Unjustly Dishonored: An African American Division in World War I

Two: Argonne

17 IF ONE WERE TO HAVE ASKED the white field officers of the 368th Regiment what was wrong with the regiment after the infantry battalions , one thousand men each, came out of the Argonne Forest, the three battalion majors and the colonel commanding would have said: their African American company officers, captains and lieutenants , and their men. The white officers would not be expected to answer in this way. The division chief of staff, Col. Allen J. Greer, believed the 368th was the best infantry regiment in the division.1 At the outset of the action the majors and their colonel may not have believed the chief of staff’s remark, but they thought the regiment would do all right. At the end they could say, with truth, that the regiment had done as well as its French opposites, the 9th and 11th Cuirassiers on Foot. But they were terribly disappointed and in the case of the major commanding the Third Battalion outraged by what had happened. The above analysis, to be sure, was nothing but racism, no analysis at all. It does not begin to analyze how the 368th got into trouble and how, eventually, it took its objective at the top of the subsector , the village of Binarville. At the end the plain fact was that the regiment succeeded, however embarrassing some of the episodes along the way. The reason for the good result had explanation in the details of the action in the forest. What happened to the battalions divided into two phases as the men went forward and sometimes backward . The first, with preliminary explanation of arrival, the borders of the subsector, and its geography and man-made obstacles, saw the Second Battalion under Major Elser move out, and back, on the initial day of the attack, September 26. The next day, September 27, two Argonne U N J U S T LY D I S H O N O R E D 18 marked a joint attack of the Second and Third battalions, the latter under Maj. Benjamin F. Norris; the battalions divided the front line. At the end of that second day they seemed secure. The second phase of the 368th Regiment’s experience in the Argonne opened with the event that labeled the regiment and the division and black officers and men as military failures—the disintegration of the two battalions. But there was more to the story than that. On the same day, September 28, the First Battalion under Maj. John N. Merrill went forward a short distance, came back to await the morning, and then moved up in earnest. The following day, September 30, at four o’clock, it entered Binarville, twenty minutes after the 9th Cuirassiers, and one company under Capt. H. G. Atwood went ahead to the northeast, where it spent the night. 1 The Ninety-second Division left Saint-Dié on September 21, and by train and truck and marching arrived in its assigned area as a reserve division for the American I Corps, holding the left line of the American Expeditionary Forces’ First Army, on September 24. The division’s 368th Infantry Regiment moved up that day to its subsector as part of a provisional brigade under the colonel of the 11th Cuirassiers. The regiments divided the subsector, French to the left of a line drawn between the village of Vienne-le-Château on the west, La Harazée on the east, both just above the Biesme River. The tiny stream meandered roughly east-west toward territory held by the French Fourth Army to the left of the line of the Meuse-Argonne (the lower half of the Argonne Forest eastward to the Meuse River). The subsector of Groupement Durand, the Franco-American provisional brigade, was to be a holding operation . The subsector moved north five kilometers into German terrain and for the Americans began with a width of approximately two kilometers and narrowed until at Binarville it was a half-kilometer . The theory behind the narrowing was that it would force the enemy to leave by having less and less territory in which to maneuver. By an alternative logic it was possible that the shrinking of an area of operations would favor the German defenders. A R G O N N E 19 The latter had prepared positions to use rifle and machine-gun fire, and artillery received larger targets as troops concentrated...