The successes of the 369th Infantry on the battlefield and the exploits of Henry Johnson had demonstrated that the integration of the unwanted ‘93rd Division (Colored)’ into the French Army had been an enormous success. Trained by seasoned French instructors, the 369th in particular had developed into one of the most effective combat units in the French forces. They and the other three combat regiments of the division had ceased to be Pershing’s problem when he handed them to the French; but by the summer of 1918 they were once causing alarm in the headquarters of the AEF. African Americans and white Frenchmen had faced the dangers of battle together, endured bombardments, suffered the loss of their comrades and charged enemy positions. Quite naturally, strong martial bonds had developed between officers and men. These sentiments were regarded by the US War Department and the US Army with hostile suspicion. It had come to the attention of the Americans that white French troops were saluting African-American officers, and that comrades in arms were shaking one another’s hands, irrespective of race.
Furthermore, the black combat troops, now beyond the everyday control of the US Army, had happily integrated into French wartime society too. Despite the widespread racism within French society and the army, its different emphases – on cultural backwardness rather than biology – meant that the French were considerably more racially tolerant than the Americans. African Americans were culturally American even though racially African, and this duality in some ways short-circuited French racism. Some scholars believe that African Americans received better treatment in France than did the men from France’s own African colonies. What disturbed the US Army most was the warmth and ease with which the African-American troops were being received by French civilians, including women, a reality that was looked upon by the American authorities with profound distaste.
The response from AEF headquarters was the Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops. A statement of intent, it was the determined policy of the US Army, which, like wider white American society, aimed to keep the African American in his place irrespective of the service he was able to offer in the war. The document was issued to French officers commanding African-American troops and to the civil authorities in areas where they were deployed. While the Secret Information tacitly forgave the French for having treated African-American soldiers as equals, and put this lapse in standards down to cultural differences and French ignorance of American culture, the document was designed to bring the era of fraternization, familiarity and respect to an end.
After the contents of the Secret Information were revealed, in 1919, in the French National Assembly and the African-American press, there was outrage and condemnation. However, the theory was one thing, and the practice was another. In 1918 French officers took little notice of its demands – and under the circumstances they would have had little opportunity to implement them had they chosen to.
The Secret Information was dated 7 August 1918. The following day, at 4.20am, twenty-seven divisions of British, French and American troops launched an attack that arguably represented the turning point of the war and the beginning of the end for Germany. The first blow was struck on the Somme, where the British, Australians and the Canadian Corps advanced after a lightning artillery bombardment. The Germans were taken by surprise. As shells thundered down onto their lines, 400 British tanks attacked, and those that penetrated the German lines unleashed mayhem in the rear areas. Through the huge gap that had been punched into the German front by the initial assault, the great international army swept forward. Among the Canadians who raced behind the German lines was the Blood Indian Mike Mountain Horse. His post-war War Deeds, painted on calfskin, included a panel depicting his part in the capture of German guns, 500 of which were taken during the battle. The assault, known as the Battle of Amiens, was so successful that General Haig was genuinely surprised by the scale of men and material captured. For Ludendorff, though, 8 August was a catastrophic blow – one that he called ‘the Black Day of the German Army’. What shocked the German commander most were the mass surrenders, 12,000 men in all. Whole units had handed themselves over without a fight, and on occasions whole platoons had even surrendered to individual Allied soldiers – something that had previously been unimaginable. Ludendorff recognized that he was now in command of an army whose morale and will to fight had begun to disintegrate. There were reports coming in of German troops jeering at newly arrived reinforcements, accusing them of prolonging the war. Many of the German defenders were men who, between March and June, had advanced deep behind Allied front lines and there seen the great stockpiles of war materials and ammunition – of which an even greater quantity, they surmised, must still be in the hands of their enemies. They had realized, sooner than their commanders, that the sheer weight of enemy firepower and supplies would make the Allies now invincible. Like the British after the Battle of the Somme in 1916, and the French Army after the calamitous Neville Offensive of 1917, the German Army had been promised that one final great effort would bring victory. When that promise had been shown to be hollow, there were no further promises that could be made – and morale collapsed. As the German High Command could see from the letters of the troops that passed through the offices of the censors, thousands of men were willing to accept peace at almost any cost. They hoped for revolution at home, and had decided to effectively withdraw their labour by shirking any duties other than those that were strictly defensive. They had now reached a similar point of despair to that which overwhelmed much of the French Army the year before.
By the end of August 1918, Allied forces had pushed the Germans back almost to the heavily defended Hindenburg Line, the positions from where they had launched the Spring Offensive four months earlier. The Allied commanders, blind to the impending disintegration of the legendary German Field Army, were busy preparing their plans and designing new weapons for their campaigns not just in 1918 but in the year beyond too. Few believed that this time the war could really be ‘over by Christmas’. Yet the Battle of Amiens marked the beginning of a series of coordinated and unrelenting Allied offensives that would stretch right up to the Armistice of 11 November. Known collectively as the Hundred Days Offensive, or sometimes called the Grand Offensive, they marked the resumption of mobile warfare on the Western Front.
