The U.S. military is often seen as a benchmark for integration and equal opportunity. But it wasn't always that way. I had an officer call me boy. He said, well, you can't eat until the white soldiers finish eating. The military itself, they did not want us to succeed.
You people constitute 10% of the population of this country. And when we go to combat, I'm going to see that you incur 10% of the casualties. Since the Revolutionary War, black men have served in America's armed forces.
Many saw combat, but most of the time they were relegated to supporting roles, like cooks or mechanics. World War II changed all that. The challenge of finding enough men to fight the Germans in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific combined with pressure from civil rights groups at home and led the military to begin training a handful of all-black units for combat.
Almost a million African Americans served in the army during World War II, but only one unit saw combat in Europe. This is the story of the Buffalo Soldiers of the Army's 92nd Infantry Division. The Buffalo Soldiers of World War II bear the name of the all-black Buffalo Soldier units that were formed after the Civil War. For almost 50 years, forces fighting under the banner of the Buffalo Soldier saw extensive action both in the U.S. and abroad. But the unit was deactivated in 1919, soon after the end of World War I. The 92nd was reactivated on October 15, 1942, a little less than a year after the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II.
An infantry division is comprised of about 15,000 men broken up into several different units. At the outset, the 92nd consisted of three infantry divisions, the 365th, the 370th, and the 371st. Within each division there were several combat or combat support units, such as artillery, engineer battalions, and medical corps. From the beginning, the Army made a concerted effort to ensure that America's system of institutionalized inequality would be maintained. Conrad Crane is the director of the Army's War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
He explains the Army's top-down practice of prejudice. One of the problems with the way the Army sets the division up is the way it sets up the leadership. And the Army's philosophy is that the African Americans really aren't quite ready for senior leadership themselves. So of the 700 or so officers in the division, about 500 will be black, but the 200 and most of the 200 that are in the top positions, they're going to be white officers.
And the Army's philosophy on how to choose a leadership is, well, who knows how to handle African Americans better than Southerners? So the officers they put in command are normally Southern white officers. In the case of the 92nd, the division commander is going to be a guy named Ned Almond.
Almond is a, I mean, if you look at him today, Almond is pretty racist. Well, most of us felt like General Almond was not. was really not on our side, that he was like a, I don't know what you would call him.
He was a man who didn't particularly care about black people at all, none of them, regardless of their rank or where they were from or anything else. He thought that most of them should be in service outfits. He was selected, I think, because of the War College, the way the Army thought at that time.
They thought they needed a Southerner who understood Black folks. And so they selected him to deal with us, and his whole perspective… was racist. So that, for example, in the division, the general rule was that they never wanted a black officer to command a white officer. So when white officers came to the division, they were promoted readily. Black officers stayed in grade well beyond the term that was normally...
In the 92nd, we trained hard. Even though we had piss-poor leaders. We trained hard. See, and I can't understand how the junior people got blamed for the failure of the battalion, where all we did was follow orders from the senior people who were white. From its choice of officers to the sites where the unit was trained, the Army often put the troops'best interests second to the needs and fears of white America.
William Perry fought with the 92nd and is one of the unit's historians. At that time, the infantry division has about 15,000 men in it. No congressional delegation in the United States would allow a black division to be trained in their states.
We were trained with arms. So the 92nd was formed at four different places. The 365th was formed at Camp Atterbury, Indiana.
The 370th was formed at Camp Breckenridge, Kentucky. 371st was formed at Camp Robertson, Arkansas, and division artillery and headquarters units were formed at Fort McFarland, Alabama. In May of 43, the 93rd, which had been stationed in Huachuca, which is a historical, old historical fort, this is where Geronimo was brought when he was captured in 1892. Historically, they had stationed Negro troops there because it was far removed from the general population and you didn't run into a lot of social problems. And we stayed there until we were shipped overseas. Fort Huachuca is a very, very isolated place.
And so... That was the reason we were there. That's right.
The reason we were there because it was an isolated place. They wanted black soldiers in an area where they wouldn't come in contact with too many white people. Eugene Johnston served as a captain in the 92nd. Like many of his colleagues, Johnston was a white southerner.
