Brothers In Arms

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  He loved singing, and was good enough even at age eight to solo with the senior choir at local churches. But his obsession was airplanes. A favorite teacher rewarded students for exceptional performance by buying them a toy of their choice from the neighborhood five-and-dime. Smith hated arithmetic, but he worked hard to get high marks so that she would have to buy him a toy. He invariably picked out model planes, pictures of planes, and books about planes. Though he had never seen an airplane up close, there was something about the idea of planes and flying, the freedom of movement flying symbolized, that endlessly fired his high-spirited imagination.

  Money was scarce. Clothes for foster children were provided by the city, a source of some discomfort for the children: People knew they were “home” children, wards of the city, because of the way they dressed. But the only thing Smith really missed was not having a father. When other kids in the neighborhood would talk about things they'd done with their fathers, he would make up stories about fishing trips and family outings. When asked why his father wasn't around, he would tell his friends his father was traveling on business. He made an imaginary father out of Mrs. Hasbruck's deceased husband, George, collecting countless details about him: Mrs. Hasbruck told him that George had smoked a pipe with Prince Albert tobacco, and Smith vowed that when he grew up he'd do the same. Mrs. Hasbruck's two brothers gave Smith spending money from time to time, but they rarely provided him with fatherly guidance. He had to learn everything for himself, and he often made mistakes.

  One such mistake contributed to his decision to enlist in the Army. As a teenager, he had enrolled at Chelsea Vocational High School to study aviation mechanics. There he fell in with a group of older boys, budding delinquents who played hooky every Friday, shoplifting tools from local stores. It was typical of the guileless Smith that he continued going to class long after the boys he hung out with had stopped. It was also typical that while Smith's adventuresomeness led him to skirt the edges of disaster, his good-naturedness and good luck just as often kept him out. A neighborhood cop who knew and liked Smith pulled him aside, telling him that the boys he was running around with were going to wind up in prison one way or another. “Have you ever considered joining the Army?” he asked.

  Smith had considered it—it was May 1942, and the United States had been at war for six months—but at seventeen, he had thought he was too young to enlist. American troops were already engaging in bloody combat in the Pacific, surrendering after a hopelessly one-sided struggle in the Philippines on May 6, but stalling the advance of the Japanese two days later in the Battle of the Coral Sea. Like millions of families across the country, the Hasbrucks listened to the radio every night for war updates. When he went to the local cinema, Smith avidly watched the early newsreels of combat. He knew exactly what he wanted to enlist as: a fighter pilot. He imagined himself streaking through the skies, on the lookout for Japanese Zeros, engaging in dogfights, dropping bombs on enemy aircraft carriers. In Smith's young mind, war was a kind of game. He had no concept of war's brutality, and he was eager to join the fight. At the policeman's suggestion, he went to the induction office on Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan carrying a permission form signed by his foster mother.

  The doctor administering the Army physical failed to notice his slight heart murmur, and passed him. Smith told the recruiter who processed his application that he wanted to be a pilot. The sergeant told him that was not possible—the Army Air Corps did not accept blacks. Smith barely managed to swallow his disappointment. Citing his training in high school, he then said he wanted to be an aviation mechanic. Again, he was told that was not possible. The Army's rigid color line took Smith by surprise. Growing up in the New York City of the 1920s and '30s, he had encountered his share of discrimination: There were certain neighborhood pools where he was not permitted to go swimming, and certain stores where the entrance of anybody black was announced by ringing bells to rouse white clerks to extra vigilance. But despite such small daily indignities, it had somehow never occurred to him that the color of his skin would impact his future, his lifelong dream of working with planes.

  He had scored high marks on the Army's IQ screening test. “Infantry you definitely don't want,” the sergeant advised him. The next-best thing to the air force was armored, the sergeant said. “Armored?” Smith asked. The sergeant replied, “Tanks. They're starting a couple of colored tank battalions. How would you like that?” Smith had never seen a tank—in fact, he had no idea what a tank was. But he was game for anything. The sergeant told him that as a volunteer, “if that's what you want, that's where you're going to go.”

  WILLIAM MCBURNEY WAS AS RESERVED and cautious as Leonard Smith was naive and adventuresome. Although the two men didn't know each other, McBurney took the subway to the induction office just days after Smith. His motives in doing so were mixed. Like Smith, he had watched the news updates of the war: A wave of patriotism had swept the country in the wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and thousands of young men across the country enlisted every day. McBurney was eager to do his part for the war effort. But he also saw the Army as an escape.

  McBurney was born in Harlem on May 21, 1924. His parents divorced when he was very young; his mother moved away to Florida, and he saw her only rarely after that. He was raised by his father and stepmother. When he was twelve years old, his younger brother died of scarlet fever. Though devastated by the loss, McBurney did what he had watched his father do all his life: bury the pain deep inside, and keep moving.

