CHAPTER SIX
War, Race, and Rumor under the Southern Cross
Rumor travels when events have importance in the lives of individuals and when the news received about them is either lacking or subjectively ambiguous. The ambiguity may arise from the fact that the news is not clearly reported, or from the fact that conflicting versions of the news have reached the individual, or from his incapacity to comprehend the news he receives.
Gordon Allport and Leo Postman, 1947
One early April morning in 1944, Lieutenant Oscar Davenport and his platoon found themselves negotiating the dense undergrowth of the Bougainville jungle. The 30-year-old officer from Tucson, Arizona, and other members of the 93rd Infantry Division’s 25th Infantry Regimental Combat Team had no sooner entered the Allied defensive perimeter in the Solomon Islands group than they received orders to occupy a reserve position for an element of the Americal Division. For Davenport and his platoon, the patrolling missions carried out in the sector were simple: to establish a trail block some 3,000 yards in front of the main perimeter. As one GI serving with the unit at time remembered, “Most of the activity on the island consisted of patrols. We—when I say we, I mean our outfit—went out on routine patrols and occasionally they got into fights with some remnants of the Japanese army that had been left there.”1
But what ordinarily should have been one in a series of routine missions gave way to personal tragedy and public spectacle. After wading their way through the turgid waters of the Torokina River, Davenport and his men had traveled along a path when they encountered enemy fire. Nearly forty-five minutes after the firing began, the young lieutenant, along with seventeen enlisted men, lay dead, and seven others were wounded. Interestingly, several eyewitnesses later claimed that, just minutes before the burst of enemy fire, Davenport had held up a newspaper clipping he had recently received from his wife, Ollive, reporting him as “missing in action.”2
The rumor that Davenport had been missing in action was just one of many rumors circulating at this time, some of them suggesting that the 93rd Infantry Division was unsuitable for combat duty. During the weeks and months that followed the incident, army officials used such rumors as a way to reinforce the low expectations they had of the battlefield conduct of segregated black units like the 93rd in the South Pacific. By the time the division had left the Solomon Islands, the rumors had spread to such an extent that they reached the White House and beyond. Black spokespeople, pundits, and service-related communities worked diligently to counteract their chain-letter-like speed and force by devising their own independent communication networks. Yet often the zealous efforts made by the black press to publicize racism in the South Pacific as well to affirm the actions and identities of Davenport and his comrades on the field of battle carried their own ambiguous messages. Throughout 1944 and early 1945, Bougainville served as vivid reminders to black and white observers alike of how war, race, and rumor would structure the South Pacific experiences of those who served in the unit.
Negotiating Military Life under the Southern Cross
After enduring nearly a month at sea, the 93rd Infantry Division’s regiments and their attached field units disembarked at several points in the South Pacific before being assigned mainly to the Russells (Banika), Vella Lavella, Guadalcanal, and New Georgia.3 There, under the leadership of Major General Raymond Lehman, they spent the first three weeks setting up camp before participating in training exercises in jungle patrolling, perimeter defense, and first aid. These activities were a far cry from the desert maneuvers they had practiced less than six months earlier.4 As they proceeded through this seasoning process, newly arrived 93rd servicemen encountered unfamiliar sights, smells, and noises in the dense terrain. Edwin Lee, a 25th Infantry medical officer assigned to Guadalcanal during the period, recalled, “It was a disturbing experience for me to be on this island; nothing but trees, the smell of dead animals and sometimes human beings. I think the thing that stands out in my mind most is the rain every day at two o’clock and the lonely nights in which you could hear all sorts of sounds.”5 Private Bismark Williams, a native of Asheville, North Carolina, echoed these sentiments: “The weather was damp and muggy, so it was necessary to keep your boots dry to avoid jungle rot.”6 Houston resident Asberry McGriff, an enlisted man who trained with a platoon in the 368th Infantry on the Russells, claimed, “Unless you took care of your things properly, your clothes became rotted and mildewed and your weapon rusted.”7
Many African American soldiers in the 93rd Infantry Division responded to the unfamiliar conditions by reestablishing prior semiformal and formal organizations. For example, Kansas City, Kansas, native Andrew Isaacs; Lake Charles, Louisiana, native Robert Johnson; and twenty other black enlisted men in the 93rd Infantry Division Signal Company formed an organization based on their affiliation with the company and called themselves the 93rd Signal Club. Composed predominantly of Los Angeles natives, the group met periodically as the unit moved throughout the Pacific theater.8 In a similar fashion, members in several companies of the 93rd’s 318th Engineering Battalion held parties throughout the spring months of 1944 during which they decorated the recreational building and rearranged tables to resemble a cabaret. As the men enjoyed a down-home cuisine of steak with brown gravy, barbecued pig, mashed potatoes, buttered rolls, and greens provided by Jesse Barnes and Thomas Grace, they listened to selections played by 368th Regimental Band, watched impersonations performed by Richard Bethel and Joseph Edwards, and heard speeches given by Lieutenant William Collins and regimental chaplain Thomas Diggs.9 As a member of the 368th’s Antitank Company, 25-year-old New York native Cesly Peterson edited the regiment’s weekly publications, the Clarion and the Daily Mail, making them the most requested sources of information within the division. By the end of the war, Peterson’s efforts had earned him the Bronze Star Medal.10
Popular aesthetic forms also constituted a critical element in the transplantation of African American culture. More than twenty-five hundred enthusiastic soldiers attended USO performances led by Cabin in the Sky movie star Kenneth Spencer and Julie Gardner, a soloist prominently featured in Earl “Fatha” Hines’s orchestra, as well as vaudeville acts staged by Flo Brown and Ferdie Robinson.11 Many soldiers gathered together in company headquarters and the regimental amphitheaters to listen to “Tan America on the Air,” a radio show directed and produced by 369th infantryman Ted Clarke, and jazz recordings played by the radio show entitled “The Voice of the Valley.”12
The selection of favorite pinups also served as a medium through which black division members created a sense of camaraderie in an unfamiliar environment; it also bound them together in a form of male solidarity. In late 1944, for instance, black GIs in the 93rd unanimously elected Stormy Weather motion picture star Lena Horne as their pinup girl, and copies of her photograph could be found on display in hundreds of tents, recreation halls, jeeps, and trucks scattered throughout the division’s regimental and company bivouac sites. Taking a distant second were Hazel Scott and Katherine Dunham.13 Around the same time, 368th Infantry soldiers from Pittsburgh wrote letters to black newspapers, requesting autographed photos of noted pianist and arranger Mary Lou Williams.14
On the surface, this practice appears to support the idea that the collection and circulation of pinup photographs by soldiers and military officials in World War II reflected their view of women as sexual property or prized possessions as well as inspirations for fighting for their country. Indeed, as recent scholars have noted, for white GIs and military officials in a war that was racialized, pinups and the women who posed for them functioned not only as an inspiration for fighting—“protecting the girl next door”—but also as symbols of “white supremacy.”15 But pinups also seem to have served as substitutes for actual physical contact with women. The army’s semiofficial publication, Yank magazine, received hundreds of letters from GIs stationed in the Pacific theater which defended the value of pinup photos. One writer suggested, “Maybe if some of those ‘panty-waists’ had to be stuck some place where there are no white women and few native women for a year and a half, as we were, they would appreciate even a picture of our gals back home.”16 And around the same period, one psychiatrist who studied GIs in the war maintained that pinups served as “a social affirmation of virility by virtue of the public display and approval they were invariably accorded.”17
But for black troops stationed throughout the South Pacific, the circulation of pinup photographs reflected their different experience of the Pacific war—and their somewhat different needs. Pinups of black women not only boosted the spirits of black servicemen but also brought a sense of home and their own culture to their immediate surroundings. While stationed on Bougainville, men in the 369th Infantry’s Coral Reef Club held a contest during which they selected Los Angeles native Alice Jones as “Pinup Girl of the Week,” and soldiers in the 25th Infantry’s D Company chose Columbus, Ohio–born Jean Parks as their favorite, while black Ohio GIs in the 368th Infantry expressed their preference for Cincinnati native Lillian Lemons.18 Perhaps the words of an army private serving with the division’s quartermaster company on Guadalcanal at the time may have voiced what was on the mind of many black GIs when he stated in a letter to the Baltimore Afro-American: “We boys in this theater of war are feeling somewhat slighted. Every magazine and paper we get has pictures of pin-up girls in Hollywood, but why can’t we have pictures of colored pin-ups from our neighborhoods for our tents? We would appreciate it if you’d send us some.”19 In response, black news publications like the Chicago Defender, New York Amsterdam Star News, Atlanta Daily World, and Pittsburgh Courier published numerous photographs of actresses, starlets, and service dependents in bathing suits with captions reminding the soldiers serving in the Pacific of their obligations to home, hearth, and the race.20
Meanwhile, the first few weeks of the division’s campaign consisted of endless hours of unloading supplies, building tents, clearing brush, and building roads in stifling heat and suffocating humidity. And to make matters worse, once GIs attached to the division had arrived in the Solomons, they discovered that, like so many soldiers of time immemorial, they faced the minor objectionable features of life in a rear sector of an active theater of operations: namely, monotonous food, sleepless nights, and army overmanagement. During the spring months of 1944, platoons and companies within the 369th led by junior officers such as John Howard, Arnett Hartsfield, Anthony Paul, Frank Christmas, and Julius Young were assigned to unloading supplies onto the docks of Guadalcanal.21 But men with the 369th Infantry were not the only troops to perform such duties. Members of the 368th Infantry Regiment, including Raymond Jenkins, Randall Morgan, and Julius Thompson, carried out port battalion duties on Banika in the Russells.22 Meanwhile, Luther Williams, Charles Cleveland, Albert Lott, William Upshaw, and other members of the 25th Infantry Regimental Combat Team and the 318th Engineering Battalion toiled for hours at a makeshift sawmill on nearby Bougainville Island.23 Edward Soulds, an officer with the 368th Infantry Regiment, described the garrison duties performed by his unit after arriving on one of the atolls in the Russells: “We disembarked on Banika and this real estate became our home for awhile. Unloading was fatiguing as hell; we had to clear jungles to set up tents to house the troops, the headquarters and tons of equipment.”24
