Brothers In Arms

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  Captain Bear initiated a court-martial. Such charges, however, required the permission of the commanding officer of the accused's battalion. Lieutenant Colonel Bates, who had nothing but the highest regard for Robinson's character, refused to give such consent. The top brass at Camp Hood responded by transferring Robinson to the 758th Tank Battalion; the commander of the 758th immediately signed the court-martial order. On July 24, Robinson was officially arrested.

  A court-martial trial in the United States Army consists of two phases: In the first, charges are presented to a panel of officers, which then votes on their merit; in the second, those charges approved by the panel are tried before a jury of officers. In the first phase of the court-martial of Jackie Robinson, all charges involving Robinson's altercations with the bus driver were dismissed. Several white passengers testified that Robinson had cursed not only at the bus driver but also at them. These allegations were disproven and were also dismissed. Lt. Col. Paul Bates, who put his career on the line to defend Jackie Robinson on several different occasions in the weeks that followed, brought eight members of the 761st before the panel to testify to the rough and unfair treatment they regularly received on buses at Camp Hood. The Army could not afford the outcry and close scrutiny of bus policy that trying these charges against Robinson—already nationally known owing to his football career at UCLA—would bring. Instead, the court-martial trial of Robinson would turn on what happened after the MPs arrived at the scene. He was charged with behaving disrespectfully toward Captain Bear in the guard room, and with disobeying Bear's order to remain in the receiving area. Conviction would result at the very least in a dishonorable discharge.

  On August 1, an advance detachment that included Maj. Charles Wingo was sent from the 761st to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, to prepare for the unit's imminent departure overseas; the rest of the battalion was soon to follow. Lieutenant Colonel Bates remained behind at Camp Hood to testify at Robinson's trial, which began on August 2. Bates stated under oath that Robinson had performed with excellence throughout his time with the battalion, and was well-respected by all officers and enlisted men of the unit; he further testified that he would have utter confidence in Robinson's ability to lead his men in combat.

  Robinson's lawyer attacked the prosecution's case on two fronts: first, by arguing that Captain Bear had himself acted in an unbecoming manner, and second, by underscoring the provocation that had led Robinson to act with what might be deemed disrespect. Bear admitted that he had told Robinson he was “at ease”; he therefore had no right to question the manner in which Robinson conducted himself in the receiving room. Robinson's attorney argued that Robinson was well within his rights to voice concern over the accuracy of Mucklerath and Wigginton's statements regarding his behavior, and fully within his rights, as well, to demand to know whether or not he was under arrest. Bear had violated strict procedure when he sent Robinson—whom he had not placed under arrest—back to the hospital under military guard.

  Robinson's attorney further sought to attack Captain Bear's assertion that he and the other soldiers present had treated Robinson with the utmost respect. Private Mucklerath testified in support of Bear's claim. Robinson's lawyer skillfully cross-examined Mucklerath, asking him “if he had ever called Jackie Robinson a nigger. He said ‘Under no circumstances.' ‘Did you ever use that word?' He said, ‘No, I never used it.' ‘Did any of you ever use that word? . . .' He said, ‘No, none of us ever did.' ‘I want you to tell me—and this is very, very important so that we can punish this man properly—I want you to tell me the exact words he used when he threatened you.' ‘If you ever call me a nigger again, I'll break you in two.'” The jury found Robinson not guilty on all counts.

