What happened next turned out to be a fateful encounter for Pershing and his forces, as well as a pivotal development in the entire Mexican punitive expedition. The precise details and the motives that set them in motion have become somewhat obscured in the great fog of politics and war. The official version is that Pershing’s instructions to Boyd were clear: “A clash with Mexican troops would probably bring on war and for this reason was to be avoided.”
More critical assessments have conjectured that a broader war between the two countries was exactly what Pershing—and, ironically enough, Pancho Villa—wanted, though for far different reasons. From that perspective, it would seem that Pershing had ordered Boyd to continue his advance on the Villista encampment, regardless of whether any Mexican army troops were in the area or not. Boyd carried out his superior’s orders as he had interpreted them, believing that a clash with the Mexican army—if it came about—was what the general wanted. It appears less likely that Boyd would have taken the action he did on his own. Pershing, Boyd understood, thought that a show of American force would send the Carrancistas, despite their greater numbers, scurrying off into the bushes.
Boyd and his contingent of Buffalo Soldiers made camp at a ranch about thirty miles from their destination on the evening of June 20. They broke camp early the next morning and headed toward Villa Ahumada, but they never made it there. Before they completed the long march to the town where Villa was located, they spotted a large entrenchment of Carranza’s troops well dug in near the barrio of Carrizal, about eight miles from camp and more than twenty miles closer than Villa Ahumada. Boyd moved his men to the edge of an open field lying between them and the Carrancistas, who were grouped along the far side.
The Buffalo Soldiers approached cautiously as the Mexicans formed a defensive perimeter. Boyd asked for permission from the Mexican commander, General Félix Gómez, to let his men proceed, but the general refused. At first, the enemy lineup did not appear to be that large in number, and Boyd decided to fight his way through. But as Boyd’s men drew closer, they could see large contingents of Mexican troops filing out of the woods and flanking them on both sides. The Americans had walked into a trap. It was too late to back away now. Boyd sent their horses to the rear and urged his men to charge ahead. The Carrancistas fired first as the Buffalo Soldiers launched their attack.
The Buffalo Soldiers were badly outnumbered and, as a result, they paid a heavy price during the battle. Boyd paid the ultimate price, along with another officer, when Mexican bullets found their targets. “I am done for, boys,” were the captain’s last words as he fell on the battlefield. “All of our men were taking careful aim,” a Buffalo Soldier wrote afterward, “and Mexicans and horses were falling in all directions. But the Mexican forces were too strong for us as they had between 400 and 500 and we only had 50 men on the firing line.” So, even though the black troops were inflicting heavy damage on the enemy, the Mexicans outnumbered them to such a point that the Buffalo Soldiers were unable to stop them from advancing on their flanks.
Despite their smaller forces, the Buffalo Soldiers fought on for an hour and a half, holding off the Carrancistas as best they could as the enemy closed within thirty yards. Bullets fell like hot coals in all directions, taking a heavy toll on both sides of the conflict. As the battle raged on, the Tenth found itself running out of ammunition, and the men had no alternative except to escape from the trap sprung by the Mexicans. Some did get away, but the Carrancistas swarmed in and captured twenty-three of them, killed eleven enlisted men, and wounded ten others and a third officer. The Buffalo Soldiers had caused some serious damage of their own in return, killing Gómez, the Mexican commander who had refused to grant them safe passage, and forty-five of his soldiers, plus wounding forty-three others.
When Pershing received news of the defeat, he said that he was “surprised” and “chagrined” and was determined to revenge the loss of his men. War fever against Mexico was building in the United States, and Pershing wanted to seize the opportunity to launch a full-scale invasion of Chihuahua and wipe out the Villistas once and for all. President Wilson had other ideas, however, and refused to allow him to escalate the conflict. The punitive expedition to destroy Villa and his men was over as far as he was concerned.
A new war beckoned, and Wilson’s attention had turned increasingly toward German aggression in Europe while much of his army was stampeding across the hills of northern Mexico. It was time, he thought, to pull the plug and salvage what remained of US relations with the Mexican government. Wilson gave the order to withdraw from the country without accomplishing his goal there after nine months of bloody warfare. The United States never did find Pancho Villa. It took an assassin’s bullet to claim his life while he visited Parral on July 20, 1923, most likely with the approval of the Mexican government he was still so eager to topple.
Shortly after the Battle of Carrizal, the Mexican government shipped the bodies of the Buffalo Soldiers killed there back to the United States, where they received a heroes’ welcome in El Paso, Texas. The War Department transported six of the fallen men, including Captain Boyd, to Washington, DC, for burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Crowds lined the entire route all the way from Union Station, across the Memorial Bridge, and out to the cemetery as the horse-drawn procession took the men to their final resting places.
