CHAPTER 5
I was an angry young man. We were all angry, but we had a job to do and we did it. It was very frustrating to be a soldier. But when the fighting started, all of that was gone. The uppermost thought in my mind was getting the job done and keeping myself alive.
—Vernon Baker, former first lieutenant, 92nd Infantry Division, 1996
In March of 1947, the Argonne Chapel in Cheyenne, Wyoming, was the scene of great solemnity and reflection. Col. Andral Bratton and fellow members of the Transportation Training Sub-Center, along with nearly seventy townspeople, were attending a religious service where they heard the word of God and exhortations about the challenges of public service. They were particularly moved by Chaplain Louis Beasley, one of the foremost religious leaders in the nation’s military at the time. “Loyalty, Duty, and Country,” Beasley intoned, “has no price in the larger battle for our rights.” As a black chaplain with the 92nd Infantry Division during World War II, Beasley had encountered the struggle for equality firsthand. While stationed at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, during the early 1940s, he and his wife were personally insulted when they entered a post restaurant and a white colonel said, “They don’t serve your kind here.” When the pair protested, the ranking officer ordered them to leave the premises.
“It’s not enough to be the first officers in tomorrow’s military,” Beasley told those in attendance that day. “We have to be long-distance runners on the path of freedom.” As the congregants nodded their heads in approval, Beasley beckoned offstage. Vernon J. Baker—considered one of the city’s most revered citizens—strode toward the rostrum. Baker had just returned home from an extended tour of duty with the 3373rd Quartermaster Corps in Italy after enduring nearly two years of fighting against the German Army in northern Italy as a member of the 370th Regimental Combat Team. Like the rest of his uniformed comrades in the chapel, he was a member of the segregated army of the era, having served with the all-black 92nd Infantry Division.1
Baker was a twenty-three-year-old railroad porter when he joined the army in 1941, among the thousands of other young black men that year destined to wear specially made dog tags labeling them government personnel of the US military. Shortly after enlisting, Baker went through basic training at Camp Wolters, Texas—but not before receiving a rude introduction to Jim Crow racism. While boarding a bus heading to the southwestern Texas facility, he dropped his duffel bag on a front seat, only to be sternly admonished by the driver: “Hey, nigger! Get up and go to the back of the bus where you belong!”
At every turn, race and rank discrimination dogged the steps of the soldiers in the 92nd Infantry Division. As they trained in Indiana, Alabama, and Arizona, Baker and other black infantrymen lived their “fight for the right to fight” mantra. As Baker later recalled, “Instead of imbuing our men with a sense of accomplishment—gaining the right to fight—it brought unrest. We considered our homeland imperfect, but still considered it the best country in the world.”
Once Baker and his comrades arrived in Italy in 1944, they quickly discovered that the fight for first-class citizenship had taken on new meaning. Those who stood in the ranks of the segregated army at the time were being labeled by Official Washington and senior army commanders as “unreliable [. . .] soldiers who run away in the heat of battle,” even before they had begun to engage the enemy and confront the horrors of modern war.
As with previous medal recipients, the war in Europe and Asia offered black servicemen like Vernon Baker the rare opportunity to carry guns and ammunition, and the chance to strike back at their oppressors. Like those who had experienced racism and class oppression while fighting against the Confederate Army, the American Indian nations, the Spanish empire, and the armies of previous wars, World War II GIs came to regard Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito as representatives of their oppressors at home. They also realized they were being asked to pay a price for all who lived under the threat of racism and class antagonism at home.
Joining World War II
The World War II experiences of Baker and his fellow Medal of Honor recipients were forged in the crucible of the Great Depression and the New Deal years of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Between 1925 and 1930, the labor-participation rate for black working-class males (between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four) dipped from 85 percent to 82 percent. By 1940, the proportion had dropped even lower, reflecting the loss of thousands of jobs in the agricultural, service, and industrial sectors due to massive layoffs and firings. Meanwhile, young black men contemplated serving in a racially segregated military, whose ongoing discriminatory practices since World War I had given them little reason for hope.
Prior to November of 1940, army planners had conducted studies that supported World War I commanders’ disparaging perceptions of black troops. War Department officials had stubbornly upheld the military’s long-standing practice of segregating black soldiers, relying on racial prejudice and vicious stereotypes and innuendo to denigrate the combat capabilities of African-American enlisted men and officers. African Americans were also barred from enlisting in the navy, marines, or the air corps. As branch officials stipulated in 1940, “The policy of the War Department is not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organizations.”
