In 2003.
He had died in 1929.
Another soldier of the 93rd, Corporal Freddie Stowers, would be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroically leading, on September 29, 1918, a charge on a German machine-gun emplacement after all of his officers and noncoms were killed. Stowers, too, was killed that day; he was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. The president who presented the medal to Corporal Stowers’s two surviving sisters was not Woodrow Wilson, but George H. W. Bush; he made that presentation on April 24, 1991. At least it was still the twentieth century.
Stowers, a farm hand from South Carolina, served with the 371st Infantry Regiment, which, unlike the other three regiments in the 93rd, was composed of draftees. It was the second-most-decorated regiment in the division, disproving the then-common belief that the colored Regular Army units (none of which ever got sent to France) and colored National Guard units (which made up the other three regiments of the 93rd) had snapped up the cream of black American manhood, leaving only the dregs for the draft board. Nevertheless, that belief remained current throughout the war, to the great detriment of the Army’s other colored division, the 92nd, which was composed entirely of draftees.
The 92nd had other strikes against it, too, the greatest of which was a feud between its commanding general, Charles C. Ballou, and his superior, General Robert Lee Bullard. Military feuds, as the soldiers of the Yankee Division had already discovered, can prove harmful to the troops under the command of the feuding officers, especially the officer of lesser rank; in addition, Ballou, who was not without his own racial insensitivities, believed—and many historians agree—that Bullard (whose name at birth had been William Robert Bullard; he’d changed it in honor of Robert E. Lee) was an ardent racist who resented the existence of the 92nd Division and was determined to see it fail. The division was dogged by absurd rumors that it was full of rapists and other criminals; its black officers, unfairly accused of incompetence, were often transferred out and replaced by white officers, many of whom didn’t care for their assignment or the men under their command. Still, in late August, 1918, the 92nd was sent to a sector in the Vosges Mountains, near the German border, where they replaced a French unit. There, over the course of a few weeks, they fought off nearly a dozen German raids, all while being bombarded with shells containing high explosives, shrapnel, and gas. And, on at least one occasion, something else.
On the morning of September 12, part of the 367th Infantry Regiment, crouching in trenches, donned their gas masks when they heard the Germans start sending shells their way. Soon, though, it became apparent that these particular shells actually contained leaflets—in English. Scott quotes them in their entirety:
TO THE COLORED SOLDIERS OF THE AMERICAN ARMY
Hello, boys, 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 are you rather not treated over there as second-class citizens? Can you go into a restaurant where white people dine? Can you get a seat in the theater where white people sit? Can you get a seat or a berth in the railroad car, or can you even ride, in the South, in the same street car with white people? And how about the law? Is lynching and the most horrible crimes connected therewith a lawful proceeding in a democratic country?
Now, this is all different in Germany, where they do like colored people, where they treat them as gentlemen and as white people, and quite a number of colored people have positions in business in Berlin and other German cities.
Why, then, fight the Germans only for the benefit of the Wall street [sic] robbers and to protect the millions they have loaned to the British, French, and Italians? You have been made the tool of the egotistic and rapacious rich in England and 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. To carry a gun in this war is not an honor, but a shame. Throw it away and come over into the German lines. You will find friends who will help you along.
Whoever wrote that clearly had a powerful understanding not only of the English language, but of American history and society. I don’t know how good the black people of Germany had it in 1918, or how many of them there even were, but it’s hard to argue with that second paragraph; I can’t imagine it didn’t resonate with the men of the 367th. And yet, Scott writes, “Be it said to the honor and credit of the many thousands of Negro officers and soldiers to whom this propaganda was addressed, the invitation had no effect other than to pre- sent an intimate view of German methods and to confirm in our men a loftier conception of duty.”
No one in the AEF thought to include the 92nd Division in the massive Meuse-Argonne Offensive until someone noticed, on a map, a gap in the lines in between a French unit and the American 77th Division, at which point it was decided that another French unit and the American 368th Infantry Regiment be used to fill it. At last, it seemed, black American troops were going to get to play a part in a major battle while serving under American command. As it happened, though, their performance was used by many to discredit both them and black troops in general. In truth, they never really had a chance to make good.
It would be too much to say that they were set up to fail; it’s hard to believe that any military commander, no matter how racist, might ever want to see an American military unit fail in a major battle, especially considering that such a failure might potentially jeopardize other troops—white troops—not to mention the battle’s resolution. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem as if much consideration was given to helping them succeed, either. They were rushed to the front without much notice or adequate supplies. Many of them rode there on open flatcars, for a hundred miles or more, in the pouring rain, arriving just two days before the attack was to commence. Their officers didn’t have time to do any scouting or familiarize themselves with the area. According to testimony some of them gave afterward, they weren’t given specific objectives, either, or even maps. Their artillery batteries were sent to support other divisions; they did not receive essential equipment, like grenade launchers and signal flares, for several days after the battle commenced. And they were given the wrong wire cutters—instead of the heavy-duty cutters they needed to slice through entanglements the Germans had been laying down for four years, they were issued light tools that weren’t up to the task—which meant that they could advance only very slowly (if at all) and in small groups, rather than with full regimental strength.
