In order to substantiate his conclusions, Anderson cited examples of other non-white soldiers serving in Allied armies. Distorting recent history and ignoring all evidence to the contrary, he looked at the record of the British Indian Corps in 1914 and 1915. Despite the fact that these men had helped halt the German advance at the First Battle of Ypres, faced the newly invented horrors of gas warfare at the Second Battle of Ypres, and participated in the highly complex, well coordinated and (to begin with) successful Battle of Neuve Chapelle, US military authorities concluded that they had failed, because ‘colored troops could not stand the nervous strain of trench warfare’. Since American racism (like British racism) regarded Indians as being a people who occupied a higher position on the hierarchy of the races than men of African decent, their presumed failures bode ill for African Americans. If Indians had supposedly struggled on the Western Front, African Americans would – the logic went – fare even worse. Offering a similarly un-nuanced and cursory assessment of the performance of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, Anderson claimed – wrongly – that ‘The French had to remove their colored Senegalese troops.’ Arguing that non-white troops had broken under pressure, Anderson also claimed that black officers in the French Army were not trusted by the French authorities. While there was a great deal of racism in the French Army, and significant resistance in some quarters to the appointment of black officers, by 1918 there were innumerable examples of black men and officers who had amply demonstrated their abilities and won decorations for their service.*4
Throughout his long document, Colonel Anderson never argued that black men should be kept out of the army; rather, that once drafted they should be found roles that suited their supposedly limited intellects and in which their purported moral failings would not be an issue. However, almost immediately the reality of hundreds of thousands of African Americans being drawn into the army aroused deep hostility in sections of the white American press and public, especially in the South where the idea of black men being trained in the use of firearms, and perhaps made more confident and assertive by the experience of having served their nation, clashed with Southern ambitions to keep them subservient.
It was decided by the army authorities that black and white recruits were to be trained at the same camps. This was not because the army sought to break down the barriers between the races but because its proposals for two black-only training bases in the South were rejected, as it was felt by some that large numbers of militarily trained African Americans concentrated in two camps would constitute a national-security risk. To mollify such fears, it was felt that a preponderance of white troops at every base – at least two white recruits to every black recruit – would reassure concerned white civilians. Nevertheless, when black recruits were housed in army bases near centres of white population there was often uproar, despite the presence of larger numbers of white recruits on the same bases. In various states, such bases led to a tightening of segregation and sporadic outbursts of exemplary violence and persecution. There was especial hostility to the idea of African Americans from the North being brought to the South for training, as this risked introducing into the Southern states black men who were less cowed and terrorized by white violence. The fear that these Northern men would contaminate their Southern brothers with progressive, big-city ideas inspired local campaigns to have black regiments relocated; on occasion these campaigns were successful. The infamous Mississippi Senator James K. Vardaman, one of the most vocal defenders of lynching, called for all African-American troops to be trained only in the North, despite the fact that most of the recruits actually came from the South. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker rejected Vardaman’s demands.
Although black and white were housed on the same bases, they were formed into separate regiments and allotted segregated facilities. Even the trains carrying men to their bases were segregated. While facilities were separate, they were almost never equal. Many African-American recruits lived under appalling conditions; some were housed under canvas and lived without even the most basic equipment, much of which had been prioritized for white recruits. In some camps in the South, African-American recruits became little more than conscripted work gangs, used to perform manual labour and receiving little actual training. There were even incidents in which African Americans were leased by the army to Southern landowners as cheap labour. All that distinguished these unfortunate soldiers from convicts was the absence of chains. But the other symbol of the chain gang – the whip – was a different matter. There were reports of white non-commissioned officers carrying whips and other weapons. Some NCOs had replied to army advertisements looking for white men to take charge of black labour units and who were explicitly ‘Experienced in the Handling of Colored Men’.14 There is further evidence that some NCOs brought the wider, brutal culture of the chain gang into their methods of supervision, including two reports of deaths at their hands and numerous accounts of violence and threats being used to compel black soldiers to work. The African-American recruits themselves were quick to recognize their plight as being little different from that of convict labour gangs on the infamous state farms.
The assignment of African-American recruits to labour duties in the training camps was an early indication of what the army had in mind for most – if not all – of them. Colonel Anderson, in his report of May 1918, was able to reassure nervous white civilians that the recruits were, after all, without black officers and were ultimately, in Anderson’s words, ‘little more than labourers in uniform’.15 By attaching an African-American labour battalion to each divisional camp, the labour duties that would unavoidably arise could be done by what Anderson described as ‘the ignorant and diseased negroes not suited for service overseas’. This would mean that ‘the white combatant troops would be released for constant intensive training’. As the army had no intention of allowing most African Americans anywhere near the battlefields, and as it planned that a large proportion of them would not even be sent overseas, the health criteria for those answering the draft were lowered. African Americans who appeared at their draft boards physically frail, or even mentally ill, and who would have been rejected had they been white, were passed fit for service – fit enough to become labourers under the white NCOs. It was Anderson again who best explained the logic behind this decision. ‘In these days of conservation,’ he wrote:
…when every rag and bone and tin can is saved, human beings cannot be wasted. These colored men have to be inducted into the service by draft in their turn and it is believed that they ought to be put right to work at useful work which will be of real assistance to the United States in prosecuting the war, and will release men available for other service.