Such mundane duties were hardly unusual for rear echelon troops passing through an Allied area of operation during the war. During the Allied campaign to extend the perimeter inland in late 1943, white enlisted men and officers of the army’s 37th Infantry Division arrived on Bougainville. Before taking their place along the front lines, troops had unloaded nearly 3,200 tons of supplies while enduring numerous strafing attacks from enemy torpedo bombers and fighters.25 After the Bougainville campaign passed to the command of the 14th Corps in December 1943, elements of the Americal Division received orders to report to Bougainville. There the men of the unit’s 164th Regiment spent much of their time constructing earthworks and other defensive positions while performing reconnaissance patrols throughout the area. Indeed, as historians have noted, although “many of the duties were invaluable for the divisional staffs and the artillery, the men involved considered it foul duty, repeated over and over again seemingly without purpose.”26
But in a setting where racial prejudice and discrimination had as much to do with the black World War II experience as did the violence meted out against the Japanese enemy, dignity and manhood formed the prism through which division members perceived their duties in the South Pacific.27 It was not long after they had landed in the Solomon Islands that many 93rd Division GIs learned that the military personnel with the 24th Infantry Regiment had spent more than twenty months toiling as stevedores and security forces, loading and unloading ships and performing patrolling missions in the theater of operations.28 And for most of the men in the division, the noncombatant duties diminished the stature of soldiers who had previously trained for action at the front. For example, in the words of Muskogee, Oklahoma, native Theodore Coggs, a Howard University graduate who was assigned to the 368th Infantry during the period, “The regiment then went to Munda and Hollandia where the men are building roads and unloading ships. I don’t know the future mission of the division or the regiment and it is a little confusing to all of the officers.”29 And as Lieutenant John Howard remembered, “Unloading ships was an unnerving experience when we first started because stevedoring was totally alien to us. We deeply resented this because we were basically being used as labor troops, and it was just another example of how the army didn’t want us to lead. When the time came for rest and relaxation, we were constantly being ordered back to jungle training areas.”30
Others likened the duties to those performed by slaves in the antebellum South. After he and other enlisted men in the 369th’s Service Company spent days unloading 2½-ton trucks and other heavy equipment, Little Rock, Arkansas, native Clarence Ross recalled feeling “mad as hell. It was as if we were the slaves and the white officers in our outfit were the overseers. They would get us up each morning and place us in designated spots on the docks, where we would unload tons of equipment sometimes on one meal a day.”31 Asheville, North Carolina–born Bismark Williams voiced similar sentiments: “Instead of treating us like men, the white commissioned officers saw us as their servants who need only a little encouragement to ‘tote that barge and lift that bale.’ The whole situation was based on race, and we were very disappointed with the duties they imposed on us.”32 These duties greatly hampered the already low morale of many 93rd servicemen and served to increase their skepticism of military life. Walter Greene, a Detroit native and 25th infantryman, stated, “One of the most disappointing things to us was as soon as we arrived in Guadalcanal we were put to work loading and unloading ships.”33 And an observer remarked, “We walked into this place and came face to face with heart break. This thing is so drastic I can’t believe it. From the way it looks, we are heading for the labor line.”34
Of course, not all black GIs felt this way. For example, Louisiana-born sharecropper and 25th infantryman Clenon Briggs viewed the assignment of black soldiers to service duties as a way of protecting their physical well-being: “I personally had no problems with unloading ships because I didn’t like the jungle training and the front line.”35 But the fact that the men perceived the service support work as inappropriate for trained combat troops captured the attention of the senior members of the 93rd high command. During a tour of the 93rd veterans in action less than a year later, the commanding general commented, “The failure to send Negro troops into combat is very bad for their morale and causes them to be resentful.”36
The resentment that black 93rd servicemen felt regarding these duties manifested itself in many ways. Some division members engaged in various forms of workplace resistance analogous to those developed in the urban industrial environment. For example, men within various elements of the 25th Infantry refused to adhere to uniformed military standards. During an inspection of 25th infantrymen laboring in rear areas of Bougainville Island in late April, the 93rd Division commander, Leonard Boyd, reported that many soldiers failed to salute white officers and displayed their uniforms in a disheveled manner.37 Less than two weeks later, the 93rd Division commander visited soldiers in the 25th Infantry’s 3rd Battalion and noted that many of them refused to shave and wear shoes.38
Other soldiers took more drastic action. In June 1944, Raymond Abernathy, James Hill, and William Wright of the 93rd Special Medical Detachment received a reduction in rank and transfers to the 368th Infantry after they refused to unload ships by staging a makeshift sit-down strike along the docks of Stirling Island.39 On Guadalcanal, Reuben Fraser openly expressed his disagreement with the work assignments. In March 1944, Fraser, a second lieutenant in a heavy weapons company of the 368th Infantry, was ordered to build a stockade for himself after he wrote an unofficial letter to the War Department protesting against the dirty, labor-intensive duties that his unit performed as port battalions. After Fraser added board tents, screen wire, running water, and electricity, the regimental staff headquarters, led by 368th Infantry commander James Urquhart, requisitioned the building, claiming that the building was too good for him. “I figured that if I was going to be in there,” Fraser recalled, “then I was going to fix it up perfectly. You know …, I was very adept at turning various adversities to my advantage.” Fraser’s struggles for dignity were short lived, however, as his acts of rebellion were spontaneous responses to seemingly impossible situations. His military career came to an end when he was mustered out of the army two months later.40 Sickness also functioned as a form of resistance. Throughout the months of May and June, an officer in the 93rd Division’s Medical Detachment duly reported large numbers of 93rd servicemen placed on sick leave and declared, “The assignment of troops to punitive (labor) duties is one of the factors tending to lower their morale.”41
The attitudes and responses of black 93rd GIs to these noncombatant tasks stemmed largely from the War Department’s racist reliance on exaggerated stereotypes regarding black capabilities under fire accompanied by its difficulties in finding a theater commander who would place the division at the fighting front. In early March, the director of the operations division commented extensively on the employment of black personnel: “Since the Army cannot afford the luxury of organizing tactical units which will remain in the United States for the duration of the war … the Army intends that colored units shall eventually be employed overseas to the greatest extent that their capabilities permit. As the end of the war draws nearer, ‘people,’ both white and colored of lower classification grades will gravitate toward less complicated tasks and conversions must be made. It is likewise inevitable that units with the most advanced training will continue to be the first employed in battle.” As a division composed largely of draftees who had obtained scores in the fourth and fifth categories, the 93rd would be placed in service support functions. Left unchanged, this policy was followed by theater commanders throughout the Pacific.
Questions of Deployment
Throughout the winter and spring of 1944, a peculiar set of circumstances fueled public speculation regarding the deployment of African American troops in the Pacific. In late January, officers with the 930th and 931st Field Artillery battalions learned that they had been transferred to the U.S. 92nd Infantry Division. Shortly afterward, the artillery units, which made up the core of the 184th Field Artillery Regiment, were converted into engineer combat battalions to construct roads and bridges. For the men with the 930th and 931st and their respective communities, the conversion of these units was significant. As former National Guard cadres, they had spent nearly two years training at Fort Custer, Michigan, after the historic 8th Illinois had been mustered into federal service and reorganized into separate elements.42 Meanwhile, the activities of the troops with the 2nd Cavalry Division and their whereabouts raised questions of mounting intensity. Activated at Fort Clark, Texas, in 1943, elements of the 2nd Cavalry, which also contained the old 9th and 10th Cavalry regiments, had been assigned to North Africa. But, at the time, the status of the cavalry unit remained shrouded in secrecy.
The official silence regarding these units didn’t last long, however. On 1 February, New York congressman Hamilton Fish wrote a letter to Secretary of War Henry Stimson inquiring whether the War Department planned to deploy black troops in front-line action in Europe and Asia. Fish asked the secretary of war whether there was any truth to the rumor that the personnel in several black tank destroyer outfits that had undergone training at Fort Hood, Texas, had been transferred to quartermaster companies after the units had been inactivated.43 As a former officer with New York’s famous 369th “Harlem Hell-fighters” regiment during the last war, the Republican congressman believed that he had more than a passing interest in the well-being of African American units in the present conflict. “I don’t understand how it is that four separate colored regiments made such gallant fighting records in the last war, which was won in approximately nineteen months and yet no colored infantry troops have been ordered into combat in this war,” Fish exclaimed.