Black Americans were confined to separate training facilities and combat and service and supply units, with limited opportunities for promotion to field-grade officer positions. In addition, the United States had greatly reduced the strength of its army after World War I. The War Department typically adopted this practice after every war, but the aftermath of World War I brought a new set of harsh realities for black recruits. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the four black regiments established after the Civil War—the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry—were chronically understaffed, and they faced the constant threat of being converted to service and support units, or being demobilized altogether.2 By 1940, there were only 4,700 African-American enlisted men and five African-American officers serving in the Regular Army.3
By the late 1930s, African Americans across the country reacted in various ways to the outbreak of war in Europe. During the first few weeks, their initial responses ranged from cynical isolationism to outright patriotism. George Schuyler, syndicated columnist for Pittsburgh’s Courier, pointed to the similarities between the German invasion of Austria and British colonialism in Asia, stating, “War is a toss-up.” Publications such as the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Scribner’s Commentator, PM, Common Sense, People’s Voice, Opportunity, and black newspapers carried stories with headlines like “Should the Negro Care Who Wins the War?” and “A White Folks’ War?” In a pamphlet titled “Why Negroes Should Oppose the War,” noted Afro-Caribbean scholar and human rights activist C. L. R. James proclaimed that no matter who won the war, blacks would continue to face discrimination, police brutality, and poverty worldwide.
In the months leading up to and through the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, most African-American views hinged on the black struggle for equality and the military’s discriminatory policies. Few NAACP and other civil rights leaders were willing to follow W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1918 advice—to embrace “First Your Country, then Your Rights.” Instead, they stressed that blacks should embrace a “fight for the right to fight” strategy to gain racial equality. From the 1940 presidential election through Asa Philip Randolph’s 1941 March on Washington Movement, black leadership advanced the central idea that total African-American support for the war campaign required federal guarantees calling for the inclusion of blacks in the defense industries and the end of segregation in the armed forces.
Training and Deploying of Soldiers of Valor
On the heels of the Selective Service Act of 1940, African Americans came out in droves to register for the armed forces. As the war intensified in Europe and Asia, the number of black servicemen in the army increased from 3,640 in 1939 to nearly 500,000 by December of 1942. On the eve of the 1940 presidential election, Franklin D. Roosevelt promoted Col. Benjamin O. Davis Sr. to the rank of brigadier general, making him the country’s first African-American general officer in the Regular Army. The War Department also announced the appointment of Judge William Hastie as civilian aide to the Secretary of War, and named Maj. Campbell C. Johnson as the special assistant to the director of the Selective Service. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the War Department created an air corps, two infantry divisions, a cavalry division, several tank battalions, and a women’s army corps unit, all of which accepted black soldiers. By 1944, an increasing number of black soldiers attended officer candidate schools and special training programs on a limited-integrated basis.4
Despite the rapid expansion of the army, black soldiers found that true equality still escaped their grasp. More often than not, African Americans held positions in the military that were similar to those they occupied in civilian society. Black GIs were largely segregated along racial lines, confined to non-combat units and training schools, and placed in separate camp facilities located far from large cities and towns. Numerous racial clashes took place between black GIs and white military and civilian law enforcement officials in military hospitals, post exchanges, theaters, and camp buses located on army and navy bases throughout the country. And in many cases, African-American enlistees and inductees received substandard instruction and faced bouts of discrimination meted out by the white Southern officers, who perceived their assignment to black units as a form of punishment. When asked years later how he and others felt about it at the time, a black soldier stated, “Right away, we said, what are we doing this for?”5
“Right away, we said, what are we doing this for?”
These day-to-day confrontations with army discrimination may have reinforced the determination of black men who served in the ranks of World War II military. Streaming into training sites in the Deep South, the Midwest, and the Southwest, young African Americans were stationed largely at facilities like Camp Croft, Camp Wolters, Fort Huachuca, Fort Breckinridge, Fort McClellan, Fort Lee, and Fort Swift. There, they were trained under the watchful eye of talented veteran noncommissioned officers.
The seven soldiers who eventually earned the nation’s highest award for valor in World War II came from all over the country: George Watson and Charles Thomas grew up in Alabama; Ruben Rivers, in Oklahoma; John Fox hailed from Ohio; Vernon Baker, from Wyoming; Willy James, Missouri; and Los Angeles–born Edward Carter spent time in China before returning to California.
As the young soldiers progressed toward the advanced stages of their combat training, a combination of forces calling for overseas deployment of black troops pushed them forward. Throughout the spring and summer months of 1943, numerous military installations like Camp Dorn, Mississippi; Lake Charles, Louisiana; Camp Stewart, Georgia; Fort Huachuca, Arizona; Fort Bliss, Texas; and Camp Shenango, Pennsylvania, became the sites of racial violence involving black soldiers and white troops and military and civilian townspeople. At the same time, members of the black press corps and War Department civilian aides William Hastie and Truman K. Gibson Jr., along with several members of the Advisory Committee on Negro Troops, clamored for the employment of black troops in active theaters of operation.
