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DEBT OF HONOR
A half-century late, seven black heroes have been nominated for the Medal of Honor
The last act of a grateful nation's half-century commemoration of the Allied victory in World War II may be a simple and long-delayed act of justice: Seven black American soldiers, all but one now dead, will be awarded the Medal of Honor for their valor and self-sacrifice while fighting for a segregated country in a segregated Army.
While 1.2 million black Americans served in World War II, not one received the nation's highest military honor, and only nine were awarded the second-highest, the Distinguished Service Cross. Now U.S. News has learned that after a selection process nearly three years long, the Pentagon has forwarded seven names to Congress and the White House. Only the president may award the Medal of Honor, but in this case Congress must waive the time limit for awarding World War II medals, which expired in 1952. The waivers for the seven are contained in the 1997 defense authorization bill, and such measures ordinarily are not passed until October.
The seven Medal of Honor nominees were chosen from a list of nine soldiers whose heroic actions in combat met the rigorous standards of a special Army Senior Officer Awards Board. The board chose its candidates from a list of 10 black heroes who were identified in a 15-month study by professional military historians who combed the nation's archives and the memories of its veterans, black and white, to find out why no blacks received Medals of Honor during World War II and whether some deserved the honor.
The families and comrades of these World War II soldiers have grown old waiting for their government to do the right thing. "Oh, I just pray that they will hurry up so that I live to see it," says Grace Rivers Woodfork, 80, of Oakland, Calif., the elder sister of Staff Sgt. Ruben Rivers, one of the seven. Her son George Livingston, a former mayor of Richmond, Calif., adds, "I was 10 years old when my uncle was killed in action. It is time to do the right thing and it doesn't really matter who gets the credit." Former Army Capt. David J. Williams, 77, of Fort Pierce, Fla., says he has worked for so many years to get the medal he first recommended for Sergeant Rivers in 1944 that now only he and eight other veterans of Company A, 761st Tank Battalion are still alive (see his story, Remembering Ruben Rivers ).
The seven whose names have been submitted to Congress and President Clinton are:
1ST LT. VERNON J. BAKER , 76, of St. Maries, Idaho, a platoon leader who won the DSC while fighting in Italy with Company C, 370th Infantry Regiment, 92nd Division. The only one of the seven still living, Baker is a lively 76 years old; he first heard he was up for the medal seven years ago, and says he assumed "they" had decided to wait until he, too, was dead before handing out any Medals of Honor to blacks (story, Page 41).
Lieutenant Baker earned his DSC in the predawn darkness of April 5, 1945, as an artillery barrage rained on "Hill X," a German mountain stronghold in Italy at Castle Aghinolfi. A platoon leader in the 92nd Division, he reminded himself of the things he had learned in the Negro section of Officer Candidate School a few months earlier: Keep going. Keep the men going. Set the example. Complete the mission.
The rest, he says, was pure reflex. Baker and his 25-man platoon reached the south side of a draw 250 yards from the castle. He saw a telescope pointing out of a slit in a bunker at the edge of the hill. The 5-foot, 5-inch, 139-pound former high school football halfback crawled to the opening, poked his M-1 into the slit, emptied it, then peeked inside. One of the two German soldiers he had killed was still sitting slumped in his chair.
Baker then stumbled upon a camouflaged machine gun nest and killed two more Germans. As he conferred with his company commander, Capt. John Runyon, who like all of his superiors was white, another German appeared out of nowhere and lobbed a "potato masher" hand grenade that hit Runyon in the helmet, bounced off and failed to explode. Baker shot and killed the German as he fled. Then he entered the canyon alone, blasted open the hidden entrance of another dugout with a grenade, dashed inside and killed two more Germans with a submachine gun he had picked up.
But his own men were being hacked to pieces. Despite Baker's protests, Runyon ordered a withdrawal and said: "Lieutenant Baker, I'm going to get reinforcements." The reinforcements never showed and Baker never set eyes on Runyon again. Half a century later, he was stunned to learn that Runyon had been put in by the white commanders of the 92nd Division for a Medal of Honor.
Seven of Baker's platoon's 25 men survived. But the platoon killed 26 Germans, destroyed six machine gun nests, two observer posts and four dugouts. At the bottom of the hill, Baker vomited.