Less than two and a half weeks later, Stimson replied to Fish’s inquiry, directly addressing the fate of black troops and where they would stand in relation to the battlefronts of the Second World War. The secretary of war confirmed the reports that elements of the 184th had been converted into service support troops. According to Stimson, the 930th and 931st, as well as other antiaircraft, tank destroyer, and coast artillery units, had been trained originally to counter a possible enemy attack upon the continental United States, but they were now being reassigned because the danger had since passed. But before Stimson completed his remarks, the logic of his statement followed an all too familiar course. Specifically pointing out the 930th and the 931st, he claimed that their conversion was absolutely necessary because, owing to their lower educational backgrounds, “many of the Negro units have been unable to master efficiently the techniques of modern weapons.”44
Within a matter of days, Stimson’s remarks had exploded into a cause célèbre. Banner headlines carrying his statement appeared on the front page of black weeklies throughout the country. On 4 March, the Pittsburgh Courier carried a story headlined “Stimson Should Quit,” claiming that by questioning the competency of black combat units, the secretary of war had “stirred up a hornet’s nest here.” In a similar fashion, the Chicago Defender, Atlanta Daily World, Houston Informer, Columbus Ohio State News, Oklahoma City Black Dispatch, and Michigan Chronicle carried the secretary’s statements on their front page.45
At the same time, Stimson’s comments impugning the intelligence of black combat units attracted considerable criticism from black congressional leaders as well as from other sectors of the African American community. Responding to the secretary’s remarks, Illinois congressman William L. Dawson angrily stated, “He is either woefully ignorant on the matter of Negro troops or purposely carrying out the pattern of fascist elements within the military establishment whose purpose is to discredit the Negro fighting men of this nation.”46 Roy Wilkins and other members within the NAACP national office also responded angrily to Stimson’s comments. In an editorial in the Crisis titled “Army Labor Battalions,” Wilkins bitterly denounced the War Department’s decision, declaring that the statement “has infuriated Negro Americans as has no other single incident since Pearl Harbor.” Referring to the persistent rumors surrounding the 2nd Cavalry Division, he went on to ask, “If combat units are so badly needed, why are Negro units being broken up into service troops?”47 The targets of the secretary’s attack also raised their voices in a chorus of reproach. Major Ovid Harris, a former commander of the 184th Field Artillery Regiment, wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, arguing that the regiment’s high IQ rating repudiated Stimson’s claim that “many Negro units have been unable to master efficiently the techniques of modern weapons.”48 Not long afterward, the responses escalated from printed words to actions. On 5 March, hundreds of people assembled in Chicago to protest against Stimson’s remarks. Sponsored by the National Negro Council and the Chicago Committee of One Thousand, conferees adopted a resolution demanding the resignation of the War Department head. “The ouster of Stimson would speed victory over the Axis nations,” they proclaimed.49
Hoping to stem the growing controversy over the War Department’s racial policies, the secretary promptly held a press conference to clarify his remarks. Meeting with a group of black press representatives, he categorically denied that he and other War Department officials assessed the combat efficiency of the 930th and 931st Field Artillery battalions on the basis of their intellectual capacities. “The fundamental principle involved that has been overlooked in my letter is that changing conditions necessitates the organization of more units to service duties and fewer of those for combat than was required a year ago,” he claimed.50 Within several weeks, however, reports on the deactivation of the 2nd Cavalry Division and its conversion into service troops in North Africa reached the press, and telegrams, letters of protests, and editorials poured into the White House from across the country excoriating the War Department’s employment of black troops.51
As the controversy heated up that spring, Stimson and members of the Advisory Committee on Negro Troop Policies, including Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy and representatives of each major agency within the General Staff, met and agreed to recommend the 93rd Infantry Division for front-line duty. However, many of the committee members present that day expressed very little faith in the fighting abilities of black soldiers. Harboring definite reservations about using blacks in combat, Stimson stated, “The Army has been drifting in regard to putting the colored troops into combat action. Of course this comes primarily from their former bad record as combat troops and the fear of putting them into any of the important positions in this critical war.”52 Echoing Stimson’s apprehensions, Theater Operations Division deputy chief (G-3) Carl Russell commented that it would be disastrous to impose black troops on the theater commanders but also stated his belief that the War Department would be forced to recommend the 93rd’s conversion if it was not used in combat. Civilian aide Truman Gibson, Ray Porter, also from the Operations Division, and Personnel Section representative Miller White, however, disagreed with Stimson and Russell and recommended that the War Department organize the 93rd’s regiments into combat teams and order the theater commanders to use them as a matter of “national policy.” After agreeing on the measure, the committee submitted the recommendation to the secretary of war, who relented and signed it.53
Complying with their recommendation, General Marshall radioed Lieutenant General Millard Harmon in the South Pacific less than a week later, asking the theater’s chief commander to place the 93rd’s 25th Regimental Combat Team in action as soon as possible.54 Although Harmon assured Marshall that he had taken steps to adequately train the division, he told Marshall that he had not planned any amphibious operations for the unit in his theater of operations. The commander earlier was very critical of the idea to place such a large number of black troops in his area.55 Indeed, as scholars have noted, the general view in Washington and throughout the Pacific during this period was that the troops of the 93rd should be assigned to areas as far away from front-line duty as possible.56 But Harmon recognized the dilemma that Marshall and other War Department officials faced, and this may have contributed to his ultimate acquiescence in the matter.
By the end of the month, however, events had occurred on Bougainville that forced the War Department and the South Pacific high command to reconsider their previous contingency plans. In early March 1944, troops of the American 15th Corps had largely broken the last large-scale Japanese offensive against the main defense perimeter on Bougainville Island. Numbering more than fifteen hundred men, enemy forces led by Isashi Magata had suffered tremendous casualties. Under the shadow of darkness, Japanese troops used the Numa-Numa Trail to repair toward the northernmost portion of the island while contingents of Major General Iwasa Shun’s forces retreated to its southern region. However, numerous American patrols traveled beyond the American defense perimeter only to encounter considerable enemy fire from well-placed, camouflaged positions along the trails. In addition, army officials, notably 14th Corps commander Oscar Griswold, felt that the retreating Japanese forces posed a real threat to the airstrips in the area if they made a concerted effort.
Given the gravity of the situation, black GIs figured prominently in the 14th Corps’ offensive strategy. On a clear night in mid-March, 1st Battalion members of the all-black 24th Infantry Regiment, led by Henry McAllister of Hamburg, New York, successfully assaulted Japanese troops attempting to infiltrate Allied communications and supply lines at Empress Augusta Bay. By the end of the combat patrol, the men had moved several thousand yards beyond the defense sector and had come relatively close to the Japanese lines, killing one enemy soldier and evading ambush attempts during the fighting. Shortly afterward, they relieved the beleaguered men of the 148th Infantry’s 2nd Battalion at Hill 700, otherwise known as “Cannon Hill.” The performance of the soldiers in the battalion was striking because, until that point, the unit had been originally assigned to service functions loading and unloading ships and building roads at Efate in New Caledonia. Therefore, many military observers who expressed skepticism regarding the fighting abilities of black troops were pleasantly surprised. For example, Griswold reported that the unit “was given a sector of the perimeter and did an excellent job in organizing and preparing its defensive position.”57 During his weekly press conference held on 6 April, Stimson reported on the 24th Infantry’s role in repulsing the Japanese attack against the Allied perimeter at Empress Augusta Bay and ended much public speculation by stating that the 93rd Infantry Division had arrived at advanced bases in the South Pacific.58
Once the exploits of the 24th Infantry Regiment hit the newspapers, army officials renewed their interest in committing the men of the 93rd to combat.59 On 18 March, General Marshall radioed General Harmon again requesting that the unit be used in action after it received adequate preparation. The army chief of staff stated his belief that the men of the 93rd Division should be placed in the most advantageous position possible because the War Department was under intense scrutiny not only from the black press for failing to place the unit in combat but also from critics of the employment of black troops in the Pacific theater in general who would watch the army’s use of the all-black division closely. Regarding the extent of public attention to the division’s initial performance, Marshall reminded the South Pacific commander that “the first reports of its conduct in action undoubtedly will be headlined in this country.” “It is therefore important that news releases and reports from the theater on the conduct of these troops be strictly factual,” he ordered.60 Four days later, Marshall again contacted Harmon, inquiring about the extent of the 24th Infantry’s operations on Bougainville and future assignments that he had contemplated for the unit.61 On 23 March, Harmon complied with Marshall’s directives when he instructed the 14th Corps commander to take the following actions:
Harass and deny to the enemy his line of supply from the southern Bougainville area by the use of artillery and such air and naval surface forces as may be available to you, with particular attention to that area in the vicinity of the Reini River…. At the earliest practicable moment … conduct limited offensive operations against the west (right) flank and rear of hostile forces in your front with a view to interrupting or cutting their line of communications with Northern and Western Bougainville and destroying the maximum possible number of the enemy and his material. As a corollary an opportunity will be afforded for the seasoning and employment of Negro combat forces. To assist in the accomplishment of the foregoing you will be reinforced in the immediate future with the Twenty-fifth Infantry combat team reinforced.62
As the men of the 25th Regimental Combat Team advanced toward Bougainville Island in March 1944, little did they realize the precarious situation they faced. First, officials within the War Department had taken a far greater political interest in the employment and the use of their division than they had for any other unit assigned to the Pacific theater. This interest and the events that followed held long-term implications for many black 93rd Division personnel, army officials, and various segments of African American society. Second, although Harmon and other officers within the South Pacific high command had followed Marshall’s directive to commit the division to front-line action, their execution of those orders was overshadowed by their deeply felt resentment over what they viewed as Washington’s intrusion into their theater of operations. Their efforts to deploy the division were also affected by their belief in racist myths of black cowardice and questions about the leadership capabilities of African American cadre. In addition, Harmon and the other officials misread the new perceptions that division servicemen expressed about themselves as they now became soldiers with a new sense of purpose, namely, the protection of their very being while struggling to wage war against American race relations in an international context. The newly discovered perspectives espoused by most division troops sometimes would overlap with but at other times fly in the face of the political stances taken by African American leaders and spokespeople. It is to the circumstances that led to the clash of visions between black division troops, army officials, and African American society and the strategies that the men devised to negotiate these dilemmas that we must now turn.
