In Touch With A Six Triple Eight Veteran
By Betty Miller Buttram
FWIS Contributing Writer
A soldier was laid to rest on June 21, 2024. The soldier received the Congressional Gold Medal in the summer 2022 for service during World War II. The soldier lived to be 104 years old, and she was an African American woman who had served in a segregated U.S. Army not only divided by race, but also by sex.
The solider was the oldest and one of the few surviving veterans of the African American unit of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, and the unit served overseas during World War II. There were more than 800 Black women in this unit, and they became known as the “Six Triple Eight.”
Romay Johnson Davis was born on October 29, 1919, in (Kings County) Dahlgren, Virginia. She was the middle child and only daughter among six children. Her father worked at the Naval Proving Grounds in Dahlgren during World War II testing armor plating for ships. All five of her brothers served in the military and her mother provided childcare for local families.
Ms. Johnson left Dahlgren because there were no Black high schools in Kings County. She stayed with various relatives in New Jersey, New York, and graduated from Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. After graduation, she worked as an elevator operator and for the Federal Government at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington, D.C. In 1941, the United States entered World War II. Two years later, she volunteered for the U.S. Army. She completed her basic training and was assigned to the motor pool at Camp Breckinridge in Morganfield, Kentucky. While there, she learned to be a mechanic and a driver. Johnson was put in charge of a jeep, two staff cars, a weapons carrier, and a truck. She drove officers to various meetings on post and in the local area. At Camp Breckinridge, Johnson volunteered for overseas duty and was selected to join the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia for training before deployment to Europe.
The 6888th made the 11-day ship journey arriving in Glasgow, Scotland and then on to Birmingham, England, where they discovered warehouses full of undelivered mail. For two years, the U.S. military had allowed millions of pieces of mail from the home front to pile up in these dank, musty, and cold warehouses. Rats had persistently nibbled at the care packages and the letters informing the soldiers of news about their families sat unread. Sadly, some of the soldiers were killed in action before any of these letters reached them.
The unit developed a new system of organizing and tracking the mail. The system required tracking individual service members by maintaining about seven million information cards. The cards included serial number to distinguish different people with the name. The hardest part for the unit was returning mail when it was addressed to a servicemember who had died. Because of their system, they were able to process approximately 195,000 pieces of mail per day. The U.S. Army thought that it would take the 6888th six months to do the backlog job in Birmingham. They accomplished the job in three months and then were transferred to Rouen, France to clear another mail backlog.
In December 1945, Ms. Johnson was honorably discharged from the Army at Fort Dix, New Jersey. She used the G.I. Bill and attended the New York Fashion Institute and later the Traphagen School of Fashion in New York City. She was employed by the Glen of Michigan in Manhattan’s Garment District for three decades designing children’s clothing. This company became one of the country’s leading manufacturers of women’s and children’s sportswear. This position allowed her to travel the country buying fabrics and tracking fashion trends. At the end of her career, she pursued a graduate education and received a master’s degree in technology and industrial education from New York University in 1981. After her retirement, she worked in real estate, ran a vending machine business, and had various hobbies such as furniture making, landscaping, and painting. She taught herself taxidermy and at age 78, she earned a second-degree black belt in taekwondo.
In 1957, she met Jerry Davis, a carpenter and they were married for 42 years until Davis died in 1999. Her only immediate survivor is a brother.
Romay Johnson Davis made a statement after receiving the Congressional Gold Medal about women being as capable as men are in their chosen positions and that Black women should be given a chance at an opportunity to see what they can do.