But unlike many of his colleagues, Johnston struggled with the racism he saw. Johnston's daughter Carolyn is a professor of history and American studies and holds the Elie Wiesel Professorship of Humane Letters at Eckerd College in Florida. She is also the author of a book about the 92nd that is based in part on the stories that her father shared with her. At Fort Huachuca he talked about the segregated facilities on the base, and he also talked about the ways in which the people in his unit were not permitted to go into Bisbee or in any of the other towns nearby, and that one of the reasons they were training there was that none of the other cities And states within the country would permit that many armed black people within their region. That's why they trained in four different camps before they went to Fort Huachuca.
While many Americans cringed at the thought of a black man with a gun, necessity dictated it. Almost a year before D-Day would open up the Western Front in France, the Allies launched a campaign through the Mediterranean. They had hoped that by creating a third front in Europe, they would be able to stretch the Germans beyond their means to support and supply their forces. With the Nazis concentrating on England to the west, and Russia to the east, many in the Allied brain trust saw Italy as the soft underbelly of the Axis.
It's a bloody business and Italy is tough terrain. One of the rules of thumb in military force structure and when you're trying to set up your combat ratios for attack for instance is offense to defense, you need to have three times as many troops on the offense to counterbalance a certain number of troops on the defense. The defense has an inherent advantage. The Germans in Italy have Very good units in very good terrain. They've got some very good experienced leaders.
General Kesselring is very familiar with how to delay in the Italian boot. The defensive lines there are very imposing, very professionally done. Italy is just one tough defensive line after another. It is no soft underbelly.
The 92nd entered the Italian theater during the summer of 1944. While the men had to deal with the issue of race in the U.S., their arrival in Italy brought a new ordeal. Another thing that's almost a unique challenge of Italy is the international flavor of the units you've got there. You've got Americans and Brazilians and French units and Polish units and New Zealand units and Indian units.
all along this line, all next to each other. You don't have your flank unit, for instance, the 92nd, and for a lot of its time on the front line, its flank unit were Indians. How do you liaise with Indian units?
It's a different culture, it's different communication styles. So it's a combined flavor, an international flavor, that also adds extra challenges to combat operations. There are a lot of different...
international troops there, Brazilian troops. Italy was kind of a dumping ground, I guess, for anybody they didn't want somewhere else politically. Before the 92nd arrived, the Allied forces in Europe had pushed the German troops back more than 500 miles. But after liberating Rome in July of 1944, the Allies paused.
That gave the Germans time to dig in and form a defensive line in the Apennine Mountains. This defensive front came to be known as the Gothic Line. In order to take these mountains, the Allies needed infantry. But with the focus on the Western Front, more than 100,000 troops were transferred out of Italy and over to France.
This put the Fifth Army in an awkward position. They had plenty of tanks, but not enough infantry. The 92nd was one of the divisions that made up the American Fifth Army. The first unit of Buffalo soldiers to arrive in Italy was the 370th Infantry.
We entered the line. On the Arnaud River, a little town, Pondadero, which is about 15 to 20 miles east of Leaning Tower of Pisa, on the 23rd of August, about dusk, 3rd Battalion of the 370th was the first Negro unit to fight in European theater in World War II. And General Clark, when we came there, he greeted us and told us he was welcoming us to the theater, and he planned to give us a soft section, let us get a little experience.
The Buffalo Soldiers were warmly welcomed by other African Americans who were already stationed in Italy with support outfits. Spurgeon Burris was a member of the 598th Field Artillery. He remembers another welcome that they received.
Our first day on the line, we were greeted by General Mark Clark. He drove up in his jeep, stood up, and gave us a brief talk. And I'll never forget that he said that the Germans were on their last leg. and you fellas are in here to finish him off. I'm glad I didn't meet him when he had both legs.
But as soon as he left his position, somebody had a radio and all this jazz was coming on. Sounded good, man. We in good shape.
Everything was quiet. But General Clark had not left. He wasn't 500 yards away. before the music stopped and this voice came on over the radio. And it said, this is Axis Sally speaking to you directly from Berlin.
