VIOLENT ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN UNIFORMED BLACK servicemen and MPs, local citizens, and police were legion throughout the South, and could turn deadly. At Fort Benning, Georgia, in April 1941, the body of Private Felix Hall was discovered hanging from a tree just outside the base. Investigators ruled the death a probable suicide, though the dead soldier's hands had been tied together behind his back. In Tampa, Florida, in July 1941, an argument between white MPs and black soldiers escalated to blows; a white city policeman, learning of the fracas, shot one of the black soldiers while he was lying on the ground. Near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in August 1941, a dispute over seating on a bus led to a gun battle in which one black soldier and one white MP were killed. Also that month, near Gurdon, Arkansas, dozens of members of the 94th Engineer Battalion were attacked by a mob of white civilians and state troopers.
Other racial disturbances occurred at or near Fort Jackson, South Carolina; Camp Davis, North Carolina; Camp Stewart, Georgia; Fort Bliss, Camp Wallace, and Clark Field, Texas; Camp Shelby, Mississippi; and Camp Breckenridge, Kentucky. Outside of Camp Van Dorn, Mississippi, on May 30, 1943, an unarmed black private arguing with a white MP was shot to death by a local white sheriff; rumors of mass violence by white soldiers and civilians against black soldiers at Camp Van Dorn in the following months have never fully been disproved.
The violence of such assaults—and the suspicion that many more went unreported—led African American federal judge William Hastie to undertake a fact-finding mission throughout the South on behalf of the Justice Department. His report to Secretary of War Stimson on September 22, 1941, stated that “bullying, abuse and physical violence on the part of white Military Policemen are a continuing source of complaints. . . . In the Army the Negro is taught to be a man, a fighting man; in brief a soldier. It is impossible to create a dual personality which will be on the one hand a fighting man toward a foreign enemy, and on the other, a craven who will accept treatment as less than a man at home.”
In January 1942, several months prior to the creation of the 761st, a violent race riot occurred in Alexandria, Louisiana. After witnessing the brutal arrest of an African American soldier by white MPs, members of three black units stationed nearby decided to fight back, throwing rocks and bottles in the town center. Local police organized to repulse the black troops, and a large number of white townspeople joined in on what became a melee. The black soldiers were beaten, tear-gassed, and fired on by shotguns and pistols. In the aftermath, the president of the New Orleans Press Club reported to the executive secretary of the NAACP that as many as ten black soldiers may have been killed in what became known as the Lee Street Riot.
The Army refused to investigate the incident, and would not allow soldiers who were involved to participate in interviews with the press. Later that same year in Alexandria, an African American soldier was murdered by a Louisiana state policeman. Louisiana law-enforcement officials ignored the incident and did not discipline the officer involved. The Army also failed to call for an investigation, though the slain soldier, Raymond Carr, was a military policeman in good standing and did not have a weapon.
The soldiers of the 761st came to understand the kinds of things that could happen in Alexandria. Many, like William McBurney, chose to stay on the base. The others generally kept to themselves on the black side of town.
BUT THE PROBLEMS THEY ENCOUNTERED in Alexandria were far from the defining element of their experience at Claiborne. The men of the 761st were fast on their way to becoming soldiers. The training was rigorous. Their instruction in tank warfare intensified. While ammunition was kept strictly under lock and key, the men were allowed to fire live rounds, correcting for some of the limitations of their initial training at Fort Knox. They learned to refine their skills, to fire and maneuver the tanks under pressure.
There were the usual tensions between officers and enlisted men, as well as tensions related to issues of race. When the 761st Tank Battalion was activated, few black officers had been trained in armored warfare. The unit began under the command of white officers who came primarily from the Deep South. These officers were gradually replaced, according to the initial design for the unit, as black officers received the requisite armored training at Fort Knox.
Many of the original white officers resented their assignment to the 761st. They considered the post a purgatory, biding their time until they received promotions to other units. “White Christmas” was leading the pop charts in 1942 and '43, and these officers frequently sang “I'm dreaming of a white battalion” to the melody of “White Christmas” in the presence of the black enlisted men who worked in the Officers' Club.