Things did not go well. Morale was low to begin with, and dropped quickly. Communications broke down between the many small units. Orders were confused or contradictory or incomplete. Artillery support was promised (from the French) but not delivered. Some units were ordered to retreat for no apparent reason, only to be sent forward again. A few managed to break through, penetrating so far beyond the German lines that they lost contact with regimental headquarters. And the commanding officer of the lead battalion, Major Max Elser, appears to have suffered some sort of mental breakdown in the midst of the battle, withdrawing from command without actually relinquishing it. In the end, the 368th failed in its overall mission, which was to achieve liaison with the 77th Division. They were pulled from the field after five days, having suffered more than 250 casualties.
Word spread quickly: The black troops were a bust. They did not hold up under fire, but fled; they could not keep order. There was no discussion of wire cutters or artillery, of ju
mbled orders, of the white Major Elser. The entire 92nd Division was deemed incompetent, despite the fact that three of its four regiments had been held in reserve, kept out of the battle entirely. It was pulled from the Argonne and sent to another sector, where its troops performed admirably, but it didn’t matter: They were already tainted. There was to be no redemption for them—or, in the eyes of many, any black combat troops, despite the heroic accomplishments of the Harlem Hellfighters and the rest of the 93rd Division. Detractors would cite the “failed” 92nd Division as proof that black men were unfit to serve in combat, through the next world war and right up until President Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces in 1948. And even for a while after that.
Even if few cared to investigate further the charges against the 92nd Division, the successes of the 93rd were not so easily ignored. For one thing, their exploits had been covered by newspapermen during the war, including a number of white journalists who had been disinclined, beforehand, to look favorably upon black soldiers, but who were won over after seeing the 93rd in action. Irvin Cobb, a well-known southern writer who covered the war for the Saturday Evening Post, was so impressed with the 369th after visiting them in France that he wrote: “A word that has been uttered billions of times in our country, sometimes in derision, sometimes in hate, sometimes in all kindliness—but which I am sure never fell on black ears but it left behind a sting for the heart—is going to have a new meaning for us, South and North too, and that hereafter n-i-g-g-e-r will merely be another way of spelling American.” He was trying, anyway.
The 93rd got an awful lot of good press in America during the war, especially the 369th. As it happened, the Harlem Hellfighters were the first New York troops to return home, and on February 17, 1919, they were cheered by huge crowds of black and white spectators as they marched through Manhattan, a parade that could be regarded as the point of origin of the civil rights movement. There is, indeed, a case to be made that the movement had its genesis in that first World War, which not only afforded many thousands of African Americans the dignity of a uniform and service but took them to a country where, more often than not, they were treated just like everyone else, at least by those who weren’t American. “We return,” Du Bois wrote in the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, in May, 1919. “We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.”
In 1993, I met a very old black man in Memphis who had served in the First World War. His memory had retreated too far for him to share very much of that experience, except for one tantalizing swatch of a story: that he and all the other black soldiers at whatever camp he’d trained at had had to wear tin cans on strings around their necks as spittoons, lest they spit on the ground. I had never heard of such a thing; certainly, no one had made white soldiers do anything like that as a matter of policy. It was as if I had pressed my eye against a pinhole in a door and beheld one tiny detail, grotesquely magnified, of the pageant going on behind it. So ten years later, when I set out to find and interview America’s few surviving doughboys, I wanted very badly to find and interview several who were also black. In the end, I managed to interview only two. And the second denied that he was actually black.
His name was George Henry Johnson; I learned about him from some brief newspaper article that Google brought to my attention in the fall of 2005. He lived in Richmond, California, near Oakland, and was then 111 years old. I did not know, from that article, that Mr. Johnson was African American. I did not know it, either, from the lengthy telephone conversation we had before I booked a flight to Oakland to go see him. He told me, in fact, that his mother had been born in Sweden, and that his father, a native of northern New England (or, he later said, Delaware), was of mixed European and Mohawk ancestry. But then he told me something else: that because his father had been part Mohawk and had passed on to George a somewhat swarthy complexion, when George was drafted, in 1918, the Army put him in a colored regiment.
Two weeks later, I was there.