  William had always been in awe of his father. A smart, determined, and ambitious man, his father had been born dirt poor around the turn of the century in Titusville, Florida. Seeing no prospects for advancement there, he had worked his way north to New York City as a railroad porter. At the outbreak of World War I, he had volunteered for the Army, serving in a quartermaster unit in Europe. When he returned to New York, still searching for a means of steady employment and advancement, he had worked his way through school to become a dental technician. But in the 1920s it was very difficult for blacks to find work in professional jobs. With a young wife and a growing family to support, he had no choice but to turn to manual labor, working on the docks and, later, with the advent of the Great Depression, for the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the massive public works programs started by the federal government.

  William McBurney was an intelligent, active boy. Despite his large size, he was not coordinated or good at sports: His one physical gift was a powerful right hook. Though he never went out of his way to seek out a fight, neither did he ever turn away from one. He got into the usual number of scrapes for a kid in Harlem in the 1930s—often chasing or being chased by Italian kids from adjacent neighborhoods—but he was also always at one remove from whatever he was doing, thinking several steps ahead. He had already noticed the kinds of trouble young black men often got into, especially with the police, and he intended to avoid it. With his air of watchfulness, his quiet, steady intelligence, and his physical courage, he stood out in his group of friends as the one you wanted watching your back.

  Like Smith and countless other African Americans at that time, McBurney was tracked early in his school career toward shop class, regardless of his intelligence or academic success. Given the options available to him at New York Vocational High School, like Leonard Smith he chose to study aviation mechanics. A female cousin was taking flying lessons at Floyd Bennet Field, and watching that plane take off and sail away made McBurney dream of becoming a pilot. But as time went on, it was a dream he seemed to have less and less hope of attaining. After school and on Saturdays he worked at a paintbrush factory for twenty-five cents an hour, helping his family to weather the Depression. Many of his friends had taken similar menial jobs. As high school graduation approached, many more of his friends, with no real opportunities for advancement, were falling into gambling and petty theft. McBurney saw himself and his friends moving steadily toward dead-end lives.

  Like many young men, he had r
omanticized his father's service in World War I—the more so because his taciturn father never talked about it. He saw the Army as a way of creating a new life for himself, and of realizing his secret dream of flying. When he told his father he wanted to join the Army Air Corps, he was surprised to find his father immediately dismissive. He didn't believe the Air Corps would accept an African American. This only made McBurney more determined. Three days after his eighteenth birthday, he took the train to the recruitment center on Whitehall Street.

  His father's warning about the Air Corps turned out to be all too true—as Leonard Smith had already discovered, no blacks were allowed to join. To McBurney, it was a slap in the face. Nonetheless, he decided to enlist. Like Smith, he had scored high marks on the Army's intelligence test. Though he also had no idea what a tank was, he found himself, like Smith, steered by the recruiter into armored.

  AFTER PASSING HIS PHYSICAL AND being given his shots, McBurney was sent by train with several other fresh recruits to Camp Upton, a processing center surrounded by open potato fields in Suffolk County, Long Island. Thousands of Army recruits would move through the sprawling complex between 1941 and 1945. The recruits spent two weeks living in tents, where they were given close haircuts, uniforms, and basic gear; then they were moved into barracks. They performed a series of marching and close-order drills each day, learning the basics of military procedure and decorum, as well as carrying out KP duty and cleaning the grounds of the camp. Finding themselves with a great deal of free time on their hands, they held a series of boxing and softball tournaments as they waited endlessly, it seemed to McBurney, for their orders to come. During orientation, they had seen motivational documentaries chronicling the reasons the country was at war, highlighting the battles that had been fought to date, and firing them up against Germany and Japan. All were eager to get overseas and get started. They wanted in on the action.

  The close friendships that would characterize the men in combat were already begining to form. William McBurney first met Leonard Smith at Camp Upton. Despite, or perhaps because of, their vast temperamental differences—Smith was the sort who leapt before looking, while McBurney was the one who held back; Smith's humor tended toward open-hearted playfulness, McBurney's toward irony and observation—the two became fast friends. Soon they became close to another recruit as well, soft-spoken Preston McNeil.

  At nineteen, McNeil was a year or two older than the other new recruits. Something about his patience and gentle, reflective manner made him seem older still. His gaze was direct but kind; deeply empathetic, he was always willing to give others the benefit of the doubt, taking care to make sure that no one in the group felt left out. Though McNeil had joined the Army in New York, he had been born and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, a segregated southern city. His mother worked as a live-in maid, and McNeil grew up in his grandmother's house. He never knew his father.

  His grandmother was a staunch Baptist, a “Holy Roller” who made certain that McNeil went to church every Sunday. The generosity that came to be characteristic of McNeil was more than a religious conviction, however: In the Depression-era South, he daily witnessed people like his grandmother sharing what little she had with neighbors who had less. Much of McNeil's early life was spent taking care of others, performing whatever odd jobs he could to earn money for his family. At the age of thirteen, he left home to join the Civilian Conservation Corps. There he earned a dollar a day, thirty dollars a month. Twenty-five of that was sent home to his grandmother. He stayed at the CCC camp in North Carolina for three years before moving north to New York City to live with his aunt and cousins.

