McBurney then ordered his driver to roll forward. Knocking over the heavy gate, they entered into what seemed a kind of compound, a collection of barracks. McBurney had seen a POW camp before and assumed this must be another. No German soldiers were anywhere to be seen.
Everywhere, slowly at first and then in increasing numbers, figures emerged from the buildings. Leonard Smith's crew cautiously watched from their turret, their hatches half-closed. They didn't know what they were seeing; it took a moment to realize that these impossibly frail figures were men.
The compound they had entered was a branch of a Nazi concentration camp. The enlisted men, like most Americans at the time, had never heard the term “concentration camp.” When the Red Army had liberated the vast complex at Auschwitz in its push across Poland, most Westerners had dismissed its descriptions of the camp as Russian propaganda. This error was soon corrected when the Third U.S. Army discovered its first camp at Ohrdruf, Germany—a branch camp of Buchenwald—early in April. Eisenhower toured the camp, then ordered all commanders and all noncombat units in the area, as well as all German citizens of the surrounding towns, to do the same. Eisenhower also summoned all available members of the Allied press corps to document the atrocities committed at Buchenwald, so that what could not previously have been imagined could never afterward be denied.
Hitler's campaign to eradicate the Jewish people had begun shortly after he seized full control of the German government in 1933. The first concentration camp, Dachau, had been opened that year; others soon followed. German Jews were gradually stripped of all political rights and freedoms and shipped in increasing numbers to these camps. Jewish men, women, and children, as well as political prisoners and other “undesirables,” were literally worked to death. Forced to live on daily rations of watery soup and scraps of bread, they died by the thousands from malnutrition, exposure, exhaustion, and widespread disease. Random executions by SS guards were commonplace. Nazi doctors performed barbaric medical experiments on live prisoners, including children. One type of camp was reserved almost exclusively for Jews: Death camps, like those at Auschwitz and Treblinka, were not work camps but rather holding pens for mass executions. As the borders of the Reich expanded beginning in 1938 into Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, France, and Russia, Jews in each new territory were either shot to death by special SS squads or shipped to the growing number of camps. Unsatisfied with the pace of the annihilation, Hitler in 1942 ordered the “Final Solution,” the construction of gas chambers at the death camps that were capable of killing up to 4,000 people at once. By war's end, the Nazis had murdered six million Jews.
The camps that members of the 761st witnessed in Austria (some of the tankers and infantry had earlier freed a camp outside of Straubing, Germany) fell under the general jurisdiction of Mauthausen. The largest of the camps in the 71st Division's sector, Gunskirchen Lager, housed 15,000 inmates, mostly Hungarian Jews. The scattered camps the tankers and infantry, by twos and threes, discovered in the region were branch and work camps, not the vast concentration and extermination complexes. Although only a portion of that great evil, what the men witnessed was brutality enough to remember forever.
Smith and McBurney did not know what to do as the crowd of skeletal figures around them grew. They began to hand down their rations, unaware that this could be dangerous for people in a near-starving condition; they and the stunned foot soldiers behind them were soon admonished by officers to cease performing what had seemed acts of mercy. Several of the infantrymen were vomiting. The filth of the compound and the sheer human suffering contained within its walls—as well as the knowledge that this suffering had been deliberately, consciously, inflicted—were horrors beyond words.
Smith and McBurney had been inside the camp for only ten minutes when the two Shermans received orders from the infantry to pull out. The surrounding territory had not yet been fully secured, and the infantry captain asked McBurney's team to advance against a possible counterattack. With such compounds being discovered throughout the region and continuing pockets of resistance being encountered, the commanders didn't know what was going on and wanted the support of all available American tanks.
ON MAY 4, SHERMANS OF THE BATTALION engaged German troops in a brief firefight at Wels and supported the infantry in capturing a civilian airstrip on the eastern edge of town that had been taken over for military use. Those who had seen the camps fought with increased purpose, destroying a number of hangars and riddling several planes attempting to take off with .50-caliber machine-gun fire. After downing a Junkers transport plane, they took grim satisfaction in surveying the still-burning wreckage containing the bodies of dozens of German soldiers who'd attempted to escape.
