However, after posing these difficult questions, and painting a disturbingly accurate picture of how American democracy had failed its black citizens, the leaflet then painted an entirely false picture of racial attitudes in Germany. Fourteen years after German soldiers and bureaucrats had conducted a war of extermination in South West Africa, and in the middle of a war in which there had been numerous reported incidents of racial violence against non-white Allied prisoners, German propagandists still felt able to claim that Germany was a nation ‘entirely different’ to the United States, ‘where they do like colored people, where they treat them as Gentlemen and not as second class citizens.’ The leaflet went on:
You have been made the tool of the egotistic and rapacious rich in America, and there is nothing in the whole game for you but broken bones, horrible wounds, spoiled health, or death. No satisfaction whatever will you get out of this unjust war. You have never seen Germany, so you are fools if you allow people to make you hate us. Come over and see for yourself. Let those do the fighting who make the profit out of this war. Don’t allow them to use you as cannon fodder.
Finally, the German propagandists invited the black troops to throw away their guns ‘and come over to the German lines,’ where it promised that ‘You will find friends who help you along.’
That there are no reports of soldiers from the 92nd Division seeking out new ‘friends’ in the German lines suggests that the leaflet was clearly ineffective. However, the ability of its authors to point to uncomfortable truths about the status of black people in the United States must have been deeply disconcerting. Nothing in the German propaganda leaflet contradicted the official American position on race as outlined in the Secret Information.*9
The African-American campaigner Emmet J. Scott reminded readers of his Official History of the American Negro in the World War (1919) that ever since the Civil War it had been demonstrated repeatedly that ‘If properly trained and instructed, the colored man makes as good a soldier as the world has ever seen. The history of the Negro in all of our wars, including our Indian campaigns, shows this.’32 Whatever else that sentiment evokes, it reminds us that African Americans were not the sole non-white minority in the United States – nor in the ranks of the US Army that fought in the First World War. Men against whose forefathers those ‘Indian campaigns’ had been waged were now fighting on behalf of the US government. As with the Native Canadians who had served on the Western Front since 1915, Native Americans brought their traditions and beliefs into a modern industrial war. And they were perceived entirely differently by domestic white society from the sons and daughters of African slaves.
Although a long-persecuted non-European minority, Native American men were welcomed into the US Army in a way that in almost every respect was the inverse of the treatment meted out to African Americans. Native men were not forced into segregated regiments, nor deployed in unglamorous support units like the Services of Supply. While the army obsessively set out to marginalize and dehumanize African-American troops, in the same years and in the same conflict it actively celebrated the service and courage of its Native American troops. The First World War proved, therefore, to be a far more positive experience for Native Americans than for their African-American countrymen. Nevertheless, they too were victims of a form of racism. The belief that Native Americans were members of a noble, warrior race was so firmly established within the cultural imagination of white America that Native men were thrust into the front lines, where they were expected to live up to their stereotypes.
On America’s entry into the war there had been an initial, concerted campaign for the creation of segregated ‘Indian regiments’. However, the US Army had a binary view of race, recognizing only two categories: black and white. Native Americans were thus classified as ‘white’, and for the most part they served in regular regiments. As only around two-thirds of all Native Americans had been granted US citizenship by 1917, not all of them had to register for the draft. But, overcoming difficulties of language and distance, around 17,000 Native Americans were registered, and over 6,500 were drafted. A similar number enlisted voluntarily, and in total about 13,000 – around one-third of the eligible Native American male population – served in the military during the war.33 This was a higher proportion than among the white population, although there was huge variation by tribe. While just 1 per cent of Navajo men enlisted, 39 per cent of eligible Osage men and 54 per cent of the Quapaw (both peoples from Oklahoma) joined up.34
Native Americans took part in every major US engagement of the war and served in a wide range of roles in various army branches.35 However, prevailing racial stereotypes encouraged the army to deploy them in roles where their supposed warrior instincts could best be utilized. In the popular imagination, Native Americans possessed a special connection to the land and to nature. They were, it was believed, able to read the landscape and be at one with it. For these reasons they were regarded as being particularly effective scouts, as it was out in no man’s land, on patrol or working as observers or snipers, where it was hoped their supposed gifts for agility and camouflage would emerge. These ideas went deep within American popular culture; they were almost universally accepted and rarely challenged. Newspapers, magazines, popular fiction and textbooks all made casual reference to the martial reputation of the ‘Indians’. The magazine Outlook noted that they were endowed with ‘adroit tactics, sense of strategy, and feats of camouflage’, these traits the fruits of their ‘ancient training in the science of war’.36 In an article from August 1918, the New York Evening World assured its readers that while the Native Americans serving in the war fought in the uniform of the US Army, they were ‘none the less courageous for the absence of feathers and war paint’.37
It was held that Native Americans were able to navigate without the use of a compass and could lead units of their white comrades to enemy positions, or back to their own positions, in a way that defied easy explanation. Such a belief that Native Americans had an innate predisposition for navigation gave rise to the suggestion that they should be trained for service within the Aviation Corps. The Washington Sunday Star posited other potential attractions of the Aviation Corps. Writing during the Hundred Days Offensive, in August 1918, the newspaper argued that:
The Aviation Corps of the Army makes an appeal to the red-skinned youth as fully as to the pale-face. There is a sharp fascination to youthful imagination in learning to take to the clouds like birds of the air. And then there is a kinship with nature, too, in the religion of the genuine Indian, which makes the ability of human beings to rise and go skyward doubly alluring.38
The stereotypes that attached to Native Americans were in numerous ways the opposite of those imposed upon African Americans. Whereas the latter were said to break down and panic under the pressure of bombardments, Native Americans were reported as being casually dismissive of the effects of explosions and detonations, even when the shells were falling around them. Whereas Colonel Anderson regarded the bulk of African Americans in the draft as in some way physically deficient, Native Americans were repeatedly described as having perfect warrior physiques and athletic bodies that were entirely suited to hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches or in no man’s land. While African Americans were dismissed as moral cowards, Native Americans were continually portrayed as being naturally bloodthirsty, living for the fight and blind to mortal dangers. For African Americans, service in the US Army was a suffocating, daily reaffirmation of their supposed inferiority, where achievements were dismissed. The opposite was the case for Native Americans, some of whom may have, by contrast, suffered under the burden of pressure to live up to the very high expectations on the battlefield.