  Segregation had been such a permanent fact of McNeil's early life that he'd never thought much about it, and he was stunned by the relative freedom of New York. He could sit on the bus beside a white person; if he was first on line at the grocery store, he could pay for his goods and leave—he didn't have to keep moving back for whites. He could sit at a lunch counter and be served. To him, it was heaven. He briefly attended New York Vocational High School, but had to leave after a few months because of the pressing need to send money back to his family. He got a job at a CCC camp in upstate New York, where he worked for another three years before joining the Army in the spring of 1942.

  EACH DAY AT CAMP UPTON, the men gathered excitedly before the tin-roofed PX to learn who had been given orders to be shipped out. Leonard Smith received his orders to Camp Claiborne relatively quickly. He reluctantly bid good-bye to his newfound friends, thinking he would never see them again, and headed with fourteen other recruits for that hot Louisiana field, beginning his basic training at Claiborne shortly thereafter.

  McBurney and McNeil remained stationed at Camp Upton for so long that they stopped paying attention to the daily roll call. In time, their excitement turned to apathy. The war would surely be over, they began to think, before they shipped out. Then came the day that would alter their lives forever: McNeil heard the first name called on the day's list—Thomas Brisbane, whom he knew to be a member of his group of recruits. The men were shipping out to Kentucky to begin specialized training.

  The Armored Force Replacement Training Center at Fort Knox was located in the rolling countryside approximately thirty-five miles south of Louisville. It was there that McNeil and McBurney would see a tank for the first time. However, they had several weeks of trial and tribulation to suffer first. Any impression they may have formed during their long sojourn at Camp Upton that the military would be easy was dispelled the moment they set foot on the grounds at Fort Knox: Drill sergeants screamed at the new recruits. The men were drilled anew in formations. The smallest infractions in dress code or bearing were punished not with lighthearted assignments to KP, as at Upton, but with shouted insults, push-ups, and more push-ups. They went on forced daily marches in rain or sun, heat or cold; they took apart and reassembled guns blindfolded, navigated obstacle courses, crawled under barrages of live machine-gun fire. Upon returning from this daily torment, they would troop back to their quarters up “Misery Hill,” a mile-long incline, in full gear.

  Preston McNeil survived by repeating to himself and laughing at the irony of something the Army recruiter had told him months before—the sole reason he had allowed the sergeant to sign him up for armored as opposed to a quartermaster or infantry unit: “You won't have to do any walking.” This phrase became his mantra as he walked, ran, crawled, vomited, sweated, and willed his way through basic training.

  Leonard Smith, on the other hand, six hundred miles away at Camp Claiborne, had with characteristic ingenuity and good fortune found a way out of the more grueling aspects of training. He volunteered for the battalion's military band. He had no experience on any instrument, but, relying on his childhood talent as a singer, he figured he could fake his way through on drums. He played for the other soldiers as they headed out on long forced marches, then joked around with the rest of the band in the PX until they were called on to play the exhausted, sweaty, mud-soaked troops back in.

  Finally, after several weeks of training, the men at Camp Claiborne and Fort Knox were marched to their respective motor pools. Most of them—like Smith, William McBurney, and the vast majority of Americans in the Depression years—had grown up in varying degrees of poverty and had never driven a car before. They had to be trained from scratch in the basic maintenance of motor vehicles, lectured repeatedly on the function and significance of everything from headlights and motor oil to fan belts and spark plugs. They were taught how to drive motorcycles, followed by jeeps and trucks, with a sergeant watching over their every move, riding beside or pacing behind them. Finally, they were brought before a tank.

  The men of the 761st initially trained on a model known as the M-5 Stuart Light Tank. This was a smaller, less powerful vehicle than the M-4 Medium Tank they would drive to battle across Europe; but to Leonard Smith, seeing a tank for the first time, the M-5 was something to marvel at. Powered by twin 220-horsepower Cadillac V-8 engines, weighing approximately 12 to
ns, the M-5 was armed with a 37mm cannon and three .30-caliber machine guns.

  The men were given time on the tank range to get used to their new equipment, driving for three or four days with an instructor beside them and then a day or two alone. The only breaks in this hands-on training were to receive instruction in the basics of map reading, compass reading, and battle strategy. In the day room, they'd discuss problems in tank placement and command. Officers would present the men with various hypothetical battlefield situations, such as “What would you do if you were a tank commander and you were out to recapture a town overlooked by an enemy-controlled ridge?” A sand bin contained miniature tanks with which the trainees would demonstrate their plans of attack; the officers would then talk them through what they could have done differently, how another maneuver might have been more effective.

  As they became more familiar with their equipment, the men began to learn how to work together as a crew. The crew of the M-5 Stuart consisted of a tank commander, driver, gunner, and replacement gunner. Each man learned to master all four positions. Quarters were close: In early models without radios, the tank commander, positioned above and just behind the driver, communicated with him by tapping his foot on the driver's left shoulder to turn left, on his right shoulder to turn right, and by giving him a firm kick in the center of his back to make him stop suddenly. The men learned how to zero in on both static and moving targets, “bracketing” to find the correct range. The tank commander spotted targets through the telescopic sight and gave orders to the gunner beside him—left, right, steady on—and then he'd estimate the range to the target, say, 110 yards. If the round was short, the commander would tell the gunner to go up fifty yards. If it was long, he'd tell him to come down fifty.