By early 1944, the 24th Infantry Regiment had been deployed into action in the Pacific, and infantry teams from the 92nd and 93rd Infantry Divisions were designated for combat assignments overseas. As their deployment attracted the attention of punditry and public alike, War Department officials and army commanders offered their racially biased perceptions of how black soldiers would perform on the field of battle. Indeed, as noted historian Ulysses G. Lee pointed out, “The careers of Negro combat units were, there, as atypical as were the circumstances of their commitment to overseas duty.”6
The Heroism of George Watson
Not long afterward, everyone had their answer. In the months following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Washington strategists hastily dispatched nearly 80,000 troops aimed at protecting the supply and communication routes between Hawaii, Australia, and vast areas of the Southwest Pacific. By the end of 1942, nearly 300,000 soldiers would be mobilized and deployed to the Pacific. Aboard the converted transports were hundreds of black GIs assigned to engineering and quartermaster units. Once they arrived in the Pacific, most of these soldiers performed backbreaking labor, including stevedoring, guarding air bases, loading and unloading ships, and roadbuilding at various island ports stretching from Samoa and Fiji to New Caledonia and New Guinea.7
For black troops arriving on converted landing crafts, just being able to reach the Pacific Rim safely was clouded with uncertainty. Hazardous weather at sea and bombing attacks by Japanese aircraft and submarines proved to be just as much of a test as the jungle warfare that awaited them. Japanese nighttime attacks also spelled endless round-the-clock evacuation drills and heightened feelings of anxiety among the men.
In the words of one black soldier who journeyed aboard a transport ship at the time:
This was a long and anxious trip for those of us who were poor sailors or who were not able to pass the time in poker. I was often seasick but had to struggle out at odd times during some of the days for “abandon ship” practice. If a suspicious submarine or airplane was sighted or heard, everyone went on the alert. At night the ship was in complete “black out”; to get from one area to another after dark one had to go through a series of dark room curtains or staggered door. If the night watch on deck saw one flicker of light from a cigarette, flashlight, or electric, the offender was apprehended and questioned. Every military man knows how important this precaution is, since submarines along the marine route can see a light in the dark for miles and miles.8
On the night of March 8, 1943, precaution gave way to a moment of heroism for George Watson, a private assigned to the 29th Quartermaster Regiment. Born in Laurel, Mississippi, and raised by his grandmother in Birmingham, Alabama, Watson moved to Colorado in the late 1930s. He attended Colorado Agricultural and Mechanical College before entering the army in 1942, at the tender age of twenty-four.
Watson and his fellow GIs in the quartermaster unit had been aboard a Dutch converted luxury liner named Jacob for nearly a month after leaving San Francisco. As they coasted near Porlock Harbour, New Guinea, on March 8, they suddenly found themselves under all-out attack by Japanese bombers. After sustaining serious damage to its hull, the transport ship listed back and forth before capsizing, forcing all occupants to abandon ship. A fair number who had never learned to swim drowned in the process.
Watson decided to take matters into his own hands. Instead of moving directly to safety, he swam from ship to shore several times, saving soldiers struggling to get free of the ocean current. His courageous efforts came at a tremendous cost. Weakened by exertion and overcome with muscle fatigue, Watson drowned as the undertow from the sinking ship dragged him below the surface. While his body was never recovered, his valorous actions, exemplary leadership, and selfless devotion earned him the army’s second-highest decoration, the Distinguished Service Cross. Watson was the first African American to be recognized for such an honor, and later, he became the only black soldier who served in the Pacific War to receive the Medal of Honor.9
The Heroism of Ruben Rivers and Charles Thomas
After crossing the English Channel and landing at Omaha Beach in the fall of 1944, black soldiers with the 761st Tank Battalion were transformed into the shock troops for freedom on the battlefields of Europe. They bivouacked at Les Pieux, France, where they were assigned to Lt. Gen. George Patton’s 3rd Army and attached as a supportive unit to the US 26th Infantry Division, commanded by Maj. Gen. Willard S. Paul. With their morale running at an all-time high and buoyed by the chance to finally strike a blow against the enemy, most of the well-trained soldiers quickly realized their stake in the war’s outcome. Advancing at a breakneck pace, the flamboyant Patton had reached a critical stage in the execution of the war. His tanks were running short on gasoline and supplies that were necessary for making an assault during the Lorraine Campaign of northeastern France, and the three-star general desperately needed fresh manpower, guns, and equipment to complete the Allied race across Europe.
Specifically calling for the 761st Tank Battalion, Patton visited the soldiers on November 3 and addressed them while standing on a half-track:
Men, you’re the first Negro tankers to ever fight in the American Army. I would never have asked for you if you weren’t good. I have nothing but the best in my Army. I don’t care what color you are, so long as you go up there and kill those Kraut sonsabitches. Everyone has their eyes on you and is expecting great things from you. Most of all, your race is looking forward to you. Don’t let them down, don’t let me down.10
But Patton’s words of encouragement belied his true feelings about the capabilities of black soldiers in battle. When he returned to his headquarters, he noted, “They gave a good first impression, but I have no faith in the inherent fighting ability of the race.”11
Patton’s disparaging attitude toward black soldiers was soon put to the test. The 761st entered combat on November 7 and would see continuous action on the front lines for the next 183 days. During this period, the unit largely fought through the Lorraine region as forward elements. The men battled German tanks, losing fourteen of their own in the process, and sustaining the loss of 113 men either killed or wounded during its first month of combat.
It was during the unit’s all-out assault on enemy forces at Vic-sur-Seille that Staff Sgt. Ruben Rivers first came to the attention of his superior officers.
