Unjustly Dishonored: An African American Division in World War I

Five: Conclusion

89 THE REPUTATION OF THE Ninety-second Division was not high before its 368th Regiment went into the Argonne Forest for five days. Thereafter it settled into the basement of divisional reputations . The reason was twofold. For one thing, the white officers of the division who in the Ninety-second were for the most part senior officers, field grade officers to employ the army phrase for grades of major and above, believed that blacks could not make good officers of any sort, nor could their men fight. The reason was a racial difference: the black race was mentally inferior. The other part of the reason for the low appraisal of African Americans as fighting men was a series of events that afflicted the Ninety-second after the end of the war. Those events had their beginnings in the Marbache sector where Generals Ballou and Bullard could not get along. The appearance of their antagonism was all in favor of Bullard, who was a canny maneuverer against the rough edges of Ballou’s personality . History, by which one means what Americans in subsequent years thought of the Ninety-second, came down against the division. Because of racism and events that followed the Argonne, the Ninety-second’s achievements were lost from view. In the Argonne and despite the retreat of the Second Battalion and the collapse of the Third, the First Battalion managed to move forward to Binarville, with a few men going beyond. If one considered this performance against the achievements of white divisions during the first attack of the First Army in the Meuse-Argonne, the showing of the 368th Regiment was not so bad. In the I Corps to the right the three divisions did not do well, with the Seventyseventh moving ahead in its part of the Argonne with a slowness f i v e Conclusion U N J U S T LY D I S H O N O R E D 90 that was contrary to what General Pershing asked of his divisions. The second division of the corps, the Twenty-eighth, did likewise. The third, the Thirty-fifth, collapsed in the field, gave up territory it had taken, and had to be relieved and sent to a portion of the line where there was little action and it could refit and recover its nearly lost morale. In the next corps, the V Corps, the performances of all three of the divisions were so poor that General Pershing withdrew all three; the third of the V Corps divisions, the Seventy-ninth, did so badly that it held up the advance of all the divisions of the First Army for an entire day while the division fumbled in front of Montfaucon, where two of its regiments stalled before a minuscule German force. The last of the corps in line, the III Corps, did fairly well but not spectacularly, by any means. In the second and third attacks of the First Army, over the next weeks, the Americans managed only to inch their way forward against the defending German divisions. A little trouble with a single regiment of the Ninety-second Division was not worth the attention it received. Meanwhile, the achievements of the division’s engineer regiment and its artillery brigade, both units successful by any measure—those successes were ignored. The account of the 317th Engineers, written with admiration by Lieutenant Colonel Cassidy, together with two volumes of photographs, went into the division’s files, and the present writer believes he was the first person to look at Cassidy’s history and the photographs after the passage of nearly a century since the achievements they celebrated. The quick training and excellent firing of the 167th Field Artillery Brigade were praised by General Sherburne, whose blunt statements of what happened were notable ; they lay buried in the files of the U.S. Army Military History Institute, a part of the Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. The same can be said for the work of the Ninety-second’s three infantry regiments on line during the Second Army’s attack on November 10–11, 1918, all of which did well, the Second Battalion of the 365th Regiment making the only notable advance of any unit in General Bullard’s army, the other regiments succeeding at their assignments, all this when the three white divisions of the army failed to do anything. C O...