Today the battles of the Hundred Days Offensive are remembered as being the most tactically advanced operations of the whole war. New weapons were deployed, according to new tactics. Tanks, both heavy and light, worked together in mass formations; the light and portable Lewis light machine gun, an American import, was carried into battle by British and American troops, increasing their firepower while on the advance; aerial observation and photography reached new heights of sophistication and effectiveness, with Allied airmen dominating the skies, scouting out the enemy, looking for tell-tale flashes of enemy guns, and guiding their own artillery batteries’ targeting using radios. Attack-aircraft strafed German positions with machine guns and dropped bombs on their troop concentrations. The ‘creeping barrage’, a protective screen of carefully placed explosive artillery shells, behind which the attacking armies advanced, reached new heights of sophistication and accuracy, as all the lessons in artillery tactics and battlefield communication learnt over four years of war were applied with enormous professionalism. Perhaps most importantly, all these various components were brought together in what became known as ‘combined arms operations’.
If the tactical innovation and pace of the Hundred Days Offensive are justly lauded, a less well remembered feature was the battles’ international make-up. Among the French attacking forces, which were repeatedly led by Charles Mangin, were the North Africans and the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, alongside the long-suffering French poilus, veterans of years of misery and frustration. In repeated attacks, the British Army was spearheaded by its Canadian and Australian components, the latter under the formidable and pugnacious Lieutenant General Sir John Monash.
For the AEF, the key struggle of the Hundr
ed Days was the Meuse–Argonne Offensive, a great rolling wave of attacks that lasted from late September until the Armistice, and which involved both of the African-American Divisions – the 93rd Division under French command and the 92nd Division, still under American orders. Although they never fought together as a unified division, all the regiments of the 93rd took part. The 369th Infantry, the ‘Harlem Helfighters’, participated in the capture of the town of Sechault, enduring very heavy losses. Today a black granite obelisk, a monument to them, stands in the town centre – and an exact replica stands in a New York park. The 370th Infantry, men from Illinois and Chicago’s South Side, took part in attacks on the Oise–Aisne Canal and were later to push on into Belgium.
The 371st Regiment – draftees from the rural Carolinas – led an attack on the German stronghold of ‘Côte 188’ in the Ardennes where, on 28 September, they were lured into a trap by the German defenders, who pretended to surrender only to open fire on the regiment as they approached over open ground to receive the German prisoners; it was a ruse known as the ‘Kamerad trick’. Among the men caught in this deadly trap was Corporal Freddie Stowers. Typical of his regiment, Stowers had been a Carolina farmhand before the war. With the officers of the 371st either dead or wounded, Stowers led an attack on the German machine-gun positions that had done such damage to his platoon. This proved the critical moment, which turned the tide of battle and led to the capture of Côte 188, but in the process Stowers was mortally wounded.
Freddie Stowers was posthumously recommended for the Medal of Honour. There followed seven decades of official silence until 24 April 1991, when the award was presented to Stowers’ two sisters by President George H.W. Bush at a ceremony at the White House.
Describing the battles of 1918 in his war memoirs, Erich Ludendorff felt the need to regurgitate the now well-worn German propaganda line that the use of black troops, within the armies of the French and latterly the Americans, was somehow unfair and represented a war crime:
Where tanks were lacking, the enemy drove black waves towards us, waves composed of African bodies. Woe to us, when these invaded our lines and murdered or, even worse, tortured the defenceless. Human indignation and accusation must not be directed against the blacks who committed these atrocities, but against those who deployed these hordes on European soil, allegedly fighting for honour, liberty and justice.27
Had Ludendorff been able to tour the areas to the rear of the Allied lines, or pay a visit to the ports of Brest, Boudreaux, St Nazaire or Marseilles, he would have realized that the black soldiers taking part – men from the French colonies and African Americans – represented only a very small proportion of the great multiracial legions of soldiers and labourers that his enemies had drawn into the war from their empires and beyond. One US writer, arriving at Bordeaux in 1918 expecting to see mainly ‘colored’ American troops, was astonished by the scene that greeted her: ‘as we landed at Bordeaux, it seemed every man’s home. So crowded and varied was its population… There were many Colonial troops, Chinese laborers and, more or less maimed French soldiers.’28
Bordeaux was one node in an immense and intricate system of supply that stretched back from the front-line trenches to the munitions factories of France, and across the Atlantic Ocean to the training camps and industrial plants of the United States. War materials and supplies were being carried to the war on great convoys of ships under all flags, manned by men of disparate races – West Indians, West Africans, Lascars from India, South Americans, Scandinavians. On landing in the ports of France, these supplies were unloaded by the black stevedores of the US Services of Supply. The war materials then passed through the hands of the various labour corps – North African, Egyptian, Indian, British, French, South African, Portuguese, Chinese and German PoW – as they got closer to front lines. Alongside the mountains of supplies, also arriving at the ports of Brest, Bordeaux and St Nazaire were the US Army, in their hundreds of thousands every passing month. If the Canadian Corps became ‘the ram which will break up the last line of resistance of the German Army’, as described by the overall Allied commander, Ferdinand Foch, then the engines of their assault were the ports, railways and supply systems that fed the front lines.
