Unjustly Dishonored: An African American Division in World War I

Three: Engineers and Artillery

49 IF ONE TOOK THE opinions of the three battalion commanders and the colonel commanding the 368th Infantry of the Ninetysecond Division, it was evident that both black officers and black infantrymen failed in the Argonne. If, then, one took the opinions of the white officers in command of the 317th Engineer Regiment and the 167th Field Artillery Brigade of the division, it was evident that with white officers black troops in those specialties succeeded. The engineers worked in the Argonne from September through November 1918, as the Ninety-second moved from sector to sector. In Saint-Dié they had cooperated with the French in ensuring the safety of the Frapelle salient once the Ninety-second’s predecessor division, the U.S. Fifth, had taken it. In the Argonne the 317th Engineers initially worked on bridging the huge holes blown in the Route Nationale No. 46, the only good road for two of the I Corps’s three divisions in line, together with removing the masses of barbed wire and chevaux-de-frise. For the rest of the regiment’s time, until the end of the war (only Company E of the 317th went to the Marbache sector), the regiment devoted its attention to roads, under Lt. Col. J. Edward Cassidy, and narrow- and standard-gauge railroads under Col. Earl I. Brown.1 The 167th Field Artillery Brigade was in training in France until mid-October 1918—it could not train in the United States because of a lack of guns—going then to Marbache, where it showed its mettle, excellent support of the three infantry regiments in action there in the last days of the war, November 10–11. After the war the commanding brigadier wrote enthusiastically of how well his brigade handled itself, superior to other brigades in every way.2 three Engineers and Artillery U N J U S T LY D I S H O N O R E D 50 What a relief the easy relationships of officers and men in the engineer and artillery units of the Ninety-second, compared with the complaints and hostilities of the division’s infantry units! Almost no black civilians possessed the mathematical and technical training necessary for engineer and artillery officers. The war did not allow time to train such specialists. This was not a theory but a condition. It did not mean that the white officers in the Ninetysecond ’s engineers and artillery were without racial prejudice, for they had plenty of it. In that regard they were no better than the average white American. It did mean that the engineer and artillery officers were technicians, from whose direction their units’ drafted men had much to learn and thereby could accomplish their designated tasks. According to the U.S. Army table of organization, engineer regiments were not nearly as large as infantry regiments. The latter comprised 4,000 men, an engineer regiment 1,500. When the 317th Engineers left the Saint-Dié sector for the I Corps just before the Meuse-Argonne battle opened, it consisted of 56 officers and 1,499 men; similarly, an artillery brigade was much smaller than an infantry brigade, the latter consisting of two infantry regiments together with auxiliary units. An artillery brigade had three regiments of about 1,000 men and officers each, with a total strength of about 4,000, that is, an infantry regiment, although commanded by a brigadier general. 1 In the case of the 317th Engineer Regiment of the Ninety-second Division—all infantry divisions in World War I whether in the United States or Europe had engineer regiments as inherent parts of the divisions—the immediate issue, upon formation of the regiment , was the need (said Engineer Corps officers) of white engineer officers. This contention dominated the choice of officers for the regiment from the very beginning of its existence. In the end the officers were all white except physicians, a dentist, and the chaplain . The men were random choices from the draft, none chosen for any engineering training, or experience.3 E N G I N E E R S A N D A R T I L L E R Y 51 When the 317th formed at Camp Sherman in Ohio, the headquarters of the Ninety-second at Camp Funston in Kansas assigned the necessary number of officers from the pool created by graduates of Fort Des Moines, several captains and thirty...