Born in Tecumseh, Oklahoma, Rivers was the son of Willie, an African American, and Lillian, a Cherokee. Growing up in nearby Hotulka with eleven brothers and sisters, the twenty-three-year-old had worked on the family farm and as a railroad porter, and had enrolled with the Civilian Conservation Corps before joining the army in 1942. After undergoing basic training, he reported to Fort Hood, Texas, where he was assigned to the 761st Tank Battalion.12
On November 8, 1944, Rivers and fellow A Tank Company members of the 761st, along with the 104th Infantry Regiment, moved into armed positions against the German position near Vic-sur-Seille. As they reached a railroad crossing adjacent to the town, they confronted a roadblock of felled trees in which enemy forces had placed mortars, rifles, and land mines to obstruct the movement of tank columns and infantrymen. As the troopers advanced, several soldiers accidentally tripped the mines, drawing enemy fire, disabling several of their tanks, and pinning the infantrymen down during the fighting.
Despite being struck in the leg during the action, Rivers, a tank platoon sergeant, declined medical treatment and refused to be evacuated to safety. Instead, he took command of another column, attaching a cable to one of the felled trees and removed it from the road. He continued to use his tank to deliver direct fire on enemy tanks, allowing A Company to move forward and successfully assault and capture the town without sustaining further loss of life and limb. His courage and devotion to duty brought great distinction to the talented noncommissioned officer and his unit.
Less than a week later, his military career came to an abrupt end. While advancing toward the town of Guebling, France, his lead tank was hit by several deadly rounds from German guns, killing the sergeant instantly. The staff sergeant stayed at his post until his death. Capt. David Williams, his company commander, remembered Rivers telling him over the radio just minutes before he was mortally wounded that he had spotted enemy antitank positions in the area, exclaiming, “I see ’em! We’ll fight ’em!” On November 20, Captain Williams recommended Rivers for the military’s highest award, the Medal of Honor, but it would take nearly sixty years for a grateful nation to finally recognize the leadership qualities and selfless actions taken by this intrepid young soldier.13
“I see ’em! We’ll fight ’em!”
Meanwhile, the performance of another soldier with the 761st in the European Theater of Operations would bring additional luster to the African-American experience in the war. On a cold, foggy morning in early December 1944, a task force of tankers with the 614th’s C Company, along with a reinforced rifle company from the 411th Infantry Regiment, advanced through northeastern France. Their assignment: to storm and seize the German-occupied village of Climbach, an area centrally located in an open valley approximately five miles from the Siegfried Line. Capturing the heavily wooded stronghold would cut off the enemy line of communications, thus bolstering Allied chances of knocking Germany out of the war altogether. Their mission was hampered by limited visibility in the valley and lack of reconnaissance regarding the enemy’s whereabouts.
This select platoon was commanded by Lt. Charles Thomas. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Thomas was a former molder for the Ford Motor Company, and had been attending Detroit’s Wayne State University when he decided to join the army in January of 1942. While undergoing basic training with the 614th Tank Destroyer Battalion, his leadership qualities and assertive personality caught the attention of his senior officers, and they encouraged the intense twenty-two-year-old soldier to attend Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia. Thomas successfully negotiated the twelve-week program and earned his commission the following spring.
Thomas and his men left Preuschdorf, France, in the early-morning hours that day and climbed the rugged hills. They had no sooner achieved the high ground southeast of the village than they drew fierce enemy fire from German artillery in the area. The initial hail of bullets disabled Thomas’s lead jeep and severely wounded him in the chest, legs, and left arm. Undaunted, the determined commanding officer rallied his troops, signaling them to halt in the face of enemy fire. Despite his severe wounds, Thomas refused medical attention and directed the dispersal and emplacement of two of his antitank guns before ordering his platoon leader to train his guns on the enemy gun positions. Only after stabilizing his unit’s situation, permitting the men to outflank the enemy, did Thomas allow himself to be treated for his wounds.
Thomas’s courageous action enabled the unit to capture the town and forced German troops to withdraw below the Siegfried Line. For his extraordinary heroism in France that day, twenty-four-year-old Thomas was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross by the War Department, becoming the second African American to be so honored during actual fighting. Not long afterward, the humble GI returned home to wide acclaim, downplaying his newfound celebrity status. “I know I was sent out to locate and draw the enemy fire, but I didn’t mean to draw that much,” he said.14
John R. Fox, Vernon Baker, and the 92nd Infantry Division in Northern Italy
Meanwhile, black troops with the 92nd Infantry Division received their first taste of war in northern Italy in the fall and winter months of 1945. Arriving in Naples at the end of July, 1944, the newly constituted 370th Regimental Combat Team reported to the 1st Armored Division. There, the men prepared to cross the Arno River in order to breach the southern slope of the Gothic Line that stretched along the northern Apennines. Their mission was to maintain contact with enemy forces, thus allowing Gen. Mark Clark’s 5th Army to launch a coordinated effort in the Bologna area to outflank the German Army, puncture the Gothic Line, and reach the Po Valley.
