretary of War wrote the U.S. Attorney General that he would no longer stand for black press reports on racial violence in the military: "It is strongly urged that your department take appropriate action to eliminate this serious threat to the war effort."

  What that action was has yet to be unearthed from the National Archives. But a study of the one of the nation’s most influential black newspapers of the time, The Pittsburgh Courier, shows that all mention of its own militant "Double V" campaign ends within 60 days of Stimson’s challenge to the Attorney General.

  What began around the same time are indications that the black press – and white media – submitted to increased censorship. There are records of editors calling the War Department for clearance to run stories deemed "inflammatory." There are drafts of newspaper stories stamped "No Objection To Publication." Access to bases and information was restricted.

  When a reporter for The Pittsburgh Courier asked about the court martials he’d heard about at Camp Van Dorn, base commander Col. Guthrie responds in a letter dated Sept. 2, 1944: "Your telegraphic request for information concerning the court martialing of certain soldiers at this camp was referred to the headquarters … It prefers to withhold information for the present."

Two Army Inspector General reports prepared after the Walker-related incidents hint at the Army’s response. The so-called Burney Report concludes: "[Gen. McNair] is of the opinion that the best solution is to confine the organization to the limits of its regimental area and deprive it of all privileges until such time as it will disclose its real troublemakers …."

  The Peterson report concludes: " … in light of the recent riotous conduct of the 364th Infantry, vigorous and prompt corrective action was necessary in order to place this regiment in such a disciplinary state that it would not again resort to mutinous conduct and to protect the lives of the citizens of Centreville and other innocent person."

  Ridenhour interviewed black vets who remember being under such a form of house arrest and white vets who patrolled the cordoned-off area in jeeps and half-tracks mounted with .50-caliber machine guns. More letters intercepted by military intelligence and other Ridenhour interviews make reference to sporadic gunfire exchanges across the cordon line.

  The 1999 Army report does not mention armed patrols or house arrest. It refers to a disturbance in which members of the 364th disrupt a July 3, 1943, dance in the black section of camp. The disturbance was broken up by a battalion of the all-white 99th Division. "No one was hurt," reads the report. The rest of 1943 is covered in a single sentence: "Training in the regiment continued through the summer of 1943 without incident."

  In September 1943, Col. Lathe Row of the Army Inspector General’s Office studied the situation and concluded "that the presence of the 364th Infantry constitutes a threat to the normal peaceful conditions at Camp Van Dorn … [and] should be transferred at an early date … for overseas duty."

  According to most 364th regimental documents, those troops not transferred to other units left Camp Van Dorn by train Dec. 26, 1943. After waiting a month or so at Ft. Lawton, near Seattle, Wash., they embarked on three ships for the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. They served out most of the war, some records indicate, spread out over 1,500 hundred miles of desolate islands, eight to a Quonset hut.

  The 1999 Army report concludes its Executive Summary, saying: "… there is no documentary evidence whatsoever that any unusual or inexplicable loss of personnel occurred." What is "unusual or inexplicable" has yet to be determined. But attached to the report is an appendix that indicates hundreds of soldiers (almost one-fourth, it appears, of the regiment’s authorized strength in the period) were transferred out of the troubled 364th to other segregated units prior to shipping out to the Aleutians.

  The main alphabetical roster of the 364th reconstructed by the Army in 1999 from personnel files not lost in the 1973 fire lists for each soldier the date he’s "separated from service," a catchall phrase covering all deletions from the payroll – through discharge, court martial or death. When these entries are re-sorted chronologically, a pattern emerges that appears to be at odds with the Army contention that there was little loss of personnel. On average, about one soldier’s name per day – from June 1943 through the end of the war – is dropped not just from the 364th’s roster, but from the Army payroll.

  In the months before his death, Ridenhour was comparing Army payroll records and General Orders he had obtained that bore hand-written notations in the Regimental Journal showing "losses" to the 364th while stationed in the Aleutians in 1944. Some of his preliminary calculations showed a drop-off of nearly 1,000 enlisted men – a third of the regiment – with no accompanying explanation of transfers to other units or discharges.

  In 1999, the Army said it has accounted for all but 20 of the nearly 4,000 black enlisted men who served in the 364th during some period of time from April through December 1943. However, in a memo to DeHart in response to some of these apparent discrepancies, the Army retreated from its 1999 position of certainty. The memo said faulty record keeping in the 1940s, miscommunication about transfer orders and poorly copied records can account for the apparent conflicts.

  Regardless of the state of the documents the Army relied on, all that is accounted for are records of these men, not the men themselves. When the Army sought to interview by phone living members of the 364th, they turned up only 116 by the time the report was issued.

  Of course, death by natural causes in a group this old would explain much. But when independent producer Greg DeHart hired a private investigator to run computer traces on members of the 364th listed in 1943 intelligence files as "troublemakers" the investigator reported a common response: "No records found for your subject." Some living soldiers were traceable. Some, when contacted by producer DeHart, denied that they were ever in the 364th. Some initially agreed to be interviewed about violence at Camp Van Dorn, then declined.

  It’s experiences like these that keep people digging for answers.

Certainly, the idea of a single massacre of 1,200 soldiers in one unit at one base and a subsequent cover-up lasting almost 60 years, strains credulity. But even one Army commentator believes aspects of history can be hidden for generations. "Although almost too preposterous to consider at first," he wrote of the Camp Van Dorn massacre, "so too was the government’s involvement in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study," referring to the recently revealed scandal of government program in which treatments were withheld from blacks to study how they deteriorated and died with the disease.

  The level of racial violence in the military, the intensity of racial hatred and the willingness of elements of the Army to discriminate against blacks trying to serve their country is a disgrace that is gradually coming to light.

  Perhaps further research will show the worst violence at Camp Van Dorn and other bases occurred at the hands of civilians, not Army personnel. Consider this item in the declassified study "The Treatment of The Negro Trainee" (conducted just months after the 1943 summer of violence): "There are a few cases where it appeared that the army officers deserted the men and left them to the mercy of civilian attackers."

  Or perhaps "troublemakers" were disappeared into a maze of secret court martials, open-ended "disciplinary" internments and dishonorable discharges. Consider this Oct. 9, 1944, memo from Col. J.M. Roamer, Director of Intelligence, sent to the Commanding General, Army Service Forces: "It is known that there are large numbers of Negro soldiers who are now awaiting discharge in camps where trouble has occurred. … The discharge should be accelerated."

  In the final analysis, the 1999 Army report presents a rebuttal to Carol Case’s The Slaughter that is as fragmented and circumstantial as they charge Case’s book to be. At best, it is one more chapter in the ongoing saga, raising challenges to a massacre theory that must be addressed by researchers, but illuminating little of this dark corner of American history.

  The History Channel’s Mystery of the 364th is an even-handed advancement of this compelling inquiry.

  Much remains to be done. .

Geoffrey F.X. O’Connell’s work is supported by a grant from The Fund for Investigative Journalism. Ron Ridenhour’s investigation was supported by a grant from the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Since Ridenhour’s death, the executor of his estate, New Orleans attorney Mary Howell, has assisted O’Connell in furthering his former colleague’s work. Email O’Connell at gfoconnell@aol.com.