Census records do confirm that he was, as he claimed, 111 years old, having been born in Philadelphia in May of 1894. But of all the things he told me, that little bit of information is one of the few that I know without reservation to be entirely accurate. George Henry Johnson’s story comprised a great many claims and anecdotes that, I have come to understand over time, may or may not have been true; and some, I am certain, were not at all.
Now, there is plenty about George Henry Johnson that was truly remarkable. He was, after all, 111 years old, and lived on for another ten and a half months after I met him. At the time of his death, at age 112, he was among the oldest men who had ever lived. He was married to the same woman for sixty-eight years. When I met him he was blind but still lived alone in a house he had built himself seventy years earlier, mostly with wood he had salvaged.
And yet, it became apparent to me very soon after I arrived at that house, on October 14, 2005, that George Johnson was a man who could, shall we say, spin a yarn.
Take the story he told me, over the course of twenty minutes, about his childhood adventures at sea, which began when he and a friend, Charlie Porter, went across the Delaware River to the shipyards at Camden, New Jersey, to poke around a huge ship that was about to be launched—only at some point Charlie disappeared, and by the time George made it back on deck, the ship was far out at sea. So young George embarked, he said, on an odyssey that took him to South America, then South Africa, then back to South America, then England—and I’m probably missing a few stops in there; it’s a hard tale to follow, even though I have a transcript of it—until finally, he said, “I arrived home on a Christmas Eve Day . . . and I got home and my mother opened the door. So now I had been gone three years. They didn’t know where I was, and to stand there and see me at the door of the home, she was just amazed.” That’s right: From that day he’d gone off to Camden with Charlie Porter, he said, his parents had had no idea where he was. “I tried to write but I couldn’t,” he explained. “Didn’t have enough papers or enough pencils to write.” And so, “when I finally got home I was about seventeen years old . . . and we had a wonderful Christmas Day that year.”
Or something like that. There were several tales of that nature; at various times, for instance, he told me that his father, or maybe his grandfather—he vacillated on this point—had been the illegitimate son of President Andrew Johnson, and that both were present on the platform at Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address (“With malice toward none, with charity for all”), although apparently he told others it was the Gettysburg Address. He was clearly proud of his father, a “very distinguished-looking man, a very uprighteous man” who “looked like the king of England” and worked for six decades for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, calling trains on the platform of Thirtieth Street Station, a position of a certain prestige. That much can be verified. I even examined a picture of his father: dark three-piece suit, watch chain, wire-rim glasses, perfect posture, impeccably trimmed Vandyke, stern expression. He did bear a passing resemblance to George V, in a way.
He did not, however, look at all like a white Vermonter (or Delawarian) with a bit of Mohawk in him; nor did his mother, in the same picture, look like a Swedish immigrant. And they weren’t, at least not according to the United States Census Bureau, which recorded in 1900 that James Edward Johnson had been born in Kentucky in November, 1861, Corona Mason Johnson in Maryland in October, 1864. Her parents had also been born in Maryland; James’s parents had, like him, been born in Kentucky. All were listed as black. And, as far as the Army was concerned, George Johnson was colored, too.
To be honest, I don’t know all that much about his military service. As I said, he never made it to France, although he told me that they were getting ready to ship out when the war ended, and that he was glad it did. He told me—and also told several other people who interviewed him on different occasions—that he was sent down
to Camp Greene, North Carolina, and assigned to the “14th Company, 154th Battalion.” There was a Camp Greene near Charlotte, and some two thousand black inductees were sent there for training in the summer of 1918, exactly when Mr. Johnson was inducted into the Army; but there was no “14th Company” there (Army companies were typically lettered, not numbered), and no “154th Battalion.” He gave that unit in response to a question, and gave it quickly, reflexively. Whether he had become confused over the years or was deliberately obfuscating, I don’t know. He did not, he told me, have his discharge papers anymore. I can only say for certain that he served because I saw, in his house, a photograph of him in uniform.
Whatever his unit, he said he was eventually made “a postal agent” at the camp, assigned to sort and deliver the mail. When I asked him if he’d liked the Army, he replied: “No, of course not.” He said it “mostly was drilling, drilling, drilling, drilling.” The officers, he recalled, “treated us well.” “They were all white,” he told me when I asked him. “All white—that is, as far as I know.” He refused to acknowledge, though, that his fellow soldiers were all black. Or even that any of them were. I asked him every which way about this, yet he always avoided using the B word somehow. One of his close friends was “a brown-skinned man,” while another “was a kind of mulatto.” The rest of his unit, he said, “were different-looking nationalities . . . there was so much of a mixture . . . that is, so far as general looks were concerned—light, brown, dark, what have you.”
The Last of the Doughboys Page 33