The only all-Black Women’s Army Corps united to serve in World War II n Europe is fondly remembered in Tyler Perry’s “The Six Triple Eight,” a polished, sentimental and old fashioned picture that points out to the culture at large an important piece of African American history.

World War II was a turning point in American civil rights, as Black troops and Black pilots were reluctantly celebrated in a country slowly coming to grips with the idea of “equal rights.”

Black women making the mail run to and from the combat zones played their part. And if that seems lower stakes than the myriad other Black contributions to the war effort, Perry’s film tries to remedy that. It’s not wholly successful.

Ebony Obsidian (“If Beale Street Could Talk”) stars as Lena, a Philadelphia high school teen courted by a Jewish boy (Gregg Sulkin) as he’s about to enter the Army Air Corps. When he’s killed in 1943, she resolves to finish high school and sign up for the WACs.

That’s where she meets Black women from all over America anxious to serve. Shanine Shantay, Pepi Sonuga, Sarah Jeffery, Jeanté Godlock and Moriah Brown play Lena’s comrades in arms, put through their basic training paces by Lt. Campbell (Milauna Jackson) and the 3888 Batallion’s commanding officer, the accomplished and driven Captain Charity Adams.

She’s the one determined to prove her more cynical volunteers’ fears wrong, that “They ain’t gonna let no Negro women NEAR Europe, much less Hitler.”

Captain Adams (Kerry Washington) clasps her hands behind her back and reminds them “We have the most to prove” as she warns the recruits about all the racists, in and out of the Army, who “do not want us to succeed.”

They can’t even get themselves assigned anywhere after completing basic training in Georgia.

But the movie’s opening scene has hinted at a logistics problem the war effort has failed to master. A pilot is killed, strafing a battlefield. A GI who finds him takes a bloodstained letter out of his jacket. All sorts of mail, to and from the front, is not making it to the troops fighting or the folks back home anxious to hear from them.

That’s a crippling “morale” problem that comes to the attention of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt (Susan Sarandon), and to Mary McLeod Bethune (Oprah Winfrey) a member of President Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet,” the civil rights advisors who bargained for racial equality through participation in the conflict.

That’s where the Six Triple Eight will make its mark, straightening out the mess with the mail under the thumb of racist white officers bent on ensuring their fail and a white general (Dean Norris) determined to let the world know when they do.

The script strains to make this part of the war effort’s importance known and felt. The film’s resemblance to “Hidden Figures” is most obvious in the ingenious ways the WACs reason out where assorted units are on the fluid front lines.

But “The Six Triple Eight” stumbles as the characters are often stock “types” — the sassy one, the preacher’s daughter, etc. Liberties are taken with the timeline of events and Perry’s inattention to the militaria of it all bites him in the bum time and again.

The opening combat scene is clumsily conceived and staged, and the narrative bungles events in the action, which is mainly confined to the last months or even days of the war. Lena’s Jewish pilot is shown shot down in a P-51 Mustang many months before they were in service. The cockpit instrument panel shown is plainly for a more more modern (swept wing jet) aircraft. A V-1 “buzz” bomb air raid is inaccurately timed, and myriad other events are packed into the mere days between President Roosevelt’s death and the war’s end in Europe.

Washington is good in a role that asks for little more than stern stand-offs and speechifying, Obsidian has a moment or two and Shantay (of TV’s “Perfect Harmony”) stands-out as the mouthiest, most short-tempered member of the battalion, whose commanding general refers to as a “company,” at one point. A war zone love story is treated as an afterthought.

“The Six Triple Eight” illuminates the barriers these women faced, confronted by outright racism on occasion and reduced expectations at every turn. Perry’s sympathetic treatment of this history — stay through the credits — is laudable, and no one can ever say he can’t turn out slick to the point of immaculate melodramas. These ladies are so smartly made-up and prepped for their closeups that it calls to attention how tidy and sterile this cinematic war is. It barely looks lived-in, much less fought.

The best scenes are a parade march through bombed Glasgow, and an elaborately staged USO dance, a blast of jitterbugging that would best anything filmed in the musicals of the World War II era.

But Perry’s growth as a filmmaker peaked with his adaptation of the celebrated play “For Color Girls” back in 2010. Here, he’s blessed with material just as dramatic and important, and you’d swear from the evidence that he’s never seen a WWII movie, much less gotten his co-writer to cross his T’s and dot his I’s researching it to get the details right.

Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity

Cast: Kerry Washington, Ebony Obsidian, Shanice Shantay, Milauna Jackson, Kylie Jefferson, Susan Sarandon, Sam Waterston, Dean Norris and Oprah Winfrey

Credits: Directed by Tyler Perry, scripted by Kevin Hymel and Tyler Perry. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2″07