Baptism under Fire in the South Pacific
The first contingent of the 25th Regimental Combat troops, along with the 593rd Field Artillery Battalion and an assortment of the 93rd’s medical and engineering elements, left Guadalcanal for Bougainville Island’s Empress Augusta Bay perimeter on 26 March. Among those in this group of 4,234 enlisted men and officers were Lonnie Goodley of Halletville, Texas; Nehemiah Hodges of Chicago; Oscar Davenport of Tucson, Arizona; James Reese of Cotton Plant, Arkansas; and Walter Sanderson, Lemuel Penn, and Conway Jones of the District of Columbia.63 For Hodges, Goodley, and Davenport, this journey would be their last, for they would die in the Bougainville jungles less than three weeks later.64 The thought of not returning safely weighed heavily on the mind of many of the men during this period. For example, Edwin Lee remembered, “We lived every day on those transport ships for what it was worth because everybody figured that some of us would not come back from Bougainville.”65 Within days, the men of the 25th Regimental Combat Team had established a bivouac area and prepared local security positions after they were assigned to the 14th Corps. Shortly thereafter, they received additional training in patrolling and jungle operations as corresponding units of the Americal Division. Less than a month later, troop transport ships carrying men of the division’s headquarters and detachments of medical, quartermaster, and ordnance companies arrived at the Torokina Strip.66
Very shortly after arriving on Bougainville, many of the black servicemen discovered that the Pacific War was much more than just a struggle against fascism; it was a racial war fought on multiple fronts. For example, as the hours dragged into days, many division soldiers couldn’t help but recognize the disheartening irony of fighting troops of darker hue who were fighting on behalf of fascism while, at the same time, the division soldiers were fighting white racism within their own army. As Nelson Peery in the 369th Infantry recalled, “It wasn’t right. It didn’t sound real. We were out there killing people to protect something we hated.”67 Calvert, Texas, native Marke Toles of the 25th Infantry remembered: “Many of the Japanese soldiers were starving and wouldn’t attack us unless we attempted to ambush them.”68
But these sentiments changed somewhat after many black GIs witnessed the savagery of war and the jungle fighting encouraged soldiers on both sides to dehumanize each other. On many occasions, soldiers went out on daily patrols and faced endless hours of peril. Wilmington, Delaware, native Julius Young and Indianola, Mississippi, native Edwin Lee probably understood this sort of abstraction of the enemy better than anyone else. Young and Lee recalled going out on one of the first patrols on the island and not knowing whether their next actions would be their last. “To go out in the jungle and establish a perimeter while searching for Japanese stragglers created a certain edginess in the men,” recalled Young.69 Lee recounted one patrol: “As we were walking along in single file, I heard someone making noise and we looked, and by that time the shooting seemed to break out everywhere. It was a Japanese soldier up in the tree. This was a habit that the Japanese troops had. If a Japanese soldier was wounded, if they were of a nature of being suicidal or a volunteer, they’d leave him behind. And often times they would be up in trees. This was about the closest call that I had that I knew about.”70
The Japanese, in turn, had negative opinions of the character of black U.S. soldiers. In October 1944, American army intelligence officers stumbled upon a report filed by the Japanese Grand Imperial Headquarters that contained information about the strength and disposition of black service personnel serving in the South Pacific area and their performance in the field. The contents and the assessments made in the report are quite revealing. According to Japanese intelligence, there were approximately twenty-five thousand black troops in the region, many of them serving with the U.S. 93rd Infantry Division. With regard to the capabilities of the division’s enlisted personnel and its junior officer corps, the message echoed some of the beliefs held by many white officers and observers in the American army. For example, the report noted, “The abilities of the American Negroes are relatively outstanding but they generally are indolent, have little willpower and are inclined to be cruel, and lack spirit of unity.” But the intelligence dispatch also revised previous reports filed with the imperial headquarters which claimed, “Negroes are unsuitable officers,” and it contended that the reports were not only erroneous but “unjustified.” “Since the founding of America, the Negro has been maltreated, and therefore there is a deep feeling of hate toward the Caucasians on the part of the Negro,” the communication pointed out. On the racial situation in the South Pacific theater of operations, the report concluded that, despite the stellar battlefield performances of black soldiers in the Solomon Islands, “there is still an ever present conflict of feeling between the Caucasians and the Negroes.”71
Many of the perceptions that Japanese intelligence held of the tensions between white soldiers and black GIs in the South Pacific and of American race relations in general made their way into the nightly radio shows broadcast by “Tokyo Rose”—a name used to refer to several English-speaking women broadcasting Japanese propaganda.72 Working directly from the Japanese mainland, these propagandists frequently made black GIs serving throughout the Pacific the targets of their invectives against American units. Many of their broadcasts sought to cause friction between Allied soldiers and to lessen African American morale by reminding them of the futility of fighting for democracy abroad while being denied first-class citizenship in the United States at the time. For example, a propaganda story that GIs heard during a shortwave broadcast in the South Pacific in March 1944 provides a window into the lengths to which Radio Tokyo had gone to raise questions of doubt in the minds of black soldiers serving in the area: “A captured Negro soldier revealed that Negro troops are demanding that American troops should share the same risks, and not leave them to face the Japanese alone. He added that Negro troops are fed up with the discrimination meted out to them by the Americans, and Australian soldiers feel the same way about the Americans as the Negroes do.”73 Although U.S. soldiers recognized the propaganda broadcasts for what they were, they still produced a myriad of emotions among the division troops. As Technical Sergeant Bennie Etters of Marygrove, Mississippi, recalled, “The Japanese let you know who you were, and what a hard time you were having back in America. This was propaganda that could divide units because it was hitting home on a lot of things that were true. But our main concern at the time was how they got their information.”74
Not long after arriving in the area, the battalions of the 25th Infantry Regimental Combat Team and their attached field organizations underwent a baptism by fire, and most of the troops acquitted themselves quite well. Given orders to pursue and destroy withdrawing enemy forces east and north along the Laruma River as a part of the U.S. 37th Infantry Division, the 25th Infantry’s 2nd Battalion, led by West Point graduate Arthur Amos, departed from the Numa-Numa Trail and descended by rope down a 60-foot bluff overlooking the river. No sooner had the men in one of the battalion’s companies, led by LaGrange, Texas, native Dewitt Cook, covered the crossing of the river than they drew enemy fire. By the end of the firefight, several Japanese snipers lay dead. Several hours before the 2nd Battalion’s operations, Brooklyn, New York, native and battery man Isaac Moore of the 593rd Field Artillery Battalion pulled the lanyard on the first firing piece, expelling the first round of ammunition against enemy forces by the division in World War II.75 The work done by the men in the 593rd Field Battalion in constructing, occupying, and firing from their gun positions at enemy targets was so impressive that it received special commendation from Americal Division artillery commander W. C. Dunckel.76 The performances of Wade Foggie, from Anderson, South Carolina, and Will Morey, from Greenville, Mississippi—who on 3 April had set up and fired eight rounds from their rocket launchers into three heavily armed enemy pillboxes, rendering them inoperable—earned them the Bronze Star.77
Lesser known were the actions of Isaac Sermon of F Company, St. Petersburg, Florida–born Frank Little of G Company, and Ewel Polk of Los Angeles. When his company encountered an ambush by opposing forces during a patrolling assignment, Sermon fired his Browning automatic rifle into a well-concealed area until enemy guns were silenced. Afterward, he managed to keep his position in the advancing patrol until he dropped from exhaustion and the loss of blood resulting from multiple gunshot wounds. For his efforts, Sermon later earned the Silver Star.78 Little, a native of Philadelphia, distinguished himself under fire when he directed his company in ground combat against the enemy, knocking out several machine gun nests during the fighting.79 And Ewel Polk’s performance garnered him a battlefield commission after he assisted his company commander in bringing his company through a Japanese ambush without serious casualties.80
Meanwhile, the other battalions of the regiment took part in the action. Men in the 1st Battalion’s C Company, under the command of Wilson Kispert, fought the elements of Hill 500 as much as the enemy until they were forced to retreat to the main perimeter.81 Throughout much of May, a reinforced platoon of the 93rd Reconnaissance Troop, led by Charles Collins, operated along the East-West Trail mapping the paths between the Saua and Reini rivers where they had to endure stiff resistance from opposing forces on various occasions. During one fire-fight, the patrol was ambushed by a large Japanese contingent, and large numbers of men (including Collins himself) suffered serious injuries and several were reported missing in action.82 But not before James Owens, from Cleveland; Walter Jeffress, from Waterbury, Connecticut; and Clarence Reese, from Cotton Plant, Arkansas, knocked out a Japanese mortar squad despite being surrounded by enemy forces. For their efforts, these men received the Bronze Star Medal.83 By the summer of 1944, the 25th Regimental Combat Team and adjoining personnel had performed numerous tactical operations throughout much of the area, often encountering natural obstacles such as jungle growth and rushing streams. As 25th infantryman and patrol leader Walter Greene recalled, “We went on patrol every day, at least the lieutenants went out every day with different men and we were in a combat situation for two months, every day, seven days a week.”84