Before leaving the bivouacked area, the 370th Regimental Combat Team quickly discovered that their operation was part of a multinational effort involving soldiers from all over the world, including South Africans, Italian partisans, and Brazilians, Indians, Canadians, and British forces, all of whom had made their way to the northern Apennines to fight Hitler and Mussolini.15
They soon discovered that the weather and the jagged rock of the northern Apennines would prove to be just as daunting as the enemy they faced. Running from south of La Spezia to the Foglia Valley in the west, the Gothic Line consisted of crests and peaks reaching as high as seventy feet. They stretched to the Adriatic Sea and then dropped sharply into the Arno River valley and the narrow coastal plain south of Massa. The deep valleys and irregular terrain provided ample cover for more than two thousand machine-gun nests, casemates, bunkers, observation posts, and artillery-fighting positions. Developed by German field marshal Albert Kesselring, these fortified enemy redoubts were designed to withstand any assault mounted by Allied forces. Finally, weather considerations dictated that the 5th Army must launch a successful attack on this heavily fortified position before the onset of winter.16
On September 1, the men of the 370th Infantry, commanded by Capt. Charles Gandy, crossed the Arno River near Pisa and secured Mount Pisano, before moving on to capture the towns of Lucca, Bagni di Lucca, La Lima, and San Marcello. They destroyed enemy resistance and successfully breached the Gothic Line south of Abetone, a small ski resort. By the end of October, the men in the unit had participated in several offensive operations that bordered the Ligurian Sea, most notably at Mount Cauala, where some of the most staunchly defended positions of the Gothic Line were located. All told, by the end of autumn, the regiment had advanced more than thirty miles into enemy territory. Seven men distinguished themselves on the field of battle and were awarded the Silver Star for gallantry in action.
But the combat team suffered dearly. While advancing the front line, black soldiers with the 370th suffered nearly 300 casualties, including 225 wounded and nearly 70 killed in action. As the men quickly realized, army commanders were reluctant to provide adequate replacements for their diminished numbers. Jehu Hunter, a former 92nd Infantry Division GI, reflected years later: “The human cost of this effort pointed out the need for trained black infantry replacements, and they were nowhere to be found. It is my opinion that the failure of Army Ground Forces to provide for suitable replacements was an extension of the Army’s plan to limit the utilization of blacks in combat roles.”17
During the Serchio River Valley Campaign that winter, manpower issues and the army’s lack of confidence in black soldiers’ fighting abilities were exposed. On the night of December 26, a company of the 366th Infantry Regiment arrived in Sommocolonia. As an element of the 92nd Infantry Division, the unit was part of the division’s all-out attack on the enemy to support the 5th Army’s drive toward Bologna. The 366th attack was to take place along the Serchio River in conjunction with its sister outfit, the 370th Infantry, in order to secure the water crossing for supporting troop movements through the area. But no sooner had the company arrived in Sommocolonia and attempted to move into position than they were forced to abandon their plans for the Christmas Day attack. Almost instantly, the men were greeted by enemy antitank and machine-gun fire from the village. The GIs’ field of fire was greatly hampered by enemy soldiers who fired on them while dressed as civilians.18
As the fog of war thickened and the situation at Sommocolonia worsened, one courageous soldier stepped forward. Lt. John R. Fox was a soldier with the 92nd Infantry Division. Originally assigned to the 366th’s Cannon Company, he had been transferred to the 598th Field Artillery Battalion as a forward observer. In late December, the Wilberforce University graduate, along with several other forward observers, volunteered to be a part of the company to indirectly support the mission. As enemy mortar and artillery fire steadily increased that morning, Fox called for artillery fire perilously close to his own position. After discovering that large numbers of the enemy had encircled the dwelling, he issued a last radio request directing an artillery strike on his own position, and for a smoke screen to provide adequate cover for his withdrawing troops. When asked whether his call for fire was accurate, Fox answered, “Fire it! There are more of them than there are of us. Put fire on my Observation Post.”
With that, Fox’s radio went silent, and the rest of his observer party was never heard from again. Days later, soldiers with the 366th discovered his body, along with one hundred dead Germans, near the demolished building. The 366th Infantry regimental commander recommended Fox for the Distinguished Service Cross, but the 92nd Division Headquarters never forwarded it to the 5th Army Corps. It would take nearly forty years and an intense investigation by a former 92nd Division GI before the racial injustice and pain of nonrecognition would be fully resolved.19
Wyoming native Vernon Baker was born in 1919. He hardly knew his parents, having lost both of them when he was just four years old. Years later he would learn that he was the child of an interracial couple; his father Manuel Caldera came from New Mexico and worked as a carpenter, and his mother Beulah’s family had labored as black farmers in the cornfields of Clarinda, Iowa, prior to his birth. After his parents died in a tragic car accident, Baker and his two older sisters moved to Cheyenne, where they were raised by their grandparents in a blacks-only boardinghouse.
