The True Story Behind Netflix's The Six Triple Eight Explained

20 years ago, Tyler Perry caught Hollywood completely by surprise when his low-budget romantic comedy "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" opened to $22 million at the U.S. box office. Though critics savaged the film, it received a sterling A+ CinemaScore from audience exit polls, thus indicating that Perry knew precisely what this underserved segment of African-American moviegoers were desperately craving. After this stunning success, Perry was off to the races, churning out at least one movie per year — a pace that's even more amazing when you factor in the myriad of television series he began producing in 2007. Tyler Perry, whose base of operations is an Atlanta studio that bears his name, is a one-man entertainment industry.

While Perry seems untroubled by his continued lack of critical acclaim, he has on occasion attempted to mount a prestige film with the kind of socially important pedigree that goes down well with Academy Awards voters. As a producer, he tasted Oscar success via Lee Daniels' "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire" in 2009, but struck out in 2010 when he bungled an adaptation of Ntozake Shange's choreopoem "For Colored Girls."

14 years later after that misstep, Perry has again reached for the respect of more than his fanbase, and maybe a little Academy love, with "The Six Triple Eight," an inspirational World War II drama about the all-Black, all-women 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion. With a budget of $70 million and a star-studded cast that includes Kerry Washington, Sam Waterston and Oprah Winfrey, this is easily Perry's most ambitious film project. Though he received more favorable reviews than usual, "The Six Triple Eight" failed to catch on with Oscar voters when it received a limited theatrical release in early December 2024. Unsurprisingly, though, it proved hugely popular when it began streaming on Netflix two weeks later, racking up 52.4 million views over its first four weeks (outpacing his success with "Mea Culpa" from earlier in the year).

Many viewers are now eager to learn more about the 6888th Battalion (hopefully they can also spare a couple of hours for Anthony Hemingway's Tuskegee Airmen drama "Red Tails," too). Amazingly, Perry's deeply Hollywood treatment of this story didn't exaggerate many of the movie's most memorable elements.

"The Six Triple Eight" draws from U.S. Army historian Kevin M. Hymel's article "Fighting a Two-Front War," which WWII History Magazine published in 2019. The article told the uplifting tale of how the 6888th Battalion came to be and all they managed to accomplish in a startlingly brief time. The battalion came into existence via the efforts of African-American educator Mary McLeod Bethune, whose determination to get Black women involved in the war effort led her to successfully lobby First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to create the unit in 1944.

Bringing the story of the 6888th before cameras was a passion project for producer and political activist (and wife of Netflix honcho Ted Sarandos) Nicole Avant, whose mother told her about the battalion when she was a little girl. As Avant told Netflix's Tudum:

"My parents would've loved 'The Six Triple Eight' because they [were] big believers in passing the baton, and they always believed that you can't teach people about passing the baton if they don't understand the baton itself, and they don't understand the history that's behind the baton that they're passing on."

Once the project was officially in development, she wasted no time in getting Perry involved. Stunned to be hearing of the 6888th's exploits for the first time, Perry immediately signed on to write and direct the movie.

The 6888th Central Postal Delivery Battalion was formed in 1944 to provide direly needed assistance in sorting through a massive backlog of undelivered letters to and from soldiers serving overseas. The women, who enlisted through the U.S. Women's Army Corps, were sent to basic training in Georgia, and subsequently stationed in a suburb of Birmingham, England. As depicted in the film, they were forced to turn abandoned, rat-infested boarding school buildings into a functioning post office and barracks.

Despite having to contend with the ignorant double-whammy of racism and sexism from their male superiors, the 6888th proved phenomenally effective in breaking up the backlog in Birmingham and, later, an even bigger backlog in Le Havre, France. In both locations, they delivered well ahead of schedule, providing a service that was essential to keeping up the troops' morale as they risked their lives to save the free world.

Regardless of what they thought of "The Six Triple Eight" overall, most critics agreed that the film's most dynamic element was Kerry Washington's portrayal of Major Charity Adams. Born on December 5, 1918 in Kittrell, North Carolina, Adams was encouraged early in childhood by her parents to value education and personal achievement. She made them extraordinarily proud by becoming the highest ranking African-American woman officer in the U.S. Army (as a lieutenant colonel) by the end of World War II, and, upon returning home, becoming a champion of education and civil rights.

Reading over her history, it's impossible to say that Washington overplayed Adams. She really was that amazing. The incidents where Adams stands up to a troublemaking Army chaplain (Nick Harris) and the prejudiced General Halt (Dean Norris) really did play out exactly as they're depicted. Yes, she told Halt that his attempt at placing the 6888th under the charge of a white male officer would be done "over my dead body, sir."

After the war, Adams earned a master's degree in psychology from the Ohio State University, and went on to serve as the director of student personnel at Tennessee A&I College and Georgia State College. She eventually settled down in Dayton, Ohio, where her various services to the community resulted in several programs and buildings being named after her. She received her greatest honor posthumously in 2023, when Fort Lee, Virginia was renamed Fort Gregg-Adams (she shares the base's moniker with Lieutenant General Arthur J. Gregg).

Though the 6888th did receive a richly deserved hero's celebration in Paris after the end of the war in Europe (they marched through the city and were put up in lavish accommodations), they sadly received no public recognition upon returning to Fort Dix, New Jersey. The battalion was quietly disbanded, and everyone went back to their lives as they left them.

Lena King, the protagonist of "The Six Triple Eight" played by Ebony Obsidian, studied design in England before returning to the U.S. She worked as a nurse in Los Angeles, California, where she lived with her husband and two children until retirement, at which point she moved to Las Vegas, Nevada. Perry has stressed that King was crucial to helping him figure out how to do the 6888th justice; he met with her prior to production, and was able to show her a rough cut of the movie before she died last year. As he told Tudum: "She loved it. She was saluting the screen. She was laughing. But at the end of it, it was so powerful. She was in tears. She just said, 'Thank you so much for letting the world know that we contributed.'"

The women of the 6888th have received a multitude of honors and medals for their service — though it's upsetting how many of them came after most of the members were dead. During their service, they were bestowed with the European African Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, the Good Conduct Medal and the World War II Victory Medal.

Battalion members Alyce Dixson and Mary Ragland were honored by President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama in 2009, but, aside from the renaming of Fort Lee, their most significant recognition arrived in 2022 when the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives passed a bill to award them the Congressional Gold Medal. It was a melancholy moment given that only four 6888th members were still alive: Lena King, Romay Davis, Fannie McClendon and Anna Mae Robertson. All four were honored in their respective hometowns.