The result was that around 170,000 of the African Americans drafted into the US Army in 1917 and 1918 never left the United States. They remained on labour duties, in camps, ports and depots across the country.
It was the policy of the US Army, wrote Colonel Anderson ‘to select those colored men of the best physical stamina, highest education and mental development for the combatant troops’. There was, Anderson concluded, ‘every reason to believe that these specially selected men, the cream of the colored draft, will make first-class fighting troops’. The training of this small proportion for possible combat duties became, in large part, a case study in the ingenious sophistication of American racism in the early twentieth century. Although treatment varied from base to base, and state to state, many recruits – especially those who had been put forward for training as officers – received selective and inadequate training. Often, the elements of their training that were left out were those that involved instruction in the use of firearms. For African Americans, there was always a crippling lack of equipment too, a failure of supply far more acute than anything affecting white units. Furthermore, the kits they were issued with were often defunct and the weapons of antiquated patterns, different to those used in service. Some men were assigned to roles and specialisms for which they had not been prope
rly prepared. A whole catalogue of administrative failings and procedural lapses undermined the training and deployment of African Americans, and so great were they that they smacked not of instructional inefficacy but, at times, of something closer to deliberate sabotage. And again, prophesies fulfilled themselves. Convinced that African Americans lacked the intellect to perform as artillery officers, for example, the army provided the few recruits put forward for those roles with inadequate training – which produced men insufficiently competent to perform their roles fully, thus satisfying the army that its initial assessment had been correct.
The first transport ships taking US forces to Europe landed in June 1917, and on board were African-American troops. These early arrivals, like the 160,000 African Americans who were to come later, were channelled into the Services of Supply (SOS), the labour corps of the US Army. African Americans made up one-third of the SOS, even though they represented less than 10 per cent of all draftees. For these men, many of whom had been animated by a genuine sense of patriotism, being consigned to the Services of Supply was a profound humiliation – as it had been for the men from the British Caribbean islands who had been similarly deployed. Men who had dreamed of fighting for their nation or who had felt inspired by President Wilson’s evocation of a world ‘safe for democracy’ found themselves in a branch of army service that, although of critical importance, was routinely the butt of jokes. A song sung by US troops mocked the men of the SOS and the pretentions of the families of SOS members who had the audacity to fly flags from their homes proclaiming their sons were in military service. The most hurtful line ran: ‘O mother, take down your service flag, Your son’s in the SOS.’16
Just as during their time in the training camps back home, the African Americans of the SOS were assigned the most basic tented accommodation and a motley array of clothing. Among the many things they had in common with the men of the South African Native Labour Corps – in addition to poor accommodation, lack of basic freedoms and respect – was that the uniforms allotted to many of them were poor-quality cast-offs. They wore fatigues, basic overalls, or uniforms not good enough for the combat troops. And the United States was so ill-prepared for war in the summer of 1917 that some of the early African-American units were kitted out in old Union ‘Blues’ – Civil War-era uniforms, dug out of the stores by an enterprising quartermaster. The men who wore those uniforms, the sons and grandsons of slaves, went off to war in the uniforms of the army that had won their emancipation.
Within the SOS, African Americans worked in engineering parties, building depots and warehouses. They laboured on the railways, felled trees, built and repaired roads and worked as quarrymen. As with the Chinese labourers, they were also assigned the grimmest of all jobs. Those working in ‘Graves Registration’ were often involved in disinterring putrefying bodies from shallow battlefield graves. They would then record the details and re-inter the bodies. Also in common with the Chinese (who were now working for the Americans, as well as for the British and the French), many African Americans of the SOS worked within enemy artillery range: though reduced to the status of labours, they were not exempt from the dangers of the war. At Camp Romagne, near Verdun, 9,000 African Americans working in Graves Registration found the combination of such harrowing work and the open discrimination they faced too much to bear. Two African-American YMCA workers reported that members of the Knights of Columbus Catholic organization erected a tent at the camp on which they placed:
…a sign to keep colored soldiers away. The colored soldiers, heartsore because they… alone be forced to do this terrible task of moving the dead from where they had been temporarily buried to a permanent resting place, immediately resented the outrage and razed the tent to the ground. The officers became frightened lest there should be mutiny, [and] mounted a machine gun to keep order.17
Many thousands of African Americans spent the war in the US supply ports of Brest, Bordeaux and St Nazaire. There, they worked around the clock in a never-ending rota of shifts to unload the armada of ships that arrived daily, as youthful America infused the old continent with its lifeblood and industrial energy. Hundreds of tons of war materials and supplies were unloaded each day. On some days the totals ran into thousands of tons or even tens of thousands. The men worked sixteen-hour days, in all weathers, and without even gloves to protect their hands. German PoWs, who were also made to work in the docks, considered the black stevedores as ‘slaves’, and noted that they were made to work when conditions were deemed too extreme even for the prisoners.18 The enormous logistical struggle at St Nazaire – to unload cargoes as well as to land, process and dispatch vast numbers of men with all the supplies, weapons and equipment of war – was described by one American writer as ‘the battle of St Nazaire’.