Black 93rd GIs also paid a heavy price for their role in the operations along the Numa-Numa Trail. During a patrolling mission, an ammunition and pioneer platoon, led by John Trice, had fallen prey to an enemy ambush while trying to evacuate troops of the Americal Division’s 132nd Infantry. By the end of the fighting, Hugh Carroll, Oginal Ryan, William Ash, and Joseph Mallory lay dead, and the platoon was forced to retreat to the perimeter. But Stephen H. Simpson single-handedly destroyed a Japanese machine gun nest during the fighting before helping a patient back to the Americal Division outpost, receiving special commendation.85 During this opening stage of fighting, nearly thirty soldiers were killed, and nearly sixty were wounded.86 The efforts of the men of the 25th Combat Team were reinforced by the evacuation of casualties by medical officers and men in a medical detachment under the direction of Meharry Medical College and Howard University–educated surgeons George Porter and Philip Williams. Carrying wounded men over a very steep saddle between Hills 250 and 600 to field ambulances posted nearly 6 miles away, most of the men performed extraordinary duties as ward attendants, litter bearers, and surgical technicians, often under intense enemy fire.87
Porter and Williams were not the only African American surgeons who worked to reduce the high rate of casualties in the Solomon Islands that summer. A medical detachment of the men formed litter bearer squads that greatly assisted the 25th Infantry’s 2nd Battalion during its operations along the Numa-Numa Trail, sometimes carrying men nearly 3,000–4,000 yards back to the company perimeter. When men in the platoons, led by District of Columbia residents Conway Jones and Walter Sanderson, sustained shrapnel injuries moving against Japanese troops along the East-West Trail east of the Torokina River, medical officers Dunbar Gibson and Ernest Williams and their aides crawled from one foxhole to another cutting and bandaging their wounds.88 What’s more, clearing stations, commanded by Washington, D.C., natives and Howard University Medical School graduates Harold Whitted and Lincoln Shumate, received special commendations for their efficient treatment of wounded 25th Infantry soldiers during the first weeks of the fighting.89 And on nearby Stirling Island in the Treasury Group, Claude Ferebee—a Norfolk, Virginia, native and a graduate of Columbia University Dental School—established and operated a dental clinic that paid special attention to the needs of the men in the 369th Infantry.90 The extent to which 93rd medical officers won a hard-earned acceptance from their superior officers was reflected in the praise of the division psychiatrist written after he witnessed their deft handling of the combat team’s casualties despite the lack of manpower and supplies in early April 1944. “In view of the foregoing conditions,” he wrote, “I consider the progress made by the officers and men of the 318th Medical Battalion in handling the entire situation a good job.”91
During this period, African American soldiers in the division encountered many situations in which they found themselves compelled to combat racism in the military at the same time that they waged war against the enemy and the treacherous climate. First, many soldiers attached to the unit sensed the reluctance expressed by some 14th Corps officers to accept them as combat troops. Throughout the operations on Bougainville Island in April and May, division members constantly complained of unclear field orders, insufficient patrol preparation time, and the indifferent attitudes that 14th Corps officers expressed toward their actions. In several instances, their suspicions were warranted. For example, in requesting Fiji scouts for a late April attack, 93rd Division commander Leonard Boyd was told by the G-3 that “the Corps Commander [Griswold] had refused to let the Fijis go, stating that we had to stand on our own sometime and we could start now.”92 Boyd interpreted Griswold’s denial as evidence of the corps commander’s willingness to prove the division’s unsuitability for combat. Less than a month later, he wrote to his superiors, “The implication was not flattering to our troops and was another instance of the lack of concern in the Ninety-third Division as to their success in battle. I feel that the higher officers in Fourteenth Corps are perfectly willing to see this division relegated to service troop status and that they do not want relatively untried colored troops, with their racial problems, under their command. Our campaign here is a shotgun marriage to the Fourteenth Corps and it is apparent that we have two strikes on us and no balls.”93
Other officers in the area also sensed the attitudes detected by Boyd and other 93rd servicemen. When sociologist Edward Hall visited black troops in the Pacific theater during the summer of 1944, he noted, “White commanders of higher echelons did not know what to do with Negro units because if nothing else, they were a subject of embarrassment.”94 And in February 1945, Harry Johnson, who had just been appointed as the division commanding general, made a similar observation when he stated: “No white officer likes to be assigned to a Negro outfit because of the present attitude of those high up towards Negroes. He regards such an assignment as partaking of the nature of punishment and as reflection on his capacity.”95
The attitudes expressed by Boyd and Johnson did not escape the attention of many black 93rd soldiers, who deeply resented the condescending attitudes of senior white officers toward them within their own ranks. Many black officers felt that some white officers in command of segregated outfits considered their assignments as a punishment and worked desperately to obtain transfers to other units. In an intelligence report written at the time, the 369th Infantry S-2 commented, “The fact that morale of the white officers within this organization is low is definitely shown by their private conversations. Most of the white officers are discontented because they say they were not rotated to white units as was originally planned during the activation of the regiment.”96
Detroit resident and division medical officer Robert Bennett observed this resentment firsthand. At the end of the 25th’s campaign on Bougainville, Bennett wrote, “It is known among the troops that many of the white officers who were in command positions do not care to serve with Negro troops. Evidence for this sentiment includes the numerous statements and requests for transfer or reassignment with white troops made by these officers when it was learned that the unit was definitely moving overseas.”97 James Whittico, who commanded the division’s clearing station during most of its combat activities on Bougainville, echoed Bennett’s sentiments when he wrote during the same period: “It’s a known fact that many white officers serving with the Ninety-third Division had no desire to serve with Negro troops.” Whittico also claimed that many white officers interpreted patrolling with black troops in the Bougainville jungles as a form of punishment: “White officers seldom went out with patrols on Bougainville and saw patrol assignments as punitive measures for those junior officers against whom there existed grievances or prejudices.”98
White officers were not the only soldiers associated with the division who expressed apprehension about receiving such assignments. George Little, the division’s chief psychiatry officer, noted in late April 1944, “Some junior officers believed that patrol duty is used as a punitive measure. Patrol duty should be limited to the best soldiers and should carry with it a certain amount of distinction … the attitude to be attained should be ‘you are selected to go on patrol because you are a good soldier’ rather than ‘if you do not behave, you will be sent on patrol’ and the soldier thinks he may be killed.”99 Another 93rd serviceman, who was assigned to the 593rd Field Artillery Battalion during this period, echoed Little’s sentiments: “There was an unwritten rule expressed among enlisted men at this time … you screw up and the company commander will get a transfer for you to the infantry and that eventually led to patrolling assignments. For this reason alone, no one in my unit wanted to be transferred.”100 And Julius Young, a 22-year-old second lieutenant who had openly protested the army’s promotion policies in 1943, witnessed this practice firsthand. “As a result of the statement that I made, I received a lot of assignments that I shouldn’t have been getting, and I probably did more patrolling than any other junior officer in the outfit … sometimes staying weeks longer than the next officer.”101
On numerous occasions, black 93rd GIs alluded to these sentiments in communiqués, letters, and speeches conveyed to loved ones, prominent Afro-American leaders, black press corps members, and government officials. Nelson Peery wrote home to his mother while convalescing in a Bougainville clearing station hospital from gunshot wounds sustained during a patrolling mission, “Something must be ready to come off pretty soon. Yesterday my company commander came up to see the men and then the top kick [first sergeant] and my battalion commander comes around to console me. I’ll bet they try to send me back on patrol when I get back.”102 Likewise, George Leighton, an officer with the 25th Infantry, wrote to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt from the front: “Not far from my bomb-proof shelter are Negro soldiers who are shedding their blood in a way that made sad reading for race relations in our country.”103