Within the US Army, differences were noticed – or perhaps imagined – between the abilities and aptitudes of men from different Native American tribes. What emerged was something strangely redolent of the British martial-races theory. As a Pathan and a Gurkha were understood by British officers to have different skills and
capacities, US officers came to believe the same was true of their Native American troops. They concluded that the tribes of the Northern Plains – the Sioux, Cheyenne and Nez Perce – were the most aggressive fighters, whereas men from the tribes of the Southwest, such as the Hopis and Navajos, had greater endurance and were therefore superior trench messengers (a dangerous task in which speed and agility were essential).39 As with the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, selected for duties as assault troops on the basis of the theory that only some Africans belonged to the races guerrières, some Native Americans found themselves placed into dangerous positions on the basis of cultural expectation. For the Tirailleurs Sénégalais this sort of thinking was grimly reflected in their casualty rates. So too for the Native Americans, of whom about 5 per cent of those serving with the AEF died in action; the figure for the AEF as a whole was around 1 per cent.40 Death rates among some Native American tribes, particular those from Oklahoma and the Dakotas, were even higher, reaching up to 10 per cent.41
As numerous writers have pointed out, the military skills that were reportedly demonstrated by men from tribal societies during the First World War can be convincingly explained by experience rather than race. It is much more likely that, as men from predominantly rural backgrounds, many of whom still hunted, they were more accustomed to handling firearms and more used to the conditions of outdoor life than some of their comrades who had left urban lives in the great cities of America. Similar patterns had been noted during previous conflicts, for example during the American Civil War, where men from the predominantly agrarian South proved more comfortable in the saddle (and at times more effective with the rifle) than men from the cities of the North.42 Equally, in southern Africa the Boer commandos who took on the sickly recruits drawn from Britain’s unhealthy industrial cities during the Anglo-Boer War were, unsurprisingly, more adept at mobile warfare on the African veldt. Lifestyle and experience were the key, not race.
If the underlying reasons, then, were more straightforward, the exploits of Native American soldiers nonetheless offered the American press the same dash of exoticism and glamour that the arrival of the Indian Corps had provided the British newspapers in 1914. Their purported ability to apply ancient warrior tactics to the modern battlefield had an effect of humanizing, as well as glamorizing, the war. Colourful descriptions of their martial skills were extremely appealing to editors and popular with readers. Native Americans’ war adventures were reported in depth, and sometimes the men themselves were quoted – but even when the men had college degrees and spoke perfect English, the newspapers were unable to resist changing their words into a broken frontier English familiar from dime novels. Alongside this fake ‘Indian speak’ came all the old clichés: ‘Indians’ were said to be taking the scalps of German soldiers, of attacking with traditional tribal weapons, of using their rifles as clubs, and of dying with the romanticized stoicism expected of noble savages. There was a particular interest in traditional Native American war cries. A gleeful report had Charles Rogers, a Standing Rock Sioux man who fought with the 18th Infantry regiment, leaping ‘over the parapet swinging his old rifle over his head. He let out a yell he had been saving for years, and it was a genuine war-whoop by one of the people who made war-whooping famous’. The Native Canadian Mike Mountain Horse recalled a moment in the trenches when he felt compelled to ‘release my pent up feelings in the rendering of my own particular war song’, and was later assured by his comrades that his ‘war whoop has stopped the war for at least a few seconds’.43 For him, a man who felt strongly his society’s martial traditions, his war whoops echoed across the Western Front for inner reasons. Others may have felt a greater weight of external expectation.