Although Fort D. A. Russell in Cheyenne served as a principal training site for African-American GIs, members of the black community greeted them with ambivalence. Baker never heard anyone mention the Buffalo Soldiers of the Indian Fighting Army, and when he saw soldiers from the base “walking down the streets of Cheyenne as a child,” he received a stern warning from his grandfather, Joseph Samuel Baker: “Those are ruffians . . . stay away from them.” According to Baker, “Nobody talked of their heroics.”
But in June of 1941, past, present, and destiny intervened in Baker’s life in the form of love, and Uncle Sam. Eager to wed his hometown sweetheart, Leola Sassler, and start a family of his own, he joined the army. After basic training in Camp Wolters, Texas, he reported to the 92nd Infantry Division at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. His stellar performance as a service and supply sergeant earned him a recommendation from his company commander to attend Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia. After completing the training program, he earned his lieutenant’s bars on January 11, 1943.20
A small man at five-foot-five, Baker responded to the call of honor during the Spring Offensive of 1945. The Allies had decided to use the 92nd Infantry Division to launch a diversionary attack aimed at containing the German forces along the Ligurian Coast, clearing the 5th Army to stage an offensive toward Bologna and force the German Army to relinquish its stranglehold on the areas south of the Po River. If accomplished, the event might trigger the end of Germany’s control of northern Italy, an area that Hitler hoped to retain at all costs. Code-named “Second Wind,” the division’s components no longer fought as a single all-black unit. After reorganization, it now included the white 473rd Infantry and the Japanese-American 442nd Infantry Regiments. Only the 370th, along with its complementary assortment of artillery, combat engineering, medical, cannon, and air observation units, remained with the all-black division. By the time the division launched its initial attack on April 5, most of the black soldiers were led by white commanders, whose ambivalent views regarding black soldiers’ fighting abilities led to numerous moments of uneasiness, distrust, and uncertainty.21
Such was the case with Company C of the 370th on Hill X in the spring of 1945. Before dawn on April 5, Capt. John F. Runyon led his infantrymen west of the hill in hopes of surprising enemy forces in the area. But as the GIs launched their attack, they found themselves facing a severe bombardment of mortar and machine-gun fire from an enemy that had been alerted to their presence. Pinned down by intense shooting, Runyon ordered the unit forward, but not before calling for indirect fire to aid their advancement.
What ensued next was not for the fainthearted. The company moved swiftly toward Castle Aghinolfi, proceeding nearly one hundred yards beyond friendly lines, stopping only to cut enemy wire communications. It was only then that the men learned from central headquarters that they had overrun their artillery support. They were also told not to expect ample reinforcements, even though they had fallen headlong into a well-fortified enemy outpost. Facing increased enemy fire and mounting casualties among his men, the company commander decided to personally withdraw five hundred yards to the battalion lines, leaving behind a group of enlisted men and one sole officer to press the attack.
It was at this point that the hazards of war gave birth to a moment of heroism. Lt. Vernon Baker instantly gathered his wits and commanded his men to form a defensive perimeter, volunteering to cover the withdrawal of a group of wounded soldiers as they made their way to the rearguard area. Covered by one of his subordinates who was armed with a Browning Automatic, Baker crawled toward the enemy, lobbing hand grenades into their machine-gun emplacements, destroying the entrenchments and killing several Germans in the process. The diminutive soldier continued on, single-handedly knocking out an enemy observation post and mortally wounding its occupants.
By the end of the ordeal, Baker had destroyed four enemy machine-gun nests, secured the battalion’s objective, and managed a successful evacuation of the surviving members of his company. For his inspiring action during the assault on Castle Aghinolfi that day, and for providing valuable leadership in the capture of a key position coveted by Allied forces, Baker was promoted to the rank of first lieutenant, and 5th Army commander Lt. Gen. Lucian Truscott Jr. presented him with the Distinguished Service Cross. Nonetheless, years later Baker said, “I am haunted by the memory of nineteen men—men I left on a ridge in northern Italy five decades ago.”22
Edward Carter Jr., Willy James Jr., and the Allied Race across the Rhine
Around the same time, black GIs serving in the European Theater of Operations were given a glimpse of equality and liberation. By December of 1944, events at the Front had reached a critical stage. Army Ground Forces Headquarters began to experience severe shortages of infantry rifle replacements. That month, the German Army launched its last offensive in the Ardennes, and the Battle of the Bulge caught Allied forces completely off guard. While the offensive ended in a stalemate, American forces suffered tremendous casualties. During the first week of fighting alone, nearly 50,000 soldiers were killed or wounded. All told, between 60,000 and 125,000 soldiers would end up injured from enemy fire, missing in action, or victimized by the harsh winter conditions they had experienced after a month of the fighting.