I hope you've enjoyed the music. We have a warm reception awaiting you. And she's speaking directly to the 92nd Infantry Division. And on that word awaiting you, the shells start falling like rain. In the fall of 1944, the Allies began the push to drive the Germans out of Italy.
The 370th crossed the Arno River and made its way from Pisa, to Lucca, and then into the Cerchio Valley. Their next objective was the town of Massa, which was vital because of its proximity to the German naval base in La Spezia. By November of 1944, the 371st and 365th had arrived and joined up with the 370th.
They were also joined by the 366th, which was another all-black unit that had been trained for combat but had been redirected to guard Allied air bases in Italy. As the Italian winter began to set in, the 92nd faced a new enemy, the weather. The raining cold combined with Italy's terrain to make for a miserable existence. This served to slow down the Allied advance, and it also made a modern army somewhat irrelevant since the unit's jeeps couldn't make their way up through the mountains.
Instead, the 92nd was forced to rely on pack animals. In addition to the Germans, the weather, and the terrain, the 92nd had another obstacle to overcome, its own officers. There's not much confidence between the black officers and the white officers. One historian who writes about the North African campaign says that the key thing that the 92nd really lacked was trust between the different levels of its officer corps. That the blacks felt they were being abused, they felt they could not, they didn't have a chance for advancement, they felt sometimes they were not listened to.
The 92nd developed a very serious straggling problem in late 1944. That's usually a sign that the soldiers are, it's not as much as, some say it's a sign of bad soldiers, and that's the interpretation that some of the people at the time made. But that's really a sign that they've lost faith in their leadership, they're not willing to put in the extra effort. The time it takes to carry out their duties, good leaders don't have that kind of problem.
One of the legacies of the 92nd, which is not a good legacy, is that Almond will send this study forward that basically argues that The Negro officers, Negro non-commissioned officers, Negro soldiers have great deficiencies in combat. For instance, the Negro officer, the Negro officer in general fails to meet minimum infantry combat standards. He lacks pride, aggressiveness, a sense of responsibility, and has practically no command capability above the grade of captain.
That's General Ullman's attitude, which you can see how that contributed to the fact that why would the black officers under him not have a lot of confidence, not a lot of trust in the commander? Well, the commander has no trust in them. That's his assumption about black officers. And again, there are plenty of black officers that perform well.
But if he draws this broad stereotype. Noncommissioned officers, he says similar things. A Negro noncommissioned officer cannot be developed in self-confidence.
and consequent leadership within reasonable time for emergency infantry combat use. So he does kind of concede you can develop black NCOs, but it takes too long. And again, these are the conclusions that General Ullman is going to send forward, which is going to color the whole attitude about black troops in the War Department for years afterwards. One of the issues that generated distrust among the black soldiers was when they saw white soldiers getting credit that they didn't deserve.
I had the only black commanding company in my combat team. And I had a soldier to call me one day and said he would like to come up to see me on a very confidential matter. And he came up and he told me, he said, you send the morning report back.
He said, but your morning report is being signed by another officer and he's getting credit for being the commanding officer of this company. And they would be promoted long before these guys here would be because of the fact that they had been... In combat so to speak, but they had not been in combat either. They had never been on the line at all they had just been assigned to a company and Then kept division headquarters in our division The overwhelming proportion of the Bronze Star went to the rear echelon people where these white officers who were on paper Assigned to a frontline division, but were in the rear area one of the things I saw was that When officers came in, when white officers came in, a lot of them were assigned to line outfits and detailed within a couple of days back to division headquarters. Black officers were assigned to line outfits.
They never came back to division headquarters unless they were dead. The Army had gone out of its way to treat the African Americans as second-class citizens. This carried over into second-hand supplies and ammunition.
They were fighting very early on. He said his soldiers looked like the soldiers at Valley Forge. They didn't even have on boots.
They didn't even have winter sleeping bags. And at one point, Mark Clark came up there and saw the deplorable condition that they were in and personally had to order. them to bring up boots and sleeping bags.
Ninety-second was getting weapons that were some of the weapons we were getting were used weapons. Weapons that were old. I was accustomed to yellow mortar shells that we used back in the States.