There were two notable exceptions. David J. Williams came to the battalion as a young lieutenant just out of Yale. Williams was the son of a prominent Pittsburgh industrialist. Other white officers told him his father must have used his political influence to situate him with the 761st so that he wouldn't have to go overseas to combat, and Williams resented the assignment, as he was gung ho and eager to join the fight. Williams had been raised with an ethic of racial tolerance, but he had little experience interacting directly with blacks. He was nervous and unsure. Wanting to appear confident and in control, at times he could be standoffish, overly strict. The men regarded him warily and were not quite sure what to make of him. Despite his strictness, however, they believed him to be fair.
The officer who came to be most beloved of and respected by the battalion also happened to be white. Lt. Col. Paul L. Bates started as the 761st's executive officer and later became its commander. A former All-American football star from Western Maryland College, Bates had worked for ten years as a high school teacher and coach before joining the service. He was fundamentally decent, honest, modest, and compassionate. He saw and treated the men of the battalion with a simple, direct humanity, and they responded in kind. Unlike other commanders of the battalion, Bates lived on the post with the soldiers. He went with them on marches and runs, listening to their comments and complaints. There was nothing he could do to alter the underlying attitudes of other white officers, but he did forbid any direct mistreatment of his soldiers, and he insisted they be given nothing but the highest caliber of armored training. He believed in them.
The men could never find enough words of praise to describe Paul Bates. He would have said he was just doing his job. When Bates's eighteen months of duty as executive officer and commander with the 761st were up, he asked to remain with the unit, refusing a promotion in rank from lieutenant colonel to full colonel to do so.
The first three African American officers of the 761st joined the battalion on July 16, 1942. Ivan H. Harrison of Detroit, Michigan, was assigned to Leonard Smith and William McBurney's Headquarters Company, eventually becoming company commander. Harrison was a strict disciplinarian, nicknamed “Court-Martial Slim” because of his insistence that things be done the right way, by the book, each and every time. Harrison was at first suspected of being anti-black, although over time the men softened their harsh judgments of him as they realized that what lay behind his seeming rigidity was in fact a deep concern for their safety and well-being.
More African American second lieutenants joined the battalion in the following months, among them Charles A. Gates of Kansas City, Missouri. Gates was put in charge of the assault gun platoon of Headquarters Company. A graduate of Virginia's Hampton Institute, Gates had joined the service in April 1941 and trained with the Buffalo Soldiers at Fort Riley, Kansas. He was tough, principled, resolute: When told by white MPs in Alexandria that black officers were not permitted to carry side arms off the base, Gates quoted from the rule books he had memorized in detail, which made no such distinctions of race. Threatened with court-martial, he nonetheless maintained his position and ultimately won the right to carry his gun.
Thirty-one when he joined the 761st, Gates was given the affectionate nickname of “Pop.” The nickname said more about the extreme youth of his men than about Gates's age. Gates took a particular liking
to the spirited, headstrong Leonard Smith, and became determined to make a soldier out of him.
When Gates learned that Smith did not know how to swim, he immediately moved to rectify the situation. He took Smith along with some of the other men to a nearby pond. The water was deep. Gates held Smith over the side of the rowboat, and somebody yelled out, “Water moccasin!” (Water moccasins were a common threat in the Kisatchie Forest.) Smith jerked away, and Gates lost his hold. Gates was about to dive in after Smith when he looked up and saw him, dripping wet, sitting on the rocks by the shore beside the others. “How the hell did you get up there?” he asked. Smith told him, “I fell straight down to the bottom and ran. I didn't come all the way from New York City just to get killed by a snake.”
Pop Gates laughed and said, “Can't you do anything right?”