By late winter, army commanders’ search for trained infantrymen became so acute that men who were serving in service and support units, such as truck drivers, stevedores, and engineers, were now being placed into rifle companies and battalions slated for duty at the Western Front. Even that was not enough. Pressed by the extreme situation, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower issued a call for a limited number of volunteers to serve as infantrymen regardless of race or color. Thousands of black troops responded enthusiastically. By February of 1945, nearly 5,000 black troops volunteered, and 2,500 soldiers were reorganized into rifle companies commanded by white officers. These units were led by veteran black noncoms who accepted a reduction in rank to private, relinquishing their sergeant’s stripes in order to provide valuable leadership for those who stood in the ranks.23
Edward A. Carter Jr. was among those who answered the call to duty. Born in Los Angeles, California, in 1916, he was the son of itinerant Holiness Church missionaries. At the age of five, he traveled to China with his parents, attending schools with the offspring of diplomats. His wanderlust led him to run away at sixteen and join the Chinese Army, where he served until they discovered he was underage. He and his parents returned to LA during the mid-1930s, where Carter became interested in left-wing causes. Convinced that Generalissimo Francisco Franco posed a fascist threat, Carter went to Spain and enlisted in the Loyalist Army as a volunteer with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. He was captured by Germans and held in a prison camp for several months before returning to serve with the Loyalists for two and a half years. Carter returned to LA in 1940, where he married a young violinist. In the midst of raising a family, he felt the irresistible call to duty. Alarmed by the war in Europe and Asia and the real possibility of US intervention, Carter joined the army, reporting to Camp Wolters, Texas, for basic training in 1941, several months before Pearl Harbor.
After initial training, he was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, and assigned to the 35th Quartermaster Truck Company, rising to the rank of staff sergeant. While willing to fight against Nazism and fascism abroad, like so many other young black recruits, Carter realized that their “war within the war” was just beginning. After encountering Jim Crow discrimination in the army and among the civilian white population in places like Texas and Georgia, Carter observed, “They don’t treat us at all like soldiers. It’s more like slaves. When this war is over, you’ll see plenty of tough and bitter boys coming home.”24
“The harder I work and fight to draw this war to a speedy close, the sooner my return home.”
In November of 1944, Carter and his company shipped out to southern France, assigned to transport supplies to Allied fighting forces. They soon heard about Eisenhower’s appeal for volunteers among black troops. When the 7th Army requested an all-black platoon to serve with larger white units, army recruiters quickly realized Carter’s leadership abilities and recommended he be placed among the first soldiers to be offered the assignment. Finally able to realize his deepest ambition, he wrote home to his wife Mildred: “The harder I work and fight to draw this war to a speedy close, the sooner my return home.”25
That spring, Carter’s unit, now the 1st Provisional Company, was assigned to the 12th Armored Division before being merged into the 56th Armored Infantry Battalion. The company was attached to General Patton’s 3rd Army, which stood poised to cross the Rhine River and advance into Germany. In late March, Carter, along with fellow members of the 12th Armored Division, received an order to move from Saint-Avold to an area near Sierck-les-Bains, where they were attached to the 3rd Army’s XX Corps. There, they were ordered to attack German forces at the city of Speyer and to secure the bridge over the Rhine River.26
On March 23, reaching the heavily wooded area that surrounded the city, Carter and other black volunteers were pinned down by German antitank rockets and fierce machine-gun fire. Taking refuge behind a road embankment to decide upon a course of action, they realized that a warehouse was the source of most of the enemy rocket fire, and that seizing the stronghold meant negotiating an open field. The veteran noncommissioned officer volunteered to lead a three-man patrol for the mission.
He and his men faced an increasingly dire situation, with steady enemy fire. After witnessing the deaths of two of his men and the severe wounding of the third, Carter continued on alone, despite being wounded himself. Forced to take cover, he waited several hours before fate intervened. When an eight-man patrol of German riflemen emerged from the warehouse to reconnoiter the area, Carter emptied his .45 caliber Thompson sub-machine gun on them, killing six of the soldiers. Capturing the remaining two, and using them as human shields, Carter marched them back across the open field to his company, where they were detained as prisoners of war.
But Carter’s exploits did not stop there. Upon returning to the command outpost, he refused medical attention until he was able to obtain valuable information from the captured soldiers as to the location and strength of enemy troops in the area. Based on Carter’s interrogation, the 12th Armored Division was able to clear an essential pathway into Speyer, thus facilitating the Allied drive into the heart of Germany. After recovering from his wounds, Carter returned to his unit and continued fighting until the end of the war.
Carter’s bravery and undying devotion to his comrades attracted attention. For his extraordinary heroism and inspired leadership in the 7th Army, the staff sergeant was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.27
The clarion call of freedom and a deep devotion to country also beckoned Pvt. Willy F. James Jr. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1920, James worked as a deliveryman before entering the army in late 1942. He trained to be a scout, and was assigned to a unit with the 104th “Timberwolf” Infantry Division. After arriving in Germany in early 1945, James and his comrades in Company C were given orders on April 7 to cross the Weser River and secure a group of houses near Lippoldsberg, Germany. Possessing the enemy stronghold would allow American forces to establish and secure a bridgehead for launching an all-out attack on the rest of the town.