They were training shells. Well, when I got over there, we still got the yellow mortar shells. We went to the 88th and I put in for ammunition and they gave us olive drab mortar shells and they were new.
Well, those old yellow shells that we had used back in Fort Huachuca and also had used when we initially got to Italy. I think the people over there wanted to get rid of the yellow shells and they said the Black Buffalo Division is coming, give it to them. So they gave those shells to us and they weren't very accurate. But when we got with the 88th and got their shells, they were olive drab and they were new and they were accurate. In spite of all the adversity before them, the 92nd was still able to engage the Nazis.
By Christmas of 1944, they held the towns of Barga and Gallicano. But on December 26th, the Germans launched an offensive and quickly surrounded the American forces in Sommocolonia. It was here that Lieutenant John Fox dispelled any myths of a black man's fitness for combat.
Surrounded by Germans, Fox called in an artillery strike on himself. When he was told that such a strike would kill him too, he is said to have replied that there were more Germans than Americans in the area. When Allied troops retook the town several days later, they found Lieutenant Fox's body in the rubble. For his heroic actions, Lieutenant Fox was posthumously awarded a Distinguished Service Cross.
But in death and valor, Lieutenant Fox was still denied equality. Had he been white, Fox would have received the Medal of Honor. It took several years before the Army righted the injustice that it had committed and awarded Fox the Medal of Honor.
By January of 1945, the Allies had restored their lines that had been disrupted by the German attack. While the 5th Army was gearing up for a major offensive in April, General Amund had planned a smaller scale attack for February. The objective was to cross the Chinqually Canal and take the town of Massa. By capturing Massa, the Allies would be able to bring their artillery within range of the massive coastal guns at La Spezia.
According to one historian's report of the battle, the German guns created holes large enough that a tank could fall into them. Joseph Stevenson was there. We had two major attacks prior to the end of the war.
One in February and another one in April 1945. Well, the one in February, our organic units, 365, 371, 370 combat teams, plus the 366, attacked. The 366. was here on the plains between the water's edge and the mountains. And the other regiments were in the mountain except the 365. It was over in the Sergio Valley.
That's where I was. And it started this attack on February 5th. February 6th, the division jumped off.
And 366 were in this... It had a lot of ditches in it like that, and it's swampy. And they received a lot of casualties because there were some big guns up at Massa La Spezia, and they were shooting down the coast at will, and they were just destroying the 366. They could turn the guns and fire on the mountains, too. 371, 370 in the mountains, running into machine guns that had been pre-fixed, just waiting for them.
In the end, the attack was a disaster. This attack was poorly planned, I think, because General Oldman dealt with World War I tactics. Frontal attacks, frontal attacks, and the men had gotten kinda snakebitten about those frontal attacks.
Although the 92nd did manage to cross the canal, lack of support and air cover forced the unit to pull back. In the end, they suffered more than 1,100 casualties. Given all they faced, it should come as no surprise that the 92nd struggled at times. Their combat record mirrored the up and down mountainous terrain in which they were fighting.
This led the Army to reorganize the unit. They bring the 442nd Japanese-American go-for-broke regimental combat team in to join the division. And they also bring this task force of anti-aircraft artillerymen and form that into a regiment and add that to the division as well. So for the rest of the division's time in Italy from about January of 1945 to the end of the war, The regiments doing most of the fighting are going to be the 370th, the 442nd, and this reconstituted regiment of anti-aircraft artillerymen. So that, for all intents and purposes, is what the 92nd Division is.
After the unit was reconstituted in February, the Allies turned their attention to a major offensive they were planning for April. The 370th was on the western flank of the Allied attack. Once again, their target was the guns at Massa. On April 5th, the 370th had reached the castle at Aganolfi.
They had also advanced beyond the reach of their reinforcements. Soon they came under a withering barrage from the Germans who were in the castle. Once again, the Buffalo soldiers distinguished themselves. Lieutenant Vernon Baker destroyed three enemy machine gun nests as well as an observation post as he covered the evacuation of the wounded.