Some conveyances of these sentiments were less oblique than others. In an early July 1945 letter, civilian aide Truman Gibson was told by a high-ranking black officer in the division’s 318th Medical Battalion about “a definite, but unofficial attempt being fostered out here, to forever keep the unit in obscurity and to discredit anything that they might do, which would place them in a favorable light as combat troops.” The officer went on to describe the racial indignities that black GIs faced in the Pacific and warned Gibson that “the present policy of temporizing the public back home as to what we are doing should be stopped … I cannot understand how and why newspapers continue to print false statements about us.”104 Later that month, several officers in the division wrote Norfolk Journal and Guide’s publisher, P. B. Young, complaining of the lack of promotions in the Medical Staff Headquarters even though there were a number of vacant positions. They told Young:
We must exert more and constant pressure through existing and future contacts and channels to correct the practices going on here-now … because there is a increased fervor to depress, discredit and criticize the Negro officer. The enlisted personnel also feel these acts keenly. We cannot stand idle; we need outside help. We therefore solicit your good offices and unbiased opinion on the matter. Request that if you find our problem sufficiently important to the race as a whole, that segment of service we represent, then contact the War Department with all the fervor of that race through all available channels now open or to be opened.105
K Company and the Rumor Mill
The uneasy feelings that black division members had regarding army life and senior cadres in the corps area became specific concerns during the spring of 1944. On the morning of 7 April, 180 soldiers in a reinforced company of the 25th Infantry’s 3rd Battalion made their way down the north side of Hill 250 and crossed the east and west juncture of the Torokina River. Led by K Company commander Captain James Curran, 164th infantryman Ralph Brodin, and Lieutenant Oscar Davenport, the men then proceeded to hack their way along a prominent enemy trail nearly 2,000 yards into thick undergrowth. Led by K Company commander Captain James J. Curran, 164th infantryman Ralph Brodin, and Lieutenant Oscar Davenport, their mission was to set up an ambush on the Japanese path approximately 3,000 miles from the river. Armed with nine additional Browning automatic rifles, two light machine guns, and only one 60-millimeter mortar, the men were a part of the intensive patrolling conducted by the 25th Infantry’s 3rd Battalion north and east of Hill 250. But the men were not told that, just two days earlier, a reconnaissance patrol from Company K had reported that, although enemy resistance was slight, the trail had been heavily traveled by nearly a hundred Japanese foot soldiers who had evacuated the area five days earlier.106
As the company traveled along the trail, the platoon leaders relayed the company commander’s order of movement to their subordinates. But what followed afterward has been subject to conjecture. According to verbal instructions given by Curran, the first platoon had the mission of providing security to the front and breaking the trail; the second platoon had been ordered to provide flank security, and the third platoon had received instructions to provide rear security. All had gone well until the patrol discovered an old Japanese hospital area surrounded by five bamboo shelters just a few miles from the trail block. Sending out finger patrols to the right, left, and rear as previously ordered, the black enlisted men and officers of the first platoon, led by Abner Jackson, Clarence Adams, and Nathan Love, among others, drew fire from several Japanese soldiers about 15 yards away. When Curran attempted to regroup by instructing the men to fan out to the left and right in order to report what they saw, intense fire from Japanese forces broke out from the immediate front.
Meanwhile, the men in the first platoon made the best out of a bad situation until enemy fire forced them to retreat to the rear of the company. Left exposed to enemy fire, most of the black soldiers in the second and third platoons heard orders given by Curran to form a retreating line—but bedlam resulted as indiscriminate firing took place all around them. Only after forward observer William Crutcher ordered the 593rd, the division’s field artillery unit, to fire nearly twenty-five rounds on the area did the unit manage to regain control of the situation. However, by the time the members of K Company regrouped at the company command post on Hill 250, twenty enlisted men were wounded, and the body of Oscar Davenport lay among those killed in action as a result of his efforts to maintain control over his men during the skirmish. Among the missing were Edward Dennis, James Graham, Hue Morrow, and five other men; also missing were a radio, a light machine gun, the 60-millimeter mortar, and valuable combat equipment. Days later, a detail of men led by Abner Jackson returned to the area, where they found the bodies of the dead men and the equipment lost from the previous day. Shortly afterward, the bodies of Oscar Davenport and the seventeen men killed in action were laid to rest in a makeshift cemetery on Bougainville Island, and the army notified their next of kin.107
K Company’s difficulties that fateful day spurred controversy as Americal Division investigators struggled during April and May to piece together the unit’s actions. After interviewing the enlisted men and officers who participated in the patrol, the inspector general found that the initial shooting of the finger patrols directed by Curran caused the men to open fire in the direction of units next to them, and he charged Edward Dennis, who had returned to the battalion command post just hours after the incident, with “misconduct” in the face of enemy fire. He remarked, “The failure of the mission of Company ‘K,’ Twenty-fifth Infantry Regiment, 93rd Division, rested with the actions of a number of enlisted men who lost control of themselves to the extent that they did not obey repeated orders to keep their positions and to hold their fire and this influenced others by their actions. The actions of these men in a large measure may be attributed to their being under fire for the first time and it is not possible to fix specific responsibility.”108
But the soldiers who testified told a different story. Will Jones, a squad leader in the first platoon, recalled, “The formation the Japanese were in was of a horseshoe shape, men on both sides of the trail. They probably saw us before we entered the bivouac area and we were more or less surrounded.” Jones went on to explain that his platoon had to endure a very difficult withdrawal under fire, commenting, “We did everything we could to get out of the situation.”109 When asked where his platoon was located, Edward Dennis told a colonel, “Platoon, sir, I had trouble just getting myself out.” Eventually cleared of all charges, Dennis was evacuated to a nearby medical facility for physical exhaustion a week later.110 Eyewitnesses to the firing that occurred during the incident suggested that the heavy undergrowth greatly exacerbated the mobility and communication problems of the unit. For example, when told by Captain Curran to have his platoon hold the line with machine gun fire, first-platoon leader Abner Jackson replied, “I don’t see how I can”—with no support on his platoon’s right flank, Jackson was concerned about incurring numerous casualties. Yet while obeying the direct order and proceeding to rejoin his unit at the front, he heard a messenger state that Curran had wanted the platoon to get the wounded to the rear and set up security for them.
Confusion as to the manner in which the men received the order also may have led to the platoon’s retreat, thus exposing the second and third platoons to greater danger. Some GIs pointed out that the Japanese shouting commands to them in English only added to the confusion. John Marshall, a sergeant in the second platoon, recalled, “The Japanese in front shouted in English, ‘cease-fire’ and ‘hold your fire.’” Forward observer William Crutcher remembered that he heard four or five Japanese speaking to the men from their right and the left. In the words of Hilary Moore of the second platoon, “The men seem to become excited by the ‘yelling’ of the Japanese.” James Graham, an enlisted man in the first platoon, stated, “I shot one Jap right in the chest and the Jap yelled, ‘you got me’ in plain English. This led me to believe that it was one of my own men.” Isaiah Adams also recounted that “their voices sounded funny but you could hear them repeating everything we said. When we said, ‘hold your fire,’ they mimicked the order in their high pitched voices.”111
However, more than a few enlisted men and officers in K Company blamed the unit’s difficulties on the actions taken by their company commander. Twenty soldiers interviewed by the inspector general pointed out that Captain Curran, who had remained largely in the company rear area, had little grasp of the situation they faced at the front. For example, John Marshall testified that the men in third platoon demanded to withdraw and reorganize only to be told to stay on the line and fight. Likewise, Clarence Adams of the first platoon stated, “After the fighting started, I said to a sergeant, we need someone on the right side of the trail. The sergeant then told me that Captain Curran said that the second platoon was coming but the platoon did not come.”112 Nevertheless, the 93rd headquarters’ investigation of June 1944 absolved Curran of responsibility in the matter, and members of the 25th Infantry high command recommended disciplinary proceedings and the reclassification or “weeding out” of lieutenants Moore and Jackson from the unit.113 During the same period, Isaiah Adams and Leroy Morgan were court-martialed and reclassified for stateside duty.114
What the men of K Company failed to realize at the time was that the patrol incident had rekindled the rumors about the performance of black troops in the field and the assumptions that army planners held regarding the fighting capabilities of black enlisted men and officers. Written at the end of the 25th Infantry’s campaign on Bougainville Island, 14th Corps commander Oscar Griswold’s conclusions provide a window into the eagerness with which the army high command wanted to confirm their negative attitudes regarding black troops and how K Company’s ordeal tended to overshadow the overall contributions made by the division:
(1) It is apparent that the unit had had little “jungle training”; consequently, as individuals or as a unit, there were not prepared to handle adequately problems encountered in jungle operations. Most individuals showed willingness to learn from white troops; however, their ability to learn, and to retain what has been taught, is generally inferior to that of white troops.