Able Company tanks, continuing to press forward on the highway outside of Lambach, were halted by intense fire from a large enemy force in the surrounding woods. Hoping to block the American armored advance, the Germans were well-entrenched with numerous machine-gun emplacements and antitank guns. The Shermans left the highway and fanned out into the woods, unleashing a furious rain of fire on all sides.
The German troops were so overwhelmed by the rampaging tanks that survivors of the initial barrage quickly held up their hands in surrender. In the brief but heavy combat action, Able claimed two Mark IV Panzers, two machine-gun nests, four Panzerfausts, and a large number of enemy dead. Three hundred German soldiers surrendered; a thousand more had previously surrendered at Lambach. There was no hope for the Reich and no reason for any of these troops to resist any longer, though scattered groups continued until the bitter end.
THE BATTLE OF BERLIN, WHICH BEGAN with a massive Russian assault on April 16, had waged for two weeks, a house-to-house, hand-to-hand fight costing tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of thousands of casualties, including countless civilian losses. (In a futile attempt to symbolize a united people, the Nazis had not allowed the civilian population to evacuate.) On April 30, the Soviets flew the Russian flag over the German parliament at the center of the city. Hitler, in his underground bunker, dictated one last vicious statement against “international Jewry and its helpers” before marrying his mistress and, together with her, committing suicide by poison.
The last fanatical holdouts in Berlin surrendered to the Red Army on May 2. Members of the First and Ninth U.S. Armies in the northern half of Germany had encountered Russians at the Elbe River as early as April 25. Patton's Third Army had pushed across a broad front into Austria and Czechoslovakia, and Omar Bradley, concerned that Patton would ignore his designated stop-line, telephoned to repeat, “You hear me, George, goddamnit, halt!” Only the formalities of the German surrender remained.
On May 5, the men of the 761st received what proved to be their final order of the war: “You will advance to the Enns River and you will wait there for the Russians.” They began rolling east toward the town of Steyr. The same day, Hitler's successor, Admiral Karl Doenitz, was already attempting to negotiate the terms of the German surrender. Eisenhower responded that there were to be no “terms”: Nothing less than unconditional surrender would be accepted.
LATE ON THE AFTERNOON OF THE FIFTH, the Able Company platoon commanded by Teddy Weston was the first of the 761st to approach the bridge on the western bank of the Enns River at Steyr. Weston saw no one across the river in the territory assigned to the Soviets. Intrigued, he walked across the bridge, still seeing no sign of any troops. He walked back to his tank and waited. The battalion's other units slowly began pulling into Steyr.
Leonard Smith saw a curious sight when he arrived: a gradually increasing stream of German soldiers and civilians crossing the bridge toward the American lines. They were terrified, it seemed, of the advancing Russian troops. In their advance across Russia in 1941, the Germans had engaged in a brutal, organized campaign of rape, torture, and murder; many of the Russian troops, in crossing German territory, responded in kind. The 761st, positioned overlooking the river, were told to direct the frightened German soldiers back to surr
ender to the 71st Division. At a number of crossing points in this area alone, the 71st was to claim no fewer than 80,000 prisoners.
Looking out across the river, Smith and the others began to doubt that the Russians would ever reach them. Then, after several days in Steyr spent marshaling POWs and cleaning their equipment, they finally heard the rumble of advancing armor. A number of Russian tanks rolled to a stop on the other side of the river. Crews emerged from the tanks and started walking over the bridge toward them. Standing warily beside the American tanks, Smith had no idea what to expect, no idea how the Russians would react to this face-off with U.S. tanks and in particular with black soldiers. He became conscious of a woman's voice shouting, “America! America! America!” A heavyset Russian female tanker ran up and scooped Smith into a hug so tight that he was afraid she was going to damage his rib cage. After two thousand combat miles and 183 straight days on the front lines of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland, Germany, and Austria, through almost impassable weather and terrain and the deaths of valiant close friends and comrades, the 761st Tank Battalion's war had come to an end.