Along with the evidently irresistible temptation to exoticize their exploits, there was also remarkable enthusiasm and sympathy within the US press towards the nation’s ‘Indian’ soldiers. Their service was seen as representing their full entry into US citizenship and as proof of the moral supremacy of American democracy. That white America’s former enemies were now in the ranks of its army, fighting against German barbarism, was the American response to Britain’s claims to moral leadership on the basis of the willing service of its Indian Army soldiers. The New York Evening World in April 1918 commended Native Americans for their capacity to forget the pains of the past and fight for the American flag ‘as valiantly as their hostile fathers ever fought against it’.44 The skills and martial individualism of the Native American were set in contrast to the fighting style of the German soldiers who, it was claimed – quite wrongly – were only able to fight ‘stolidly in masses’.45
Those German soldiers, too, had grown up fascinated with the American ‘Indian’, in a nation that was utterly captivated by a romanticized image of the American frontier and deeply drawn to a simplistic, yet sympathetic, vision of Native American peoples. Although the age of the wild frontier had drawn to a close during the 1890s, the figures of the frontiersmen, the cowboy and the ‘Indian’ still gripped the cultural imagination of Wilhelmine Germany. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Germans had enjoyed various Wild West touring shows, with their highly distorted, but deeply enticing, vision of frontier life; Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show had been seen by the Kaiser himself. And among the cast of these travelling shows were Native Americans, encouraged to perform in mock battles and hunts. When the German impresario Carl Hagenbeck established his Stellingen Zoological Garden in Hamburg, he included Völkerschaustellungen – ‘exhibitions of peoples’ – including a party of Sioux Indians, by 1910, under the leadership of Chief Spotted Weasel.46
While thousands of German boys encountered Native Americans in these Wild West shows, millions more met them on the pages of the hugely popular Western novels written by German authors. By far the most successful of these writers was Dr Karl May who, like most of his readers, had never set foot on the American frontier but who made up for his lack of knowledge by cribbing information from maps and the accounts of travellers. In May’s novels his hero, ‘Old Shatterhand’, shares his adventures with the Native American Winnetou, who regards this Germanic cowboy as his ‘white brother’. The two men bond deeply through their shared experience, and the novels are peppered with quasi-anthropological observations about the military abilities of Winnetou and his people. May depicts Native Americans as natural scouts, capable of reading the landscape and in possession of innate senses almost akin to those of predatory animals. Among the front-line soldiers on whom May’s novels had a deep effect was Adolf Hitler; years later, as Führer, he was to shower awards and thanks on May’s widow. Another German veteran, the storm-trooper Ernst Jünger, who recorded his war experiences in the celebrated memoir Stahlgewittern (The Storm of Steel.), also remembered May when, during an attack, ‘memories of my third grade class and Karl May came back to me, as I was crawling on my stomach through the dew covered and thorny grass, careful not to make the least noise, for, fifty metres in front of us, was the entrance to the English trench’.47
It is one of the war’s ironies that the white nations of the United States and Germany, in 1918 locked in violent opposition, shared both an animosity towards men of African descent fighting on the battlefield as well as an admiring attachment to the mystique of the ‘Indian’ brave.
*1 The elephants were (and are) traditional symbols of the kings’ wealth and power, and it is from the extremely rare, costly and burdensome animals that the term ‘white elephant’ evolved. The current King of Thailand, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, has eleven of them. The most ‘eminent’ is a bull named Phra Sawet Adulyadej Phahnon, who resides at the Klai Kangwon Palace.
*2 Birth of a Nation portrayed the South’s brief period of attempted racial integration as an abomination and depicted a white population saved from black barbarism by the Ku Klux Klan. The film inspired a great upsurge in Klan membership, which in turn led to a spike in the numbers of African Americans assaulted. In some towns where the film was shown, white men formed impromptu gangs and prowl
ed the streets looking for black victims.
*3 The Insurectos produced propaganda leaflets and posters that reminded the African Americans who were fighting of the oppression they faced at home, and which encouraged them to reject the orders of the ‘white masters’ who had instructed them to oppress another ‘people of colour’.
*4 Emmett Scott, the African-American civil-rights campaigner and educator, claimed in his history of the war that French officers fighting with African Americans regarded them as ‘entirely different from their own African troops and the Indian troops of the British, who are so excitable under shell fire. Of course, I have explained that my boys are public school boys É accustomed to the terrible noises of the subway, elevated and street traffic of New York City (which would drive any desert man or Himalaya mountaineer mad) and [they] are all Christians.’
*5 The other units were the 370th Infantry Regiment, the 371st Infantry Regiment and the 372nd Infantry Regiment.
*6 The Bolo was a large heavy machete, originating in the Philippines, which was adopted by some Americans after the American–Philippine War of 1899–1903.
*7 This German offensive, Operation BlŸcher, is often referred to as the Aisne Offensive.
*8 In this respect, the leaflets were more akin to those produced by Max von Oppenheim’s Bureau of the East that targeted the sepoys of the Indian Corps with appeals to nationalist sentiment and anti-British feelings.
*9 That Nazi propagandists were able to make near-identical appeals to the black GIs of another world war, two decades later, pointing out the same injustices and the same racial violence, is a tragic indictment of the lack of progress the United States made between the two world wars with respect to the rights and status of its non-white citizens.
The World's War Page 41