AS THE MEN CONTINUED TO master their equipment and to mold their identity as a fighting unit in the early months of 1943, tensions rose between members of the battalion and the MPs, as well as between the battalion and white citizens of Alexandria. The men began to avoid traveling into Alexandria on weekend leave, going in on Mondays if they had to go at all. A rumor floated around the battalion—impossible to verify, as the Army refused to investigate such incidents—that a black soldier from one of the units at nearby Camp Polk and Camp Livingston was killed every weekend.
In March 1943, several weeks before the first anniversary of the 761st's activation, these tensions came to a head. A few members of the battalion had recently been severely beaten in Alexandria. Word went through the unit that another black soldier had been killed. His body had been discovered cut in half on the railroad tracks in Alexandria. The investigators claimed that he was intoxicated and stumbled onto the tracks himself. But men who knew him insisted he was a strict Baptist and a complete teetotaler.
When they learned of the killing, Leonard Smith, William McBurney, Preston McNeil, and several others went down to the motor pool, commandeered six tanks and a half-track, and started down the road toward Alexandria. They didn't care what happened to them; they were determined to roll to town as a show of strength, to demonstrate to local citizens that if they wanted they could blow the entire city off the map. If the Army wasn't going to do anything for them, they would look out for their own.
Lieutenant Colonel Bates stopped them at the gate leading out of the camp. He told them, “Let me go to town and see if I can straighten this out. If anything like this ever happens again, I swear I'll lead you into town myself.” Bates was as good as his word: In their remaining three months at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, the men of the 761st were never again harassed by the MPs or by the citizens of Alexandria.
ON APRIL 8, 1943, the 761st Tank Battalion joined the 85th Infantry Division, the 93rd Infantry Division, and the 100th Infantry Battalion of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team (consisting of “Nisei” Japanese American troops) for Third Army maneuvers in the Kisatchie National Forest. The maneuvers were designed by the Army to give its constituent units direct experience of the varying types of conditions and situations they would encounter in real combat.
The armored field operation in the swampy, densely vegetated terrain continued for almost two months. The men conducted combat simulations, working for the first time with infantrymen to take assigned objectives, learning to communicate with them via radio and hand signals. They rolled down narrow roads at night without the use of their headlights to prepare for surprise attacks. They further mastered the art of extricating tanks from stubborn mud holes. They learned how to bivouac in hostile territory, positioning the tanks in a circle around the battalion's headquarters and service elements, with the vehicles approximately twenty-five yards apart and facing outward from the center. They experienced countless details of life in battle: digging latrines, surviving on C rations, keeping the tanks functioning smoothly in the face of adverse weather conditions, scouting locations for camp beyond the range of enemy mortar and artillery fire.
Both Lt. Gen. Ben Lear, the commanding general of the Army Ground Force Reinforcement System of the European Theater of Operations, and Lt. Gen. Leslie McNair, the chief of the Army Ground Forces, observed the 761st on several occasions. By every account, the battalion conducted itself well.
The 761st returned to Camp Claiborne with a road march of eighty-three miles. Two months later, on September 14, the battalion was moved to Camp Hood, Texas, for its final months of training. On October 29, 1943, by order of the War Department, a key piece of equipment of the 761st Tank Battalion was changed: The battalion was upgraded from the M-5 light tank to the M-4 medium, or Sherman, tank.
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SOLDIERS
Wars may be fought with weapons,
but they are won by men.
—GENERAL GEORGE S. PATTON
The M-4 Sherman tank—named after Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman—was the mainstay and chief hope of the United States Army ground forces on the eve of the Allied invasion of Europe. At thirty-two tons, more than twice the weight of the M-5 Stuart, the Sherman was armed with a 75mm cannon, a .50-caliber machine gun, two .30-caliber machine guns, and a two-inch smoke mortar. The turret at its thickest point boasted 3.94 inches of armor; the V-8 500-horsepower engine powered the massive vehicle at speeds of up to forty-five miles per hour; the eighteen-inch-wide treads provided high maneuverability over difficult terrain. The first Sherman to roll off the assembly line at the Chrysler Arsenal in Detroit in February of 1942 was hailed as a masterpiece of engineering, a definitive match against the German Panzer.