(2) In general, discipline seems satisfactory; however, there is a tendency on the part of junior colored officers to make the minimum effort to carry out instructions. This same tendency exists among the enlisted men when they received instructions from these junior officers. As a rule colored officers do not have control of the enlisted men. On the other hand, those units having a large proportion of white officers appear to be better controlled, trained and disciplined.
(3) Initiative is generally lacking, especially among platoon commanders and lower grades. The presence of higher-ranking officers, especially whites, is necessary to assure the tackling and accomplishment of any task.
(4) To date, the Twenty-fifth Infantry, though better trained than the 1st Battalion of the 24th Infantry, has not progressively improved to the extent of the later unit.
On the basis of his negative assessment of K Company’s difficulties, Griswold had initially rated the performance of the men in 25th Infantry Regimental Combat Team as “poor” compared with that of other infantry units in the theater, but his staff persuaded him to raise his estimation to “fair” for political reasons.115
Griswold’s harsh assessment, however, did not escape the attention of the division’s senior cadre. For example, 93rd Brigade commander Leonard Boyd noted in early May 1944, “This critical attitude has been manifested in General Griswold’s criticism of individual acts as indicative of all troops in the division. Informal conversation with Americal Division and Corps officials leaves no doubt in my mind that most of them have a basic distrust of the Negro officer and his ability to lead Negro soldiers in combat.”116 Greencastle, Indiana, native Richard Hurst, who furnished radios and field artillery support for the 25th Regimental Combat Team, commented years later, “The officers under the Fourteenth Corp Command seem to have a disdainful view of our outfit because I know that the Twenty-fifth Infantry did their part in the patrolling and reconnaissance mission…. I was there. I never had anyone tell me of any cowardly acts by the Infantry; if anything, the comments were the opposite.”117 Yet many of the officers within the division repeated rumors of cowardice among black soldiers in K Company. In June 1944, 25th Infantry Regimental Combat Team commander Edwin Yon commented, “There were many instances of excellent leadership that produced aggressive action and successful results. Unfortunately there are others that were rather sordid and showed a lack of leadership in its entirety. For instance, helmets of a friendly patrol were seen through the bushes in the distance. A few minutes later some guns of its own battalion far to its rear were test fired. The patrol stampeded back to the company perimeter.”118
For black GIs who served in division-size units within the segregated army elsewhere during World War II, the distorted information provided by rumor often carried deep racial overtones. For example, groups of men from the all-black U.S. 92nd Infantry Division disembarked in Naples, Italy, in August 1944 after spending nearly two and a half years training in Alabama, Kentucky, Indiana, and Arizona. Three regiments and an assortment of special combat teams, tank destroyers, and field artillery battalions of the 92nd Division participated in the Arno River seizing and crossing as the 5th Army advanced toward the Gothic Line of the northern Apennines while attached to the 4th Corps’s 1st Armored Division. While in the area, its regimental combat teams successfully engaged German forces, extending the front more than 20 miles. However, the conduct of some of the troops on the battlefield attracted controversy. During the fall of 1944, an element of the 92nd Infantry Division sustained heavy casualties when it encountered fierce enemy fire in its attempt to gain and hold Mount Cauala. By the time the unit left Italy, the officers and enlisted men with the division were reorganized and reassigned, with many of them subjected to summary court-martial trials and reductions in rank. To make matters worse, vicious rumors about their conduct under fire circulated widely throughout the European theater, even reaching the Senate floor.119 Terms like “mass hysteria,” “lack of pride of accomplishment,” and “melting away” filled the numerous reports filed by army officers and observers blaming the difficulties of the division on its black officers and enlisted personnel.120 But many black soldiers with the division and black reporters covering the division contested the negative judgments of their performance in the field of battle. As one former black officer with the unit recalled years later, “The Ninety-second Division was permitted (or caused) to fail in certain combat operations; and those failures were documented for the specific purpose of discrediting blacks as efficient officers and combat soldiers. Therefore, the Army used the division as a convenient scapegoat to maintain the status quo in the military establishment and in society.”121
This was also the case for the men who served with the 93rd Infantry Division in the Pacific war. The unit, it was suggested over and over again, was a poor infantry organization commanded by inefficient black junior officers, but it was better than average in housekeeping duties. For example, while touring various areas of the Southwest Pacific during February of the following year, a public relations officer in a forward area told NAACP executive secretary Walter White that the 93rd Infantry Division, which had been assigned to beachhead in Bougainville, had broken under fire and run, causing a large number of white officers and enlisted men to lose their lives. Some of the rumors were even circulated by 93rd Division officers themselves. During the fall of 1944, 93rd Division chief of staff Stanley Prouty, who had just returned from the South Pacific theater, met with John J. McCloy and told him that the 93rd Division had failed to take a beachhead at Bougainville Island.122 A month later, Southwest Pacific theater commander Douglas MacArthur quoted Griswold’s assessment of the 93rd, rating the work of the division’s infantrymen as poor, the performance of the artillery men as good, and its vehicle maintenance “of high order.” “The general level of leadership was poor, particularly in the companies and platoons,” MacArthur stated.123 Around the same time, 8th Army commander Robert Eichelberger inspected the men in the 93rd Division and claimed, “I have never seen so much snap in my life. They had every vehicle polished, the engines were cleaned up fine, and every colored boy saluted as far as he could see you.”124
To make matters worse, the disparaging view of the unit reached the Roosevelt White House. After receiving news about the performance of the 25th Infantry in May 1944 from Undersecretary of War John McCloy, Henry Stimson observed, “I do not believe they can be turned into really effective combat troops without all officers being white. This is indicated by many of the incidents herein.”125 By the end of the war, the racist misperceptions regarding the actions of the men in K Company had reached such a level that army chief of staff George Marshall echoed Stimson’s view that the 25th Infantry’s performance “is a very clear demonstration of the unreliability of Negro troops unless they are at least supported by white commissioned and non-commissioned officers.”126 Four years later, he told a reporter, “The men of the Ninety-third wouldn’t fight…, couldn’t get them out of the caves to fight.”127 Although Marshall should have known better than to have made such an erroneous statement, the fact that he and Stimson held such strong viewpoints illustrated the readiness on the part of some War Department officials to use the flimsy evidence collected by 14th Corps investigators both to denigrate the fighting abilities of black soldiers and to demonstrate white supremacy.
But not every senior official in Washington accepted Griswold’s negative view of the 25th Infantry’s performance. Upon learning of the 25th Infantry’s action under fire at Bougainville, John McCloy stated: “Although they show some important limitations, on the whole I feel that the report is not so bad as to discourage us. The general tone of these reports reminds me of the first reports we got of the 99th Squadron. You remember that they were not very good, but that the Squadron has now taken its place in the line and has performed very well. It will take more time and effort to make good combat units out of them, but in the end, I think they can be brought over to the asset side.”128
Home Front Perceptions
Around the same time, as the speculation surrounding the ordeal of K Company began to heat up, black 93rd servicemen and sectors of the black community worked to counter the distorted information relating to their conduct on the field of battle. Largely revolving around a discourse of racial democracy and home, formal and informal networks of communication sprang forward in order to challenge the biased accounts and to serve as reservoirs of resistance. Throughout the spring months of 1944, the Cleveland Call & Post, the Baltimore Afro-American, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, and the Chicago Bee were filled with frontpage stories filed by war correspondents and soldiers alike about black courage and heroism in the Pacific. Banner headlines such as “93rd Pushes On in Drive against Japs” and “93rd in South Pacific” hailed the activities of division members at every turn.129
And the informal communication networks forged between division members and correspondents circulated news about other black units in the Pacific as well as for loved ones at home. Of his coverage of the 93rd Division’s activities in the Pacific, for instance, Chicago Defender correspondent Enoch Waters remembered, “My job was quite simple. I followed the same procedure as the unit moved from each island, getting the names and hometowns of as many men as possible who were engaged in different types of assignments. Interestingly, many of the men were as hungry for the news of the Pacific War as the people back home. And I tried to answer the questions that I thought were in the minds of people back home for every black family was concerned about the fate of its young men in the military. I believed their primary concern was not how the war was progressing but how the GIs were doing.”130
But nowhere were these formal and informal networks of communication made more evident than in the campaign waged by NAACP national secretary Walter White to draw the attention of federal authorities and African American society to the army’s employment of the division in the Pacific. In the early months of 1945, White was traveling extensively throughout the region visiting black GIs on the battlefield when he heard rumors regarding K Company’s difficulties on Bougainville Island and countless stories from black press correspondents that the 93rd Division had been reconstituted for labor duties.131 Inquiring further into the matter, White appeared at the 93rd Division headquarters at Hollandia, Dutch New Guinea, where he heard reports given by Brigadier General Leonard Boyd, 368th Infantry commander James Urquhart, 318th Medical Battalion commander Robert Bennett, and other officers of the unit’s activities on Bougainville. Boyd told White that “the story was a lie out of the whole cloth” and explained to him that the Bougainville assault had been made and the defensive perimeter established four months prior to the arrival of the 25th Regimental Combat Team. According to the division brigade commander, “The Twenty-fifth Infantry had accomplished its mission in a manner that was commendable for a veteran outfit, outstanding for a unit in its first combat action.” And White heard other officers claim that the 93rd Division had performed the very limited combat duties assigned to the unit in a creditable fashion and that the stories that surrounded the division’s participation in the taking of a beachhead on the island were absolutely false. Several officers in the U.S. 37th Division who witnessed the 25th Infantry in action echoed the observations of Boyd and other division cadres and told the NAACP secretary that the unit “conducted itself well at Bougainville.”