There was, however, another war fought in the docks and warehouses of St Nazaire. Nine-thousand African-American stevedores of the SOS lived and worked in the port and the network of encampments that surrounded it. There, they became the target of a campaign of violence, abuse and even murder by the port’s Military Police. After the war, evidence of what took place was given to the US Congress. A white soldier, Charles Green, who had worked at the port with the 20th Engineers, saw the results of one night’s violence. When passing St Nazaire’s mortuary, Green noticed two bodies on the slab. A soldier in attendance told Green that the dead men, both of them African Americans, had been murdered by the Military Police: ‘The nigger killer got them last night,’ Green was told, referring to an infamous white Military Policeman whose reputation had spawned his nickname. It seems he had shot one of the men through the eye, while the other victim had a gunshot wound to his chest. The soldier also explained to Green: ‘Oh every time he goes on guard, we get some up here.’19 The bodies of the black soldiers, Green informed Congress, were later used in medical research. Things were little better at the other US ports of Brest and Bordeaux.
Of the African Americans who served their country in the First World War, 80 per cent were consigned to the SOS. Many in the General Staff of the US Army would have been perfectly happy to see that last figure rise to 100 per cent. There was, however, enormous pressure placed on the army and the political class by the African-American middle class and African-American public opinion to allow them to fight for their nation, as their ancestors had done in previous wars. Because of this pressure, and pressure from the French, two divisions were allowed to fight. Of the approximately 200,000 African Americans who went overseas, 42,000 were therefore in combat regiments – 20 per cent of the African Americans deployed, but only 11 per cent of all African Americans drafted.20
The ‘92nd Division (Colored)’ consisted of what Colonel Anderson had regarded as ‘the cream of the coloured draft’, and most of its men came from the South. The ‘93rd Division (Colored)’ had been assembled from various African-American National Guard units, volunteers and draftees from the more liberal Northern and Northeastern states. The 93rd contained four black regiments, the most famous of which was the 369th Infantry Regiment – formerly the 15th New York National Guard, soon to be known as the ‘Harlem Hellfighters’.*5
The 93rd was trained and dispatched to France on the firm promise that its men would be allowed to fight. They arrived at St Nazaire on New Year’s Day 1918 on board the USS Pocahontas. Among the men of the 369th Infantry were the forty-four members of the regimental band, some of Harlem’s finest professional musicians, under the leadership of James Reese Europe, who was a pioneer of ragtime in New York City and the leading light of the legendary Clef Club.21 On the dockside at St Nazaire, the band brought a little of Harlem to France, playing their arrangement of the ‘Marseillaise’. Some have pointed to this moment as being the first performance of jazz – or more accurately its musical precursor, ragtime – in France, an event that marked the beginning of a century-long love affair between France and black American music. The moment of history was somewhat lost on the French soldiers present, however, who were reportedly slow to stand to attention
to their national anthem; the jazz arrangement was so inventive that it took several bars before they could recognize it for what it was.
While the band was sent on a goodwill tour of France, the fighting men of the 369th remained near St Nazaire. They were, as they soon realized, not being rushed to the front or to receive further training. They were instead being set to work in the SOS, breaking all the promises made to them – and to black America in general – that they would be deployed as a fighting unit. Their rifles were taken from them, and the 369th was ordered to build warehouses and lay railway tracks. There was some further training, but not enough to make them ready for action or allay their fears that they would spend the war working as ‘laborers in uniform’. While the 369th languished, working for part of the time in the dreaded port of St Nazaire itself, General Pershing debated what to do with them and the other black regiments of the 92nd and 93rd divisions being deployed to France.
On taking command of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), General John J. Pershing had insisted that US soldiers would serve as unified American divisions, under American command and in their own sectors of the lines. He refused to permit them to be used simply to fill gaps in French and British lines. Yet the two black divisions were a political inconvenience, against which there existed considerable hostility among white troops and officers. Pershing was warned that white US troops would find it ‘distasteful’ to serve alongside African Americans, and that the orders of African-American officers were unlikely to be obeyed by them. White soldiers were already refusing to salute African Americans of superior rank. The American plan in early 1918 was for the ‘Colored’ regiments to languish in the SOS, at least for the moment. However, Pershing and the US Army had been pressured by the French, who requested that US troops be transferred to their sectors and used to help rebuild the nation’s decimated army, a force that was short of men and whose commanders were haunted by memories of the mutinies of 1917. Pershing’s insistence that Americans fight under American command did not, evidently, extend to African Americans, as French demands for US troops combined with American hostility towards their own black comrades to present the perfect solution. In March 1918 he transferred the 93rd Division’s four regiments, of unwanted, inconvenient and potentially disruptive African-American combat troops, to the French Army, thereby ridding himself of a perceived problem. Pershing made a similar proposal to the British, offering them the 92nd Division on the same terms. But the British, who had refused to deploy both African and Caribbean troops from their own empire to the Western Front, had absolutely no intention of absorbing into their ranks America’s unwanted black regiments and so refused Pershing’s offer.22
The World's War Page 38