Looking at his new tank in the motor pool at Camp Hood, Leonard Smith couldn't help but feel like a kid on Christmas morning. The battalion had seen training films of Sherman tanks rolling straight through walls, knocking down trees, annihilating armored targets from distances of five hundred yards and more. This was power, on a level that compared—for both Smith and William McBurney—with their unfulfilled dreams of piloting fighter planes. They spent several days on the dusty driving range just getting used to the new equipment. They felt unwieldy at first in the strange machines that handled like large farm tractors—but then, as they mastered the ins and outs of the controls, invincible. Like other young American tankers in training at the time, they had no way of knowing that the Sherman's reputation was a lie. The M-4 General Sherman tank would prove to be one of the deadliest military design failures in history.
Armored vehicles, in the form of plated horse-drawn chariots, had been a highly effective force in combat from the time of the ancient Greeks; the first mechanically powered armored vehicle was designed in 1482 by Leonardo da Vinci, who developed a sketch of a crank-operated covered chariot. But mechanized, armored track–laying vehicles were not introduced to combat until 1916, by the British in World War I. The name “tanks” comes from the crates in which these top-secret weapons were shipped to the front in France, labeled as “water tanks.” The first tanks were not much more than mobile steel-encased boxes equipped with machine guns and a cannon. They showed promise, however, as a means of breaking the bloody stalemates of trench warfare. Tanks could roll straight across the trenches to penetrate deep behind enemy lines—though early models were severely hampered by the thinness of their armor, by the short range of their weapons, and by the lack of any means of communicating with the outside world, which all too often left them cut off from infantry and artillery support in hostile territory.
After the war, an isolationist United States Congress voted to abolish the Army's nascent Tank Corps. It was deemed a waste of money. Two young captains—George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower—were virtually alone in recognizing the advent of mechanized warfare. In a 1920 Cavalry Journal article, Patton wrote, “The tank is a special, technical and vastly powerful weapon . . . give it half a chance, over suitable terrain and on proper missions and it will mean the difference between defeat and victory.” This perception was, as historian Stephen Ambrose wrote, “exactly right,” but unfortunately “decades ahead of most military theo
rists.”
The Army did continue, albeit by fits and starts, to probe the new technology. But it was hamstrung by its limited vision for the use of tanks, seeing their primary role as providing reconnaissance and support for traditional cavalry and infantry tactics. In 1931, Army engineers chose—with what would prove to be tragic ramifications—not to adopt the new ideas proposed by eccentric inventor Walter Christy, which included a revolutionary suspension system that would have allowed for wider tracks, thicker armor, and far greater maneuverability. Christy subsequently took his designs to Europe, where they became a cornerstone of the German armored force. The American cavalry, with its emphasis on scouting and pursuit, developed a series of quick, lightly armored vehicles armed with 37mm cannons, precursors of the M-5 Stuart light tank. The infantry, with its focus on supporting riflemen in assaults against defensive positions, developed the heavier (though still relatively light) twenty-ton M-2 medium tank, armed with a hodgepodge of .30-caliber machine guns and a 37mm cannon. Compared with the emergent German fleet, both tanks were children's toys.
In postwar Germany, the development of armored technology had become the first priority of the state. By the late 1930s, Germany had secretly amassed an arsenal of medium Panzer (or Panther) tanks, equipped with high-velocity 75mm cannons, as well as an impressive air force, and was far along in the development of the fifty-five-ton 88mm Tiger tank. Of equal importance was Germany's development of radio technology allowing for close communication among the different elements of the military—tanks, aircraft, motorized infantry, artillery, combat engineers, and headquarters. This technology fueled the previously unimaginable mobility and highly coordinated assault of the blitzkrieg across Europe in 1939. In a panicked response, on June 10, 1940, the United States Congress authorized the creation of an Armored Force, and Army ordnance engineers began a desperate game of catch-up.
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