Like Lieutenant Fox, Baker originally received the Distinguished Service Cross. In 1997, he finally received the Medal of Honor that he had justifiably earned. By April 9th, the 370th had made its way into Massa.
When the 442nd's Nisei Division took the eastern part of the town, the Germans retreated. The 92nd pursued them, and within a week they had captured the towns of La Spezia and Genoa. By April 20th, the German guns were silenced. The report that Marshall gets on the 23rd of April, it's apparent the front has broken. And the problem is, is once you punch through that, the Germans threw everything forward to try to hold the line.
Once they break through that, then they punch through the shell and the Germans aren't much behind it. The advantage of the Germans was as long as they could keep them in the mountains, they couldn't exploit their mobility. But once they get out into the more open areas, there was nothing they could do.
Throughout their time in Italy, the men experienced what was perhaps one of the cruelest ironies of segregation. The American army that sought to liberate others still brought with it a system of oppression that it imposed on its own. We were going to Luca, Bonington Luca.
We took Pisa also. That's right. But if you put the nurses in there with the MASH hospital, they'll put a sign up off limits to the 92nd Division.
Towns that we took, the next morning there'd be a sign up there, off limits to the 92nd Division. And we captured the damn town. Why were they worried about the nurses? They were white. Another irony brought about by the war was the men getting to see the contradiction of how they were treated by the Italian people versus how they were treated at home.
Italy, I felt safer in Italy than I ever felt in Alabama. This was a fascist country. This is where the mafia came from.
But I didn't feel my personal safety was in jeopardy there as I was when I was in Alabama. How did the Italian people treat you? They were wonderful. I went back there again just a couple years ago.
I went back to Italy. And I was treated in Italy better than I was here in the United States. After the war, many of America's military returned home to a hero's welcome.
But the 92nd returned to the same segregated society they had left. Adding to the insult, in many cases the Germans were more warmly accepted in America than they were. The prisoners that we had taken and sent back, they were serving our mess and doing a lot of things and giving us a hard time. And one of the fellows that was being discharged at the time I was, he got a little angry about it. And he went up the side of a head and told him, I killed some of you so-and-sos over there and I'll do the same thing here.
When my unit was at Newport News waiting to ship out. German POWs were there doing various kinds of duties. We, the black officers, could not go to the white officers club. The German POW officers could. And they were fraternizing with the civilian personnel over there.
And they were treating us like, you know, you have to say yes sir, no sir. It wasn't just the Army. For the white veterans, their service and sacrifice had earned them the thanks of a grateful nation. For black veterans, there was no such thanks.
I was working in the post office when I went into the service. And I put in about four and a half years, and I went back to the general accounting office where I applied to go back to work in the post office. I was a black And I asked my son to blow up. what raises are you going to give me for the time that I've been in the service? So, oh, we're not giving you any.
I said, well, look, I know Pankowski. Pankowski told me he got a raise for each year that he was in the service. He said, well, he said, if you want to know, you're not getting a raise. When we got ready to board the train, if there wasn't any vacant seats, if all the whites had to be seated first, then even in uniform, You would either not be allowed aboard or you would have to stand. I applied for the job during the Cold War as a full-time technician and battery supervisor, they were called.
In fact, I was the fourth black bus driver in South Jersey. But I went to apply for the job in 49 and the man told me we don't hire colored people off the street. When I came out, I had to go back to my old job.
I was a truck driver at Safeway Grocery Company at the time. I was buying a house in 51, and I had the GI Bill to buy the house with no down payment. But my real estate officer told, person told me that because black GI is a bad risk, you'll have to make a down payment.
There was an element in this country that did not want the black military to succeed. That's right. They didn't want them to succeed.
And there was an element even in the army itself, the military itself, that did not want us to succeed. and you could feel it and tell it. And so they did everything under the sun to show that when this war is over, we can't come home and demand a lot of praise. That's right. That's exactly what happened.
We can't come home and... They didn't want what they felt was going to happen after the war when we came back. We came home, the Klan was fighting.