By August 1918, the US ‘92nd Division (Colored)’ was also in the front line. They were known as the ‘Buffalo Soldiers Division’, a nickname that had been given to African Americans who had fought against the Native American nations in the so-called Indian Campaigns that began soon after the Civil War and lasted up until the 1890s. Having failed to palm off the 92nd Division onto the British, General Pershing had placed it in the US Second Army, under the ultimate command of General Robert Bullard. A committed racist, unshakably convinced of the racial inferiority of black men, Bullard expected the 92nd Division to fail, and he set out to create the conditions in which they would do so – or at least be seen to do so. Bullard turned a blind eye to the 92nd’s successes and, worse, spread misinformation about the conduct and effectiveness of the African Americans. ‘Poor negroes! They are hopelessly inferior,’ he wrote in his private diary.29 Bullard also had a deep enmity for Major General Charles Ballou, who commanded the 92nd Division. His desire to undermine his rival’s reputation was aided by Colonel Allen J. Greer, Ballou’s chief of staff and secretly an ally of Bullard. From the inside, Greer spread slander and attempted to sabotage the reputation of the 92nd, playing down their successes and ensuring that news of any difficulties or reversals were widely disseminated.
The 92nd Division consisted of African-American soldiers and a mixture of white and African-American officers, with the latter regarded as inferior and given no opportunity for advancement. (The US Army ensured that on no occasion was a black officer placed in a position of command over a white officer.) As with most African-American troops, the men of the 92nd had received minimal and sub-standard training in their camps at home. In order to bring them up to combat readiness, they were given further instruction by the French.
In September 1918, the 92nd was rushed 300 miles in three days to be deployed near the Argonne. Three of its four regiments were held in reserve, with only the 368th Infantry Regiment being ordered directly into the lines to take part in the Meuse–Argonne Offensive, where they were to fill an expected gap between French and American units attacking the German-held village of Binarville. The 368th entered the line during the night of the 25 September and prepared to attack the next morning. Although assaulting heavily prepared German positions, they were not equipped with heavy cutters and had no grenade-launchers, flares or even maps, and were expected to attack without artillery support from the American batteries. Poorly trained, operating against these obstacles on a battlefield about which they knew little, and exhausted from an overnight march, they were unable to break through the heavy wire entanglements. Their communications began to collapse, and a request for French artillery support went unanswered. After five days in the line, and after having suffered 58 men killed and over 200 wounded, they were withdrawn to the rear and officially branded a failure.
The official reaction was extreme: the entire 92nd Division was withdrawn, as General Bullard pounced on the 368th’s failure in order to prove the ineffectiveness of African-American troops. In the weeks that followed, the 368th’s failure was widely disseminated and exaggerated. The fact that the 35th Division, made up of white American troops, had also broken and retreated in the same attack was an inconvenient fact that was overlooked, as were the successes of the 92nd and 93rd divisions. US Army authorities focused their attention on the perceived failings of the 368th, putting them down to the incompetence of black officers and the moral weakness of black soldiers. The truth, as the historian John Morrow has written, is that the 92nd Division performed better in combat and received more medals than many white divisions, about which no complaints were made or aspersions cast.30
In August 1918 the 92nd Division also proved itself resilient in the face of a sly German propaganda campaign, which sought to exploit t
he US Army’s constant attempts to belittle and segregate its African-American troops. German propaganda leaflets were dropped over the 92nd Division’s line, and the tone of them was quite different to the threatening leaflets dropped on the South African Native Labour Corps in 1917. This time, the message was altogether more sophisticated, appealing to a very real sense of injustice and oppression.*8 One leaflet, entitled To the Colored Soldiers of the US Army, set out to remind African-American troops of the racism and brutality to which they were routinely subjected at home. It got off to a bad start by addressing the black soldiers as ‘Boys’, but after this initial faux pas it raised a series of pertinent questions:
…what are you doing over here? Fighting the Germans? Why? Have they ever done you any harm? Of course some white folks and the lying English American papers told you that the Germans ought to be wiped out for the sake of humanity and democracy. What is democracy? Personal Freedom, all citizens enjoying the same rights socially and before the law! Do you enjoy the same rights as the white people do in America, the land of Freedom and Democracy? Or aren’t you rather treated over there as second class citizens? Can you go into a restaurant where white people dine, can you get a seat in a theatre where white people sit, can you get a Pullman seat or berth in a railroad car or can you even ride, in the south, in the same street car with white people? How about the law? Is lynching and the most horrible cruelties connected therewith a lawful proceeding in a democratic country?.31
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