After learning the events surrounding the reported Company K episode, however, White met with several 93rd Division GIs, who informed him that Harry H. Johnson, the newly appointed division commander, had greatly bolstered the unit’s morale by relieving incompetent white officers and those who attempted to use their affiliation with the division to obtain promotions and transfers out of the unit. But White also learned, to his dismay, that many of the unit’s capable and fair-minded West Point–educated officers, such as Arthur Amos, George Coleman, Carl McFerren, and Federick Bendtson, had been transferred out of the division to the Americal Division. The soldiers then went on to express their resentment over the transferring of black officers out of the division who disagreed with unit policies regarding promotion and assignment, and they conveyed their fears that the division would be converted into service units similar to those that had replaced the 2nd Cavalry Division in North Africa.
Hoping to focus the War Department’s attention on what he perceived as a demoralizing situation for the division troops, White adopted the cause as his own and dispatched a detailed report of the unit’s travails to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on 12 February 1945. Protesting against the unit’s unloading ships and rudimentary drilling during the past nine months, White recommended that the division be reconstituted as an integral unit, relieved of its garrison duties, and retrained for front-line action. The NAACP secretary also demanded that the War Department bring to an end its assignment of reclassified white and black officers to the division, the transferring of all white officers out of the unit who objected to serving with black troops, and the placement of black officers in the division headquarters. Finally, White demanded that the army investigate Southwest Pacific theater commander Douglas MacArthur’s policies regarding black troops, noting, “Statements have been made to me by responsible persons that MacArthur is at least partly responsible for the failure to train properly and utilize the Ninety-third Division in combat.” White’s suspicion of the lack of action taken by MacArthur and high-ranking members within the Southwest Pacific command may have been heightened by the fact that when he requested an interview with the general regarding the use of black troops in his theater of operations, he was denied a meeting on several occasions on the grounds that the general was in the midst of planning the recapture of the Philippine Islands.132
Yet when asked by the War Department two weeks later to respond to White’s accusations of a deliberate campaign to disparage the 93rd’s front-line activities and the Southwest Pacific’s inefficient employment policies regarding the unit, MacArthur presented another view. The Southwest Pacific commander referred to the comments made by the 14th Corps about the unit’s performance seven months earlier as a way of justifying the duties he assigned to the division. “The First Cavalry, Seventh, Seventy-Seventh, Forty-First and Thirty-Eighth Divisions were all superior to the Ninety-Third except in the matter of motor maintenance,” MacArthur claimed. With regard to White’s argument that the 93rd had been broken up, he contended that few divisions within the Southwest Pacific area sustained their initial makeup. According to MacArthur, the 93rd Division’s duties in the Southwest Pacific theater centered upon holding the defensive perimeters of occupied areas, performing labor details in port areas, and training for combat patrols. With this, he informed the War Department that the division had been alerted for movement from Hollandia, New Guinea, to Morotai, where it would be employed against enemy forces in the area. Referring to the assignment and transfer of white officers both in and outside the division, the Southwest Pacific theater commander also argued that while every unit assigned to the area found itself compelled to follow this policy because of the limited number of replacements, many of the 93rd Infantry Division’s capable field-grade officers had been requested by other units. On White’s claims of racial discrimination toward the unit, MacArthur finally remarked, “The violent opinions and unfounded statements of Mister White would seem to mark him as a troublemaker and a menace to the war effort.”133
The Southwest Pacific area commander, nevertheless, recognized the adverse publicity surrounding his handling of black troops in his theater of operations and agreed to meet with the NAACP executive secretary to discuss the 93rd at the division headquarters at Hollandia in early March 1945. During their high-profile meetings, MacArthur repeated his claim that “race had nothing whatsoever to do with the Ninety-third’s ability to fight.” Recalling his service as a junior officer who commanded Filipino troops decades earlier, the general argued, “Any man who says that another man’s fighting ability can be measured by color is wrong.” MacArthur based his reasoning for not utilizing the division on the lack of shipping and his inspectors’ reports on the division advising him that the unit’s morale was low.134
MacArthur’s remarks seem to have allayed White’s apprehensions somewhat because after learning that the 93rd had been reassigned to Morotai, the NAACP secretary wrote the general less than a week later: “You certainly acted promptly after our talk of March 1. Your action in bringing the division together in one island for the first time since the Ninety-third left the States will undoubtedly have immediate effect in improvement of efficiency and a sense of unity.”135 What White failed to realize at the time, however, was that MacArthur had no intentions of employing the division in front-line duty and had planned to use the unit only as rear-echelon forces in his plans to reenter the Philippine Islands. In fact, according to the plans of 26 February adopted by Southwest Pacific theater commander, the 93rd would perform “garrison duties on occupied islands and on Morotai” and would be used only in the later stages of the operation as mopping up forces.136
MacArthur’s encounters with the NAACP executive secretary and his attitudes toward black soldiers in the military may have been as paradoxical as the responses among 93rd Division members to their overseas experiences. For example, division officer Francis Ellis, a native of Chandler, Oklahoma, who was present during the general’s meetings with the NAACP executive secretary, described an incident that occurred on the last day:
When Walter White came to Hollandia, Dutch New Guinea, after the Pittsburgh Courier and the Baltimore Afro-American made a lot of noise about the 93rd being changed over from infantry troops to labor troops, General MacArthur wondered why this white man was so concerned about black troops. On the last day when the general, White, and their aides were ending their discussions and were bidding each other good-bye, MacArthur asked him why he was so interested in these niggers anyway. When White told him that he too was black, the general turned and left the division headquarters without saying another word.137
White’s efforts, however, also had their limits, as not all black 93rd GIs favored the stance that he taken on their behalf. No sooner had the NAACP leader arrived stateside than he received a letter from sixteen division servicemen withdrawing their membership and criticizing the organization’s efforts to redeploy them to front-line duty:
Your organization has failed to confine your work to the home front. This was substantiated by a recent visit to our organization by one of your representatives. The only person that he contacted was an officer, whose name cannot be mention [sic] hereon for various reasons. The only thing that he seems to be interested in, was the engaging of our organization in more combat. He didn’t bother to ask nor inquire why we have been overseas for approximately fifteen months and haven’t seen nor been near any signs of civilization for recreational purposes or otherwise. Personally, we feel that he didn’t give a darn as he hasn’t experienced the separation as we have from our loved ones. In other words, take care of the home front, we’ll handle things from this end.138
And still other GIs with the unit expressed a jaded view altogether of the war correspondents who covered their activities. Specifically, although many division members felt that the correspondents had worked diligently to circulate news of their contributions to the war effort, they sometimes resented their zealous efforts to cast them as symbols in the struggle for equality. The tension between black journalists and troops serving on the battlefield manifested at many levels. While traveling with the division throughout the Solomon Islands in 1944, Chicago Defender correspondent Enoch Waters was approached by several angry GIs and roundly criticized. Waving a clipping taken from the Defender that clamored for their deployment to battle, the soldiers told Waters, “I don’t know whom you folks think you’re speaking for, but it certainly ain’t us. You folks are sitting back at home and too old or too beat up to be drafted. It’s easy to say let them fight and die.” When the Defender correspondent reiterated the position taken by the press and the NAACP that their placement in combat units served as an indication of fairer treatment in the army, GIs jeered him derisively and asked, “Why should we volunteer to sacrifice our lives for a Jim Crow country?”139 In a similar vein, when asked by a member of Howard University’s administration to reflect on his wartime experiences, officer George Leighton wrote home from the Pacific during the period: “I can tell you that here among our troops the average colored soldier is becoming more and more disgusted with the pitifully asinine reports that are printed each week in the Afro-American, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Chicago Defender. Not only are those articles inaccurate. They go so far as to print blatant falsehoods that make the colored troops the laughing stock of the white soldiers who know the true facts.”140
Little did Leighton and other black 93rd GIs realize it at the time, but many service dependents and friends had reached a similar conclusion. After receiving word of her husband’s passing, Ollive Davenport was putting her life back together and caring for her daughter Patricia Ann when she was invited to Fort Huachuca to accept her husband’s Bronze Star as a tribute to his self-sacrificing deeds in the Bougainville campaign. Although no record survives of what she said on the day of the ceremony, in its coverage of the event, the California Eagle published photographs of the Tucson, Arizona, resident standing proud and resolute before members of the post high command.141 But Eagle correspondents failed to realize that with her attendance at the ceremony and the countless statements made by service family members and friends around the same time, Ollive Davenport and other service relatives had emerged as the chief custodians of the physical and emotional well-being of their loved ones in uniform. And in the process, they became important leaders in efforts to effect social and political change on a number of levels. For army planners, government officials, and black leaders and institutions, their voices in support of black servicemen would rumble loudly, resonating across the country as well as throughout the Southwest Pacific theater.
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