The Klan would catch a black soldier and hang him in his uniform. During the war, many civil rights organizations used the actions of the 92nd, and others like them, to point out the constitutional contradiction of having black men fight for democracy abroad while still having to deal with inequality at home. In looking back, the Buffalo Soldiers can see where their actions helped to pave the way for integration and the civil rights movement. But they say they didn't think of such things while they were in combat. I was just fighting because I got ordered to fight.
I wouldn't fight for no glory or nothing. I didn't figure I was going to get a better shot at life because hey, you couldn't get a job when you got back. I was fighting to try to get back on.
I'll tell you what I was fighting for. I think most of us were. But did you ever say, wait a minute, we're fighting for a liberty that we don't get?
No, I never thought about that. All I wanted to do was get back home. Alive. In less than a year, from August of 1944 till the end of the war in May 1945, more than one-fourth of the division had been wounded or killed in action.
But during that time they also advanced more than 3,000 square miles and helped to capture more than 20,000 German prisoners. Under their efforts, the 92nd received more than 12,000 decorations and citations. including two medals of honor.
While the men may not have known what effect their service would have, history has filled in the blanks. In 1989, General Colin Powell became the military's first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He would also go on to become the first African American appointed Secretary of State. Powell has been an ardent supporter of the Buffalo Soldiers.
Look, I knew that I was a black man entering an institution in 1958 that was four years out of segregation. And I knew that that end of segregation in the military didn't just come about because suddenly America or President Truman one day woke up and said, Well, you know, gee, this isn't right. More likely it came about because of the pressure. The pressure of black civil rights leaders exerting pressure on the government, but also the example that had been put forward. They are soldiers of the American nation that put themselves at risk.
They die and they show red blood just like any other American. And if you keep making that example, then you cannot deny their rights as a citizen. But it took so long.
And the Buffalo Soldiers fought, the Tuskegee Airmen fought, the 92nd fought, the 93rd fought, and they all knew that they would never get the kind of recognition they deserved and when they would never be able to rise into higher ranks within these organizations, but they did it anyway. The unit's motto is deeds, not words. More than 60 years after the end of World War II, the US Army was able to Their service, their sacrifice, their bravery, these deeds of the 92nd and others like them tell a story that can never be truly captured by mere words.
Tell me about some of the guys you remember. Who do you remember from over there? Are there guys, maybe some who didn't make it back?
I remember some of the guys there, quite a few of them who could have gotten awards. that never got anything except the good conduct medal. Yeah, we had over 2,000 men killed and over 4,000 wounded. That's right. And over 300 silver stars.
During the course of the whole time in Italy, right? Yeah. Right.
Yeah. During the course of combat. They were prisoners of war and so forth like that. Hell, the same thing the other outfits went through, we went through too. Do you remember the names of any of the guys?
I mean, obviously the ones we've talked to in the unit here over the past couple of weeks. But any of the other guys remember anything specific? I did my best not to remember. Why?
It does something to me. Even. Yeah, he went over where Fox was killed. I served with Fox for a year and a half. And where was that place y'all went?
Where? Where Fox was killed. Summer Cologne. Summer Cologne. Summer Cologne.
He went to Summer Cologne. I didn't go because I fought up there previously. And when he brought in that artillery on himself, He stated that there were more Germans up there than there are Americans.
And he was at the bottom of the pile when they went in and pulled the dead off. I think it was almost about 200 when that concentration came in. They had about 200 killed up there.
Lieutenant Fox received the Medal of Honor. Let me see. I have that battle up there. But there were more men in the parks up there that should have received awards that are still there.
That should have gotten awards. Also, maybe not the Medal of Honor, Congressional Medal of Honor, but they should have gotten awards because they stayed. They didn't run. I'm going to take a few seconds to ask you to repeat after me.
The great deal of the details in the house are about to be finalized. But now, it's time to take some pictures. Don't tell me what you want. I'm going to take a few seconds to ask you to repeat after me. One minute.
One minute. Have a good one, together. Thank you everyone for being here.
I'm just so much more than just a student. I'm still a student. I'm a student.
I'm a student. I'm a student. I'm a student. I'm a student.
I'm a student. I'm a student. I am a student of the University of New England. I am a member of the University of New England. I am a student of the University of New England.
I am a student of the University of New England.