Private James was walking apart from his squad when he stumbled upon a well-fortified machine-gun nest manned by enemy snipers. Despite drawing furious crossfire, James unhesitatingly volunteered to reconnoiter the area to get a better sense of the enemy position. After maneuvering approximately two hundred yards across open, contested terrain, James managed to pinpoint the enemy’s whereabouts before returning to cover, where he gave a full and detailed report to his platoon leader. His heroics were short-lived, how ever. After his platoon leader was struck down, the intrepid soldier took charge of the mission. He was moving across an open field to come to the aid of his fallen commander when he himself was struck and killed by enemy fire.
James’s extraordinary act of valor proved to be instrumental in his unit’s ability to achieve its mission.
James’s extraordinary act of valor proved to be instrumental in his unit’s ability to achieve its mission, greatly aiding the 413th’s efforts to establish a bridgehead over the Weser River. His fellow servicemen recovered his body, and his remains were interred in the Netherlands. His selfless spirit continued to inspire those who served in the theater of operations long after his demise. On May 26, his platoon leader recommended the infantry scout for the Distinguished Service Cross, and James received the honor posthumously less than four months later.28
The Legacies of Edward Carter and Vernon Baker
As James’s body was being lowered into the ground, fierce discussion ensued within the military over the very meaning of his military service and sacrifice. Although it is beyond doubt that his selfless actions should have earned him greater attention beyond the battlefields of Europe, few Americans had heard of Willy James Jr., or anything about African-American combat experience in Europe. Deeply immersed in Jim Crow practices, European and Pacific theater commanders either neglected or completely dismissed the battlefield performances of black GIs.
This was even more evident in the postwar period. In 1948, Maj. Gen. Edward Almond prepared a preliminary report on the performance of black troops in the European Theater of Operations. According to a top-secret wartime study conducted by a board of senior white officers, the former commander of the 92nd Infantry Division downplayed the army’s experiment with desegregated units at the end of the war. Almond stated that black soldiers in the unit repeatedly demonstrated their inability to be trained “in modern combat methods,” and that “no amount of training of the Negro infantry rifleman will insure his application of sound principles under fire, or even in the forward combat area.” Almond wrote to his superiors: “My experience of three and a half years in an attempt to create a combat infantry division comprising of negro units convinces me that it is a failure.”29 Almond’s staunch adherence to the military’s segregationist policies may have foreshadowed the immediate postwar experiences of black GIs like Edward Carter and Vernon Baker, who returned home to discover that their “war within the war” was just beginning.
Arriving in Los Angeles in late 1945, although Edward Carter felt his wartime experience had produced fundamental changes in him, he found the social and political climate in America basically unchanged. After struggling to find work and trying his hand at private business, Carter reenlisted in the army and reported to Camp Lee, Virginia, where he was assigned as a staff sergeant for a special service unit. But the army’s system of segregation seemed to follow the talented soldier. Based on his previous tour of duty, Carter was assigned to an all-black engineering combat battalion in the California National Guard. As his biographer later wrote, “Eddie’s assignment was ironic and exciting. The irony was that during the war Eddie had fought side by side with white soldiers and only a year earlier he was working on plans for black and white veterans to work together, but he now found himself assigned by the Army to a segregated National Guard Unit. He could not have thought of this as progress. Nevertheless, it was exciting to be training young men (and other men of color) in an environment where the best he had to offer would shine.”30
After receiving his Distinguished Service Cross—the only black soldier in his division to receive such a recommendation—Vernon Baker was reassigned to a unit in the quartermaster corps before being rotated back to the United States in 1947. Back home in Cheyenne, Wyoming, he too rejected civilian life. He reenlisted in the army and reported to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he was assigned to a company in the 82nd Airborne Division. But Jim Crow also dogged the steps of this former platoon leader. When he volunteered to go to Korea, the army refused his request, telling him they were not sending any Distinguished Service Cross recipients to the armed conflict. “I didn’t know what to believe,” Baker said. “I knew there were few black Distinguished Service recipients. But white Distinguished Service Cross recipients had gone to Korea. Was this about color, in the sense that the Army wanted a few decorated black soldiers around to prove it had a broad, inclusive outlook?”31
People have considerable expectations of heroes.
Although Baker was one of the most highly decorated black soldiers of World War II—years later, he would accept the long-delayed Medal of Honor from President William Jefferson Clinton—he wore his status with great humility. “After years of trying to forget, or regretting many deaths, I have been handed the hero’s mantle,” Baker said. “I wear it uneasily. People have considerable expectations of heroes. We are not to falter in the spotlight; we are not to have made many mistakes in the past. Being a black American raises the ante.”32
Baker’s musings about the army’s changing perceptions provide an apt metaphor for how black honor was being reshaped to meet the demands of a new period—namely, the Cold War. No longer would black GIs be expected to “fight for the right to fight” in segregated units; rather, the merits of their performance under fire would be judged in the context of a new environment, and in the face of a new enemy. This perplexing set of circumstances and the changes they wrought for a different generation of heroes also, in turn, greatly altered black perceptions of military service in America. As a result, new definitions of honor would be created.
Black honor was being reshaped to meet the demands of a new period.
The war in Korea serves as an important example of how these notions of bravery were translated into action.