The Camp Van Dorn slaughter
A 1998 self-published book alleged that 1,200 Black soldiers were machine-gunned by white troops at a Mississippi camp in 1943 and buried in a mass grave. The regiment's men were subsequently found alive, in Army records and in person.
Why this verdict
Debunked by the paper trail of the men said to have died: a Department of Defense investigation lasting more than a year, and independent work by journalists and historians, traced members of the 364th Infantry Regiment to later postings, discharges, pensions and in many cases to their own front doors.
- Period
- Region
- Reading time
- Sources
01The claim
That in June 1943 some 1,200 African-American soldiers of the US Army's 364th Infantry Regiment were killed by white American soldiers at Camp Van Dorn in Centreville, Mississippi, and that the Army concealed the massacre for half a century.
02Where it came from
The claim was made in The Slaughter: An American Atrocity, self-published in 1998 by Carroll Case, a Mississippi banker. The book is explicit about its own construction: roughly fifty pages present themselves as history, and more than two hundred are described by the author as a fictionalised account. Case said his source was a former guard who had described bodies being buried at the camp. The 364th's real history supplied the plausibility — it was a Black regiment with a genuinely violent record of confrontation with white military police and local civilians, moved to Camp Van Dorn after unrest in Phoenix, and moved again afterwards to the Aleutians.
03What the record shows
✕ DEBUNKED — Investigated and refuted. Here is what actually happened.
This is a claim about 1,200 named soldiers, which makes it unusually easy to test, and unusually thoroughly tested.
The Department of Defense investigated for more than a year at the request of members of Congress. Investigators worked through the regiment's morning reports, payrolls, transfer orders, medical records and subsequent unit assignments. The men of the 364th appear in the record after June 1943 — shipped to Alaska, discharged, drawing pensions, dying decades later of ordinary causes in identifiable places.
Journalists did the same work independently. Reporters for Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post located surviving members of the regiment and relatives of others, and found no family with a man unaccounted for from that month. There is no gap in the rolls of the size the claim requires, no cluster of 1943 death notifications, and no mass grave at a site that has been searched.
One death at Camp Van Dorn is documented: Private William Walker, shot by a local sheriff in May 1943 — an event that was itself investigated and that features in the regiment's real grievances.
04What it cost
The book found an audience because the institution it accused had earned the suspicion: the Army of 1943 was segregated, did conceal violence against Black soldiers, and the documented history of the 364th includes exactly the kind of confrontation the story extrapolated from. This entry is in the archive for that reason rather than despite it. A false claim of an atrocity does not merely waste investigative attention; it makes the documented mistreatment harder to talk about, because the refutation of the invented massacre is easily mistaken for a denial of everything around it.