In Mexico, there was little left for the troops to do except keep busy until each unit received its marching orders to head back north to the US side of the border. Pershing sent them out on tactical maneuvers, but he cut them short because of the hostility of the local population. They marked off makeshift baseball fields in the dirt, set up rings for boxing matches, and did calisthenics on the drilling field to stay in shape. On Thanksgiving Day, the Buffalo Soldiers of the Tenth and Twenty-Fourth roasted turkeys in the adobe ovens scattered throughout the area and served up dinner complete with stuffing, potatoes, corn, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and other trimmings. They topped it all off with cigars, local rum, wine, and brandy. Soon it would be time to head home—only to be sent off to the next war, which summoned them from the far side of the Atlantic Ocean.
All the American troops were back on US soil by February 5, 1917. They assembled in Columbus, New Mexico, the border town that had triggered the fruitless campaign to kill or capture Pancho Villa, and from there they departed to their new assignments, with the Tenth Cavalry and Twenty-Fourth Infantry ordered to protect the border dividing Mexico and the United States until the government decided where to station them next.
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It wasn’t long before the old racial prejudices resurfaced. Roosevelt had betrayed the Buffalo Soldiers after their service in Cuba, and now it was Pershing’s turn to stigmatize them as virtual foreigners in their own country. The man who had earned the sobriquet Black Jack because of his high praise for the black troops he led in combat now labeled them a “constant menace” to American society in a directive he sent to the French Military Mission in Europe on August 17, 1918. “We must not eat with them, must not shake hands or seek to talk or meet with them outside the requirements of military service,” he advised the French officers. “We must not commend too highly the black American troops, particularly in the presence of Americans…. Americans become greatly incensed at any public expression of intimacy between white women with black men.”
It is difficult to believe that these words poured from Pershing’s heart in light of his previous views about the Buffalo Soldiers with whom he served. Most likely his message was political, a reflection of the attitudes of the Wilson administration, which was initially opposed to admitting more blacks into the military, even as the United States waded belatedly into the war that was supposed to end all wars. Pershing was a general who served his masters, and beyond his military acumen, he was a politician himself at the core, like most high-ranking military leaders. So, while his directive may not have emanated from what he felt in his heart, it issued forth from the soul of a man who was a politici
an first and foremost. Whatever the case, it was all the more disheartening coming from the pen of a man who may not have believed in his own hateful message.
The French responded to Pershing’s missive with commendable Gallic disdain; they ordered copies of it burned. France itself was a battlefield on which one in twenty-eight of its citizens had lost their lives by the end of 1918, and its army boasted elite black officers, including two generals, who had served their country well during a four-year struggle against Germany. Senegalese, Algerian, and Moroccan troops had proved their loyalty and fighting spirit at the Battle of the Marne in 1914, which stopped the Germans cold just forty miles shy of the Champs-Élysées.
“It is because these soldiers are just as brave and just as devoted as white soldiers that they receive exactly the same treatment, every man being equal before the death which all soldiers face,” read the official French reply.
France had long been a refuge for African Americans. The French welcomed their range of music and culture and accepted them as equals in a society that imposed no color barriers. It became a home away from home for many jazz musicians, performers, and writers who faced unrelenting bigotry at home. Black American warriors were no exception as they poured into a country that had already been ravaged by war for years before they arrived. At first, Wilson tried to minimize the presence of black soldiers in the military, but when he finally decided to involve the United States in the war in Europe, he realized he would need to beef up the ranks with whatever resources he had. He instituted a military draft in June 1917 that ensnared all able-bodied men between twenty-one and thirty-one years old—black men in disproportionate numbers to white men. Seven hundred thousand black citizens registered within a month, amounting to 13 percent of all draftees, even though the total number of blacks constituted less than 10 percent of the population at the time.
All in all, ten thousand African Americans manned the ranks of the US Army before the war ended, including the Buffalo Soldiers of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalries and the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantries. The Ninth boasted the presence of Lieutenant Benjamin O. Davis, the future first black general of the army, who had fought in the Philippines. Ten thousand more joined the National Guard in a growing number of states, and another ten thousand joined the US Navy. Wilson’s need for manpower to flesh out his insatiable war machine induced him to create two additional black combat units: the Ninety-Second and Ninety-Third Divisions. Like the Buffalo Soldiers who had served in the Spanish-American War before them, the latest black warriors quickly earned the respect of both the enemy they fought against and the allies they fought beside.
Two white American aviators testified that, “While [the black troops] were captured at different points, and imprisoned at widely separate prisons,” the first question German military intelligence asked was “How many colored troops the Americans had over here.” The Germans were concerned that the Buffalo Soldiers, like the Senegalese and Algerians who fought with the French, were mighty warriors who took no prisoners.
The French were so impressed by the black Americans’ fighting ability that they awarded the coveted Croix de Guerre to Sergeant Henry Johnson, the first American of any color to receive it. More than one hundred more would be given the honor or the even more prestigious Medaille Militaire. They came to be known among black American civilians as the “Men of Bronze” and “Harlem’s Own,” while the Germans regarded them as “Hell Fighters.” The French sympathized with the men’s Class-B status by referring to them as Les Enfants Purdus—lost children, isolated within their home country.
