The 15th
Infantry, New York Army National Guard, with
antecedents going back to the Civil War, was organized in 1913
and based at an Armory on Fifth Avenue
just east of Lenox Avenue in
Harlem. J. J. Pershing, known
as “Black Jack”
from his campaigns leading
“Buffalo Soldiers” cavalry in
Puerto Rico and the Philippines and Mexico, was quick to see the
value of the 15th in the winter-spring of
1918.
Field Marshal Erich Ludendorff, supreme German
commander and by then virtual military dictator of the Reich, was
preparing an ultimate offensive on the Western front involving a
massive deception on the Marne and a breakthrough in Flanders
against the exhausted British. With war and revolution in the east
and the disintegrating Ottoman empire exposing
Germany’s southern
flanks, Ludendorff knew as well as his
British and French counterparts that, this time, it was the final
offensive in the war to end wars.
General Henri Gouraud, at the head of the
French Fourth Army entrenched on the right bank of the Marne
river — scarcely an hour
from Paris in armored vehicles — asked
Pershing for reinforcements. Pershing
said the only troops ready for action were the Buffalo Soldiers and
the 15th New York, already reorganized
with other colored elements into the 369th
Infantry. The core of the
AEF’s First Army, the Rainbow Division,
was not ready and Pershing was fighting a staff battle at Allied HQ
in Chaumont to maintain the integrity of American forces, under
American command, rather than let our men be dispersed among French
and British armies as they arrived.
Pershing made an exception because under Army
policies, governed as they were by the same attitudes that had
produced Plessy v.
Ferguson just a few
years before and to which he owed his nickname
— attitudes that had
the full support of the C-in-C, the champion of
making the world safe for democracy —
colored troops (as they were called) were relegated to
labor and support battalions. Pershing,
who had started out in life as a teacher in Negro schools on the
frontier before seizing an opportunity to attend West Point, had no
racist bones in his body, but he was a hard and realistic man and
he had a war to fight.
The Harlem regiment had left their army base
in Spartanburg, S.C. in a
hurry, as vicious feelings on the part of other enlistees and the
surrounding communities had very nearly led to race
riots. Moreover, as a support battalion
they had proven themselves a smashing success: their regimental
band, led by the legendary James Reese Europe and including the
famous Noble Sissle, was touring France with a repertory of popular
favorites and patriotic medleys and, especially, a new music that
was having a wild success and that would be
America’s signature cultural contribution
to the world in the years after the war.
Pershing was badmouthed as a martinet and a
desk general; the reality of course is that he
had been a fighting officer
in Puerto Rico and the Philippines and Mexico, where he had put an
end to Pancho Villa’s
mischief, and
he understood better than some others the requirements of staff
organization in conditions of total, industrialized
war. Teddy Roosevelt had not erred in
promoting him from captain to general ten years before (the
president cannot interfere with the regulations governing normal
promotion through the ranks, but he can appoint general
officers). How did Pershing
reply to Gouraud’s
request? Surely not with an apology, but
possibly he hesitated just for a moment, concerned as he was to
keep all doughboys under his command. On
the other hand, he knew these doughboys
wanted a chance to prove themselves.
Gouraud, for his part, was
delighted. A little younger
than Pershing (both men were in their late 50s), he had spent most
of his career in Africa and liked his colonial troops as well as
Pershing liked his colored cavalry. He
had lost his right arm at Gallipoli and
regained control of the Fourth Army after some insistence.
He was a fighting general. He told the
369th to keep their uniforms and their rifles but
trade their pancake helmets for the characteristic ones of the
French army so there would be no mistakes. He won their hearts
immediately. Europe and Sissle led the band in a
spirited Marseillaise and the
men cried “Vive Gouraud!” as they headed
to the Marne.
Twenty-six years
later, at a jagged
rock in Normandy called Pointe
du Hoc, a group of Rangers began an ascent,
with ropes, under
enemy fire. Their objective was a battery
that overlooked the Omaha and Utah landing beaches.
Commemorating the occasion forty years later, Ronald
Reagan said:
The Rangers looked up and saw the
enemy soldiers at
the edge of the cliffs, shooting down at them with machine guns and
throwing grenades.
And the American Rangers began to climb. They
shot rope ladders over the face of these cliffs and began to pull
themselves up. When one Ranger fell,
another would take his
place. When one rope was cut, a Ranger
would grab another and begin his climb again.
They climbed, shot back, and held their
footing. Soon, one by one, the Rangers
pulled themselves over the top, and in seizing the firm land at the
top of these cliffs,
they began to seize back the continent of
Europe. Two hundred and twenty-five came
here. After two days of fighting, only
ninety could still bear
arms.
Assigned to the
161st Division of the Fourth
Army, the 369th distinguished itself
during what became known as the Second Battle of the
Marne. The Allies turned the German
diversion into a decisive turning point, setting up the great
counter-offensive in the Meuse-Argonne in September.
Here again, the 369th, which
had been on the line longer than any other American unit of any
size, distinguished itself, capturing the important objective of
Sechault in Champagne. They did not lose
an inch of ground and had no men taken prisoner except two who were
immediately retrieved. The hardened
German troops gave them a name they proudly accepted:
the Harlem
Hellfighters.
During Second Marne, two privates on guard
duty, Henry Lincoln Johnson and Needham Roberts, fought off a
platoon-sized German attack (24 men), using their rifles and
bayonets when they ran out of ammunition and sustaining severe
wounds. Pvt. Johnson was
awarded the French army’s Croix de Guerre
(star and Gold Palm), the first doughboy so
honored.
These are the boys of Pointe du
Hoc. [Reagan was
addressing veterans who had made the journey to
Normandy.] These
are the men who took the
cliffs. These are the champions who
helped free a continent. These are the
heroes who helped end a war.
[And, as President Reagan said, there were
others.] There was the
impossible valor of the Poles who threw themselves between the
enemy and the rest of Europe as the invasion took hold, and the
unsurpassed courage of the Canadians who had already seen the
horrors of war on this coast.
They knew what awaited
them here, but they would not be
deterred. And once they hit Juno Beach,
they never looked
back.
All of these men were part of a rollcall
of honor with names that spoke of a pride as bright as the colors
they bore: the Royal Winnipeg Rifles,
Poland’s
24th Lancers,
the Royal Scots Fusiliers, the Screaming Eagles, the Yeoman of
England’s armored divisions, the forces
of Free France, the Coast
Guard’s
“Matchbox Fleet” and you, the
American
Rangers.
General Gouraud credited the
369th with being one of the
key factors in breaking Luddendorf’s
final offensive and making possible the September counter-attack
that ended the war. What General Pershing
thought in his heart of hearts has not been recorded, but he had no
objections when Gouraud sent the 369th
across the Rhine, the first Allied troops to invade
German soil. The armistice went into
effect on the eleventh hour of the
eleventh day of the eleventh month of the fourth year of the Great
War. Armistice Day became
Veterans Day, the day when we
remember and honor those of whom Reagan spoke, using the words of
Stephen Spender, those,
whose “lives fought for
life… and left the vivid air signed with your
honor.”
(The author thanks Richard Richardson for his
research on Gen.
Pershing.)