  Robinson returned to the 758th, the battalion to which he had been hastily transferred by the brass at Hood. He requested that he be reassigned to the 761st. However, by the time this order was approved, on August 24, the 761st Tank Battalion had already departed. Robinson was transferred to Camp Breckinridge, Texas, and later to Camp Wheeler, Georgia. In November 1944—as the 761st was experiencing fierce combat in the Saar Basin of France—he was honorably discharged. A black baseball player Robinson had encountered at Camp Breckinridge had told him that the Kansas City Monarchs, a Negro League team, was looking for athletes. Robinson was looking for employment. In November, immediately following his discharge, Robinson wrote to the Monarchs and was hired; in August 1945, he was approached after a game the Monarchs played at Chicago's Comiskey Park by a scout for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1944, as Jackie Robinson's court-martial began, the men of the 761st did not yet know that they were being sent to France. In June, July, and August, in the months between being put on alert and their departure, they didn't know whether they were heading to the Atlantic or the Pacific. Maj. Charles Wingo had made a speech to some of the men about walking over the dead bodies of Japanese soldiers like a carpet. If anything, the men thought they would be sent to the Pacific, where in August 1944, Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Adm. Chester Nimitz were preparing to attack Peleliu in the Palau Islands. Peleliu was needed to serve as a staging area for the upcoming invasion of the Philippines. The 761st would likely ship out, the men assumed, in support of that imminent attack, the Philippines being the last step in preparation for the climactic invasion of Japan itself.

  WHEN LIEUTENANT COLONEL BATES first received the alert for deployment overseas, he had ordered the company commanders of his battalion to inform their men of their new status and, in preparation for what was to come, to read them the Articles of War. Among the articles the men heard recited that day were Article 56: “Whosoever shall relieve the enemy with money, victuals, or ammunition, or shall knowingly harbor or protect an enemy, shall suffer death, or such other punishment as shall be ordered by the sentence of a court-martial.” They also heard Article 95: “When any non-commissioned officer or soldier shall die, or be killed in the service of the United States, the then commanding officer of the troop or company shall, in the presence of two other commissioned officers, take an account of what effects he died possessed of, above his arms and accoutrements, and transmit the same to the office of the Department of War, which said effects are to be accounted for, and paid to the representatives of such deceased non-commissioned officer or soldier. . . .”

  The reality of what was ahead began to sink in.

  3

  ETO

  Everything was secret, secret, secret.

  —WILLIAM MCBURNEY

  On August 9, 1944, the 676 enlisted men and 36 officers of the 761st Tank Battalion boarded a United States Army troop train at Camp Hood. In a precaution taken by the Army with all American soldiers to guard against enemy spies, they had no idea where they were going. Many of them also couldn't help but wonder whether, on their arrival, they would be fighting as they had trained to fight—as an M-4 medium tank battalion—or instead be shifted into service and support roles. Their suspicions were not without reason. Despite the battalion's exceptional performance on maneuvers, white soldiers at Camp Hood had openly continued to doubt that blacks would be allowed to fight in tanks. Moreover, while the men had been told on first being assigned their Sherman tanks that these were the vehicles they would be using if they went to combat, no preparations of any kind had been made for shipping them. Leonard Smith had reluctantly left behind “Cool Stud,” the tank he had invested with so many dreams of blasting his way across enemy lines. Only personal equipment made it onto the troop train. Everything each soldier owned was crammed into a 24-by-18-inch duffel, or barracks, bag.

  As the train jerked into motion, the men craned their necks looking out the windows for station signs. Several MPs walked through the troop cars pulling down the window shades. A few soldiers had time, however, to realize that they were moving north and east. The word spread like wildfire up and down the aisles. Despite what they had previously been led to think, it appeared Europe was their likely destination. When William McBurney complained to an MP
about the lowering of the shades, he was told brusquely that in some of the Southern towns through which they were traveling, people would shoot at cars containing black troops. McBurney was quite happy to be getting out of the South.

  Three days after their departure from Camp Hood, they arrived at Camp Shanks, in Orangeburg, New York. More than a million soldiers were to pass through Camp Shanks in the years between 1943 and 1945. Located twenty miles north of Manhattan on the west bank of the Hudson River, Camp Shanks was one of the principal ports of embarkation for troops headed to the European Theater of Operations, or ETO. Shanks was strictly a staging area, in which troops received last-minute inoculations, completed the paperwork for their wills, and waited for the arrangements for their transit overseas to be finalized.

  To the New Yorkers in the group, Camp Shanks was paradise. Unit commanders tended to be liberal in handing out overnight passes while at Shanks. William McBurney and Preston McNeil spent time with friends and family in New York City with the Army's blessing. Leonard Smith, however, had gotten into trouble for returning late to Camp Hood from a furlough, and as a punishment was denied permission to leave the grounds. But Smith and several others who were not given passes tested the perimeter fence and found a place where they could slip out undetected. Smith sneaked out almost every night, traveling to Queens to see his family and getting back before roll call at 5:30 A.M.

  In the battalion's first week at Camp Shanks, a large group took the bus across the George Washington Bridge into Harlem, to the legendary Savoy Ballroom. It was Thursday night, the night to be there. Thursdays, the women who worked as live-in cooks and maids—otherwise known as “pot-slingers”—had the evening off, and many of them would head straight to the club. Spanning a city block between 140th and 141st Streets on Lenox Avenue, the Savoy had hosted all the greats of the swing era: Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie. There were bandstands at either end of the ballroom's vast 50-by-250-foot hardwood dance floor. When one orchestra took a break, a second would take over, allowing for uninterrupted dancing. At the club's peak in the 1930s and '40s, the floor was worn through every three years and had to be replaced. Whereas Smith, William McBurney, and Preston McNeil had been to the Savoy before they joined the service—Smith and McBurney had been going since they were fifteen—some of the men from small towns, like Willie Devore, had never seen anything like it. Devore was dazzled by the red and blue spotlights, the mirrors and chandeliers, and the hundreds of people pressed together and dancing like crazy.

  Finally, on August 27, the 761st was put on “Alert” status, which meant they would be shipping out within the next twelve hours. The men were told to remove the armored unit patches from the shoulders of their uniforms (so that enemy spies could not assess troop movements); numbers were chalked on their helmets, giving them the order in which they were to march to and board the transport train. When asked where they were going, Captain Harrison told the men, “You'll know when you get there.”

  WERE IT NOT FOR THE hedgerow country of Normandy, the 761st might not have been called up from Camp Hood at all. In the weeks following the D-Day invasion of the northern coast of France, the Sherman tanks of the First U.S. Army had suffered tragic losses: By July 16, in its attempt to push inland, the 3rd Armored Division alone had lost more than a third of its 232 tanks. Scores of armored personnel were killed or seriously injured. So much planning had gone into the D-Day invasion itself that little time had been given to assessing the terrain beyond the beaches—terrain in which all the weaknesses of the vaunted M-4 General Sherman tank were thoroughly exposed.

  The soil of Normandy's Cotentin Peninsula was loamy and contained few rocks; farmers there had for countless generations divided land among their sons by planting hedges. In hedgerow country, these bushes—bordering fields as small as one square acre—had developed into tangles of roots and trees that were three to six feet high and equally thick. The Germans could not have planned a better line of defense. Extending from ten to forty miles inland, the hedgerows acted as natural barriers against tanks and gave the Germans an abundance of places in which to conceal mines, tanks, and infantry carrying antitank weapons. When the nose of an American tank came up over the top of a hedge, the Germans on the other side would shoot through its exposed undercarriage. The few tanks that did make it over faced nightmarish obstacles ahead. The Panzerfaust, a German bazooka, fired a shaped charge that at close range blasted straight through the side of the Sherman tank with pulverizing effect. Still worse were the enemy tanks. American tank units learned in short order (as tankers had previously discovered in North Africa) that their 75mm shells bounced harmlessly off the sides of enemy tanks, while the Panzer tank's high-velocity 75mm and the Tiger tank's huge 88mm shells could rocket in one side of the M-4 and out the other.