11
HOME
We love, we marry, we create families
and we hope for the best.
—MARGARET CRECY, WIFE OF MAJOR WARREN CRECY
After a period of several months spent performing occupation duties near Teisendorf, Germany, the men of the 761st began making their separate journeys back to the United States. According to the Army's “points” system, their designated dates of departure varied based on how long they had served, and each soldier was to be sent back to the city from which he had enlisted years before. Preston McNeil and Leonard Smith, two of the battalion's earliest members, were among the first to leave, traveling together to arrive at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, in time to surprise their families and friends three days before Christmas on December 22, 1945. William McBurney should have been with them but instead spent his Christmas at an Army hospital in Europe, suffering from an upset stomach brought on by his indulgence, after the deprivations of wartime, in donut after donut just out of the hot grease of a Salvation Army mess truck.
Floyd Dade, like more than a hundred other members of the battalion, chose to reenlist in Europe. Many more battalion members contemplated reenlistment, but after being advised that there was no guarantee the old unit would remain together they demurred; some were also troubled by what they perceived as arrogance and disdain toward them by new and untested white officers just rotated in from the United States. As they made their separate journeys home over the next few months and years to cities and small towns scattered throughout the country, the 761st's veterans, along with a group of over 1.2 million African American veterans of World War II, were to find themselves in many ways more at the beginning of a struggle than at the end.
ON FEBRUARY 13, 1946, a decorated young sergeant who had served for fifteen months in the Pacific Theater boarded a bus following his honorable discharge at Fort Gordon, Georgia, to travel to his North Carolina home. The bus made a rest stop in Batesburg, South Carolina. Sgt. Isaac Woodward Jr., still wearing his uniform, went in to use the “colored” rest room; when he returned, the bus driver cursed at him for taking too much time. Woodward took exception to the verbal abuse and an argument broke out, whereupon the driver called for police. On their arrival, the driver demanded that the local sheriff place Sergeant Woodward, who did not drink, under arrest for public drunkenness. Woodward denied the accusation; Sheriff Linwood L. Shull then beat Woodward with a blackjack and, at the end of the vicious attack, thrust the end of a nightstick into his eyes. The severely injured Woodward was denied medical treatment and locked in a jail cell overnight; the next day, after a sham hearing, he was found guilty of the charge of drunkenness and fined fifty dollars. He finally made his way to the Army hospital in Spartanburg, South Carolina, for treatment. Sergeant Woodward's corneas had been so badly damaged in the attack that he was left permanently blind.
Linwood Shull was later tried and acquitted by an all-white jury of federal charges of assault; as his verdict was read, the all-white South Carolina courtroom erupted in cheers. The prosecuting U.S. attorney had failed to present any witnesses other than the bus driver, and the defense attorney regularly referred to Woodward using racial epithets, though cautioned against doing so by Federal District Judge J. Waties Waring. Judge Waring was so outraged by the callous treatment of Sergeant Woodward that he would later recall the case as being crucial in the legal reasoning that led him to strike down, in 1950, school segregation in South Carolina, a case that was ultimately decided as part of the epochal Brown v. Board of Education.
The Isaac Woodward incident was a particularly brutal and emblematic example of the larger experience of repatriated African American soldiers: Having served the nation with distinction during the largest and most violent conflagration in human history, they returned to second-class status and with expectations that were in direct conflict with those of many of their white compatriots, who expected life in the United States—with its racial castes and customs—to go on as if the war had never happened, and who reinforced the unwillingness to change with lynchings and beatings of African American veterans throughout the South. The NAACP would use the sense of moral outrage and revulsion sparked by Woodward's case and others to enlist national politicians, including President Harry Truman, in the cause of racial justice.