The war crushed Europe during a brutal four-year period, but US involvement lasted only nineteen months. Wilson claimed it was America’s duty to make the world “safe for democracy,” but there was little in the way of democracy at stake in Europe, which had been crippled by the turmoil of falling and rising empires, internecine monarchies, and a lust for other nations’ territory over the centuries leading up to the First World War. “We have no selfish end to serve,” Wilson declared in a speech. “We desire no conquest, no dominion…. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind.”
While America’s belated entry into the war did not exactly expand democratic freedoms across the Continent and elsewhere—Nazism and Communism would follow in the wake of the war—it did save the day for the beleaguered Allies. Italy was on the verge of surrendering to Austria, Britain and France were close to collapse, Germany was near triumphant, and the Russian Bolsheviks had used the opportunity to impose their own special brand of totalitarian hell over a vast spread of land from Europe through the frigid reaches of Siberia.
“We’re finished forever with this filthy war!” read the lyrics of a popular French protest song of the period. The country’s soldiers were deserting in droves, and England and France together had lost a million men plus countless civilians during the seemingly interminable onslaught. Germany was ready to declare victory in April 1918, when the landing of a million US troops on European soil turned the tide and disabused them of that notion. The German general Erich Ludendorff attributed his nation’s “looming defeat” to “the sheer number of Americans arriving daily at the front.” The Buffalo Soldiers were among the last US troops to hit the shores and were placed under the command of the French army. Afterward, an aide to Marshal Philippe Pétain praised the fighting spirit of both the black and white American soldiers who came to his country’s rescue in a memo to Pétain: “The spectacle of these magnificent youths from overseas” symbolized “life coming in floods to reanimate the dying body of France,” he wrote.
The Buffalo Soldiers suffered tremendous losses in the war to liberate Europe from German aggression, with the dead and wounded of the Ninety-Third alone totaling almost 50 percent of the division.
Within four months of their triumphal return to the United States, which included a ticker tape parade down Fifth Avenue in New York City, race riots exploded across the length and breadth of the country. The summer of 1919 was called the “Red Summer,” a reference to the blood of black citizens that flowed through the streets of large cities and small towns in both the North and South. Seventy-eight black men—including several veterans in uniform—were strung up by the neck in the course of the year. The president of the United States defended the widespread racial antagonism in a book he had written in 1901, stating that “congressional leaders were determined to put the white south under the heel of the black south,” and therefore whites were motivated by “the mere instinct of self-preservation.” As president, Wilson institutionalized racism at the highest level of government.
This time around, however, African Americans were determined to give back as good as they got. “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back” was a call to rebellion penned by Jamaican American writer and poet Claude McKay in July 1919. African American civil rights activist and writer W. E. B. Du Bois followed that cry from the soul a month later with his own words: “They cheat us and mock us; they kill us and slay us; they deride our misery … TO YOUR TENTS, O ISRAEL! And FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT for freedom.”
Black citizens in Chicago armed themselves with government-issued Springfield rifles and Browning automatic machine guns on the night of July 28, 1919, when a race riot broke out, the result of black residents fearing an invasion of their neighborhood by an Irish gang. Fortunately, the conflict never came off, since it would undoubtedly have ended in bloodshed and the loss of life for many participants. “Always I had been hot-tempered and never took any insults lying down,” wrote black veteran Haywood Hall. “This was even more true after the war.”
Republican congressman Hamilton Fish from New York, the son of the Rough Rider of the same name who had been killed in Cuba, spoke out in favor of a bill to make lynching a federal crime in 1922. “The colored man who went into war had in his heart the feeling that he was not only fighting to make the world safe for democracy but also to make this country
safe for his own race.” The bill was defeated with the help of President Warren G. Harding, who was elected in 1920. Harding was rumored to be part black himself; one of his ancestors may have “jumped the fence,” the president admitted, with no trace of irony in his voice.
The aftermath of the war marked the beginning of the end of the Buffalo Soldiers as a group of tightly knit fighting units in the US military. Although the need for black warriors to help fight the country’s battles never ended, when the United States began to downsize the armed services during the years following World War I, there is no question that African Americans were more adversely affected than whites; turned away from the military, they were left only the most menial jobs available in the mainstream economy.
The downsizing continued through the 1920s and into the 1930s, with the Ninth, Tenth, and other Buffalo Soldier units thinned out and all but obliterated as the Great Depression took hold. The cavalry and infantry divisions that survived continued to be segregated as they had been throughout the wars in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, and during the expedition into Mexico, and they were still under the command of mostly white officers. As late as 1941, there were still only five black officers in the army: Benjamin O. Davis, who became the first black general on October 25, 1940; his son Benjamin O. Davis Jr.; and three chaplains. Those who had served earlier had either been killed in battle or become ill and forced to retire—including Charles Young, who had fought valiantly in the Philippines and in Mexico and died an outcast in Nigeria in January 1922. He was buried there with full British military honors.
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