  In those first weeks in France, it was only because of the extraordinary courage of tank crews who would get out of damaged tanks and back into others that any ground was gained at all. Even so, as casualties mounted throughout July, the United States Armored Force began to run into manpower problems. Infantrymen who were pulled off the line, given a few hours of tank training, and sent out to fight in Shermans were invariably slaughtered, often within a matter of minutes. Tanks could be replaced; highly trained crews could not.

  FROM CAMP SHANKS, the 761st rode the train a short distance south to the docks of New Jersey. From there they took a ferry across the Hudson River to New York Harbor. Lionel Hampton and his orchestra were on the midtown pier that day as part of the USO, playing a final farewell to the thousands of troops boarding the ships of the large convoy. Hampton's band played one of Leonard Smith's favorite tunes, “Flying Home.” Though Smith was eager to get to Europe and join the battle, the song lent a bittersweet melancholy to the moment. As the men walked along the pier with their heavy barracks bags on their shoulders, they first caught sight of the ship that was to carry them to England, the HMS Esperance Bay. Like most members of the 761st, Smith had never been on a ship before. What he saw did not reassure him: The Esperance Bay was rickety in appearance, and was dwarfed by many of the transports around it.

  Constructed in London in 1922 as a passenger ship, the Esperance Bay had been reoutfitted by the British navy on the outbreak of war and served a brief stint as an armed merchant cruiser before becoming a troop transport in 1941. Its odd, shaky appearance may have arisen in part from its layers of paint: from the bright colors of the cruise line, to dark gray with the white silhouette of a destroyer etched on it to scare off German battleships, to all gray. As on most troop transports in World War II, quarters on the Esperance Bay were extremely cramped: Its original capacity as a passenger ship was 1,500, but as a transport it housed thousands more. Bunks were stacked four and five high; soldiers slept in twelve-hour shifts and kept their bags with them at all times, because they never knew if they'd be going back to the same bunk. The food was terrible: William McBurney survived on a box of chocolate bars he took from the ship's post exchange. Leonard Smith ate next to nothing, as he was seasick from the moment the ship left port.

  Like all military facilities at that time, the troop transports were segregated. White troops rode in the bow and midship areas, and blacks were quartered near the crew, in the hold at the bottom of the boat. Not many of the 761st's men ventured up to look around. They stayed belowdecks, reading, talking, playing cards, and shooting dice, often with the crew of the Esperance Bay, career merchant mariners who had enlisted en masse when the war broke out. They got along so well with the crew that Captain Jacoby, the transport commander, took the unusual step of giving Lieutenant Colonel Bates a letter of commendation before the ship reached port, complimenting the unit for its discipline, military courtesy, soldierly conduct, and high morale.

  The ship reached port at Avonmouth, England, near Bristol, on September 8, 1944. As they gathered their gear and prepared to debark, Smith, McBurney, and the others had little sense of what lay ahead. At nineteen a
nd twenty years of age, respectively, Smith and McBurney felt invincible. They had no idea what war was like. Moreover, they arrived in England under the impression (shared by most of their fellow Americans at that point) that the war was almost over.

  The bloody fighting in Normandy had come to an end in August: In Operation Cobra, Gen. Omar Bradley's First Army and George S. Patton's Third Army broke out of the hedgerow country after a massive air and artillery bombardment of enemy positions. The armored units in the battle were aided by a novel invention of Sgt. Curtis G. Culin of the 2nd Armored Division—steel prongs welded to the front of the Sherman tank that cut right through the hedgerows, a device known as the “rhinoceros.” The prongs didn't allow the front of the Sherman to rise up, and the tank had power enough to push its way through, carrying roots and branches with it. The Americans quickly moved inland on the flat, open countryside beyond the hedgerows, taking St. Lo, Avranches, Chartres, and Rennes in rapid succession. On August 25, two days before the 761st sailed on the Esperance Bay, the Allies liberated Paris. As the men of the 761st stepped off the boat and onto the pier at Avonmouth, England, they had no way of knowing that some of the bloodiest fighting of the war was yet to come.