THE 761ST TANK BATTALION'S VETERANS returned home without ticker-tape parades or fanfare to resume their daily lives in a country in which, in most southern and border states, they could not vote, use public facilities, sit beside whites in buses or at lunch counters, provide their children with an equal education, or find work at anything but the most menial of jobs. In the metropolitan areas of the North, their lives were circumscribed in more subtle but nonetheless enduring ways: The VHA loans, for instance, which fueled so much of the postwar economic expansion and prosperity, did nothing to help them attain homes and financial security for their families in the thousands of all-white Levittowns and other booming suburbs, as they were redlined into existing ghettos; they experienced, as well, various sorts of oblique and unstated employment discrimination. They returned to discover that what Ruben Rivers, Samuel Turley, Willie Devore, and dozens of others had given and what they themselves had endured for their country was not acknowledged or even believed. In the segregated postwar America of the 1940s and '50s, the battalion's service might as well not have happened; it meant almost nothing.
The battalion's beloved commander, Lt. Col. Paul Bates, returned to America to find himself in a period of deep confusion, haunted not only because of what he had seen in combat but even more so because “I couldn't put behind me all the contradictions I'd encountered, and how badly my men had been treated.” He was also stunned to witness and learn more over time about the true dimensions of the racial divide back home. He began a long campaign to help bring his men their due.
But if their native country and countrymen had not changed and were not immediately ready to receive them, something was different: the men themselves. They knew what they had accomplished in the war as a unit and as individuals. They had worked in combat on equal footing with white troops, some of whom had come to acknowledge them, and they had performed beyond all expectations. They had succeeded in the worst of terrain and weather conditions against far superior German equipment, in vehicles that were essentially mobile death traps. They had stood up for one another in the face of extraordinary losses, and had kept going back and continuing to stand up for 183 straight days. In England, France, Holland, Austria, and Germany, they had experienced at first hand—and, for most of them, for the first time—a larger, unsegregated world, a world in which they were viewed by civilians directly and simply as human beings, not categorized by the color of their skin.
They came back to the United States with a different sense of life's possibilities, and they expected more from their countrymen and from themselves. In cities and smal
l towns throughout the country, others of the 1.2 million African American veterans of World War II expected the same—and over the next ten years, veterans like Medgar Evers, sacrificing their jobs, their lives, putting their families at risk, would demand a share of the American Dream for themselves and their children. Their war experiences and heightened expectations were in many ways the spark that ignited a revolution in the way Americans lived and understood their society: Their questioning of whether the first fully democratic nation on paper would fulfill its promise, their questioning of the real meaning of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, developed into the American civil rights movement.
Though there were no well-known civil rights leaders among the veterans of the 761st, their numerous accomplishments had been important in paving the way for the integration of the military—a landmark step toward true equality that was firmly established as policy (though it would take several years to implement fully) by Executive Order 9981, signed on July 26, 1948, by President Truman, which stated, “It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed forces without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.” And as the 761st's veterans returned to their home cities and towns and gradually began to put their lives together, to start careers, to marry, to raise children, they were to lead in countless other quiet but nonetheless significant ways.
Capt. Charles “Pop” Gates thought he had seen enough of the military—more specifically, of the racial prejudice he and his men had encountered in the service both at home and overseas—and fully intended to leave it. He began studying veterinary medicine at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, but chose to return to his native Kansas City, Missouri, before completing his degree in order to care for his ailing mother. He took a job at the local post office. In 1949, he received a call asking whether he would be willing to run the 242nd Engineer Battalion, a newly created African American Missouri National Guard unit. Gates was about to refuse the offer when he heard a Missouri congressman comment that blacks were incapable of running a military outfit. To prove the congressman wrong, he accepted the post, intending to serve for just one year. He eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, leading hundreds of black troops in what became one of the most distinguished units in the Fifth Army area until his retirement in 1964. At Camp Clark, Missouri, three streets were named after outstanding National Guardsmen: one after President (and former Missouri Senator) Harry Truman, one after a general from Cape Girardeau, and one after Charles Gates.
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