The Six Triple Eight (2024) – Worthy war drama

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Genre – WW2 Drama

Time: 2 Hour 10 minutes

Platform: Netflix

Director: Tyler Perry

Cast: Kerry Washington. Ebony Obsidian. Milauna Jackson

 

WW2 has millions of untold stories which are still being revealed. While the war was usually viewed through the lens of “Allied Good vs Axis Evil”, there are very few films on the “internal evils” practiced by the Allies – racism by the Americans against their own “colored” troops, Colonial troop from France, Britain, being used in the heaviest fighting, etc. Its only in the 21^st century that with the passage of time and the acceptance of “the wrongs done” that some of these stories starting with French colonial troops (Days of Glory – 2006) being written out of history , to the current one ,The Six Triple Eight, are being told. (There is still no film on the huge Indian contribution to the Allied cause; 2.5 million men and women served in uniform and they too have been mostly written out of history; politics triumphing over honor ).

 

The combat record of American (and British , French) black troops both in and behind the front line was excellent as they had to prove themselves worthy against the many prejudices. The most famous example is that of The Tuskegee Airmen who had to battle white prejudices about being equal of whites while using technically advanced equipment such as fighter planes. When it comes to women, the story gets further compounded as they had double pressure and prejudices, just because they were women.

 

The Six Triple Eight tells the story of one such battalion, the 6888 Postal Battalion. It was felt that since they were women, they were unsuitable for combat (while the Soviet Union was already seeing female tank aces, female fighter aces, female snipers with 300+ “kills’ and so on) and had to prove that they could sort out the mess created by non-delivery of 17 million mails (letters, packages and so on).

 

Captain Charity Adams (Kerry Washington) is the feisty leader, who rigorously trains the women from various social backgrounds, ranging from poor to university graduates. She keeps pestering her white bosses for a mission worthy of them as they too are part of WAC (Women’s Auxiliary Corps) whose function is to take over non-essential jobs, thus releasing the men for fighting roles. Lena Derricout (Ebony Obsidian) is from a relatively privileged background, still unable to forget the kind white Jewish boy who died in the first few weeks of the war. Lieutenant Campbell (Milauna Jackson) is Adams’ able assistant who has much to prove as all “the girls” as ‘her charges” too.

 

Based on lobbying the White House by mothers who aren’t receiving mail and a black civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune (Oprah Winfrey), the women are sent to Europe to sort out the mess created by mails not reaching the front lines and home. They are deliberately not given proper accommodation and housed in a broken-down school in Glasgow. Thus begins their story of an uphill struggle sorting out the accumulated mails and sending them onward to their proper destinations.

 

The story is told in a straight forward manner though we get a feeling that we have seen this in other films dealing with racial prejudice in America, especially in the US Armed Forces (The Tuskegee Airmen 1995, various Vietnam movies). Still, this is an uphill struggle that is worth watching.

 

Following WW2, and demands from returning veterans, the American Armed Forces were the first to be integrated in the early 1950s with no more separate black and white units. The civil rights for integration continued well into the 1960s.

 

At times the film’s pace flags, and some of the events seem repetitive; it IS a mirror of the treatment meted out to the black troops that it was felt that without “white oversight” they could not and would not do a good job. The Six Triple Eight proved otherwise.

 

 

 

The true story behind the film is available at this link 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Script – 4 out of 5

Story – 4 out of 5

Direction – 4 out of 5

Photography – 4 out of 5

 

Total – 4 out of 5