STAFF SGT. EDWARD A. CARTER JR. of Los Angeles, Company No. 1 (provisional), 56th Armored Infantry, 12th Armored Division. He won the DSC for his actions in combat on March 23, 1945, and died in 1962.
Sergeant Carter had been with Provisional Infantry Company No. 1 less than two weeks when he and his rifle squad were on a tank advancing toward Speyer, Germany. The tank began taking bazooka and small-arms fire from a large warehouse.
Carter volunteered to lead a three-man patrol across 150 yards of open field to check out the warehouse. Small-arms fire killed one of the men; Carter ordered the other two to pull back and provide covering fire. One was killed, the other wounded before they could reach cover. Carter pressed on, taking three bullets in his left leg, then another in an arm, and yet another through his hand. Near the warehouse, Carter dove for cover behind an earthen berm. About two hours later, eight German soldiers approached. Carter killed six of them, captured the other two and used them as a human shield to get back across the open field.
1ST LT. JOHN R. FOX of Boston, Mass., an artillery observer with Cannon Company, 366th Infantry, 92nd Division. He was killed in action in Italy on the day after Christmas 1944, and posthumously awarded the DSC.
On Christmas Day, Fox volunteered to serve as artillery forward observer in the village of Sommocolonia in the Serchio Valley. He chose the second floor of a house as his observation post (OP). The 366th was in a precarious position: The battalion, some 1,000 men strong, had been sent to face the Germans across 30 miles of battle front. They were stretched so thin, the German commander later recalled, that the Germans found they could easily push through the American line along with their Italian Fascist allies.
On the morning of December 26, Fox and his men woke to find themselves overrun and Germans trying to break into the house where they had set up their OP. Fox got on his radio and called in artillery fire on the Germans nearby. A friend of his, Lt. Otis Zachary, was posted in the fire direction control command post of the 598th Field Artillery, a unit of the 92nd Infantry Division to which Zachary's and Fox's Cannon Company was attached.
At 11 a.m. the fire control command post's radio crackled. Lieutenant Fox was calling again, this time asking for artillery fire directly on his own position. It was Zachary's job to give the order to Cannon Company's 105-mm gun battery, but Zachary balked. So did the colonel commanding the artillery battalion. He had never heard such a suicidal request. He radioed for clarification. Fox replied: "There are hundreds of them coming. Put everything you've got on my OP!"
The colonel, still balking, called up the chain of command to division for approval. When it came, a shaken Zachary gave the command to Cannon Company's artillery battery: "Converge, sheath" on Fox's post. That meant, says Zachary, that the four guns would walk their fire toward the post, converging until all the shells rained down on Fox. "That was with high explosive [shells], and that's the last I heard of John Fox," says Zachary. The unit later went into Sommocolonia and retrieved Fox's shattered body.
Although Fox was recommended for the DSC at the time, the paperwork was either lost or destroyed and it was not until April 15, 1982, that the medal was awarded to him. His widow, Arlene Fox, now lives with her daughter Sandra in Houston. She still cries when she speaks of her husband: "He was big and strong and handsome and very principled." Her daughter says the medal would be a great honor "but it also stirs up painful emotions. I'm 50-plus years old [and] still dealing with issues of abandonment."
PFC. WILLY F. JAMES JR. of Kansas City, Kan., Company G, 413th Infantry Regiment, 104th Division. He was killed in action in Germany on April 7, 1945, and posthumously awarded the DSC.
The 413th Infantry had established a bridgehead across Germany's Weser River and to secure that vital crossing was ordered to capture the town of Lippoldsberg. James, scouting ahead of the platoon, drew fire. He volunteered to move forward another 200 yards, observed the German positions, then returned to report. Again, he walked point in the assault. When his platoon leader was hit James went to his aid and was killed.
"They said us black troops weren't any good," says former Pfc. William S. Harden, 78, of Cincinnati, who was with James that morning. "The only thing we were good for was to dig latrines and bury the dead. I'm glad to see him get a Medal of Honor."
STAFF SGT. RUBEN RIVERS of Tecumseh, Okla., Company A, 761st Tank Battalion, 3rd Army. Rivers was killed in action and won a Silver Star, the Army's third-highest award for valor, in France on Nov. 19, 1944.
Sergeant Rivers had already gotten his "million-dollar wound" when his Sherman tank hit a German mine at a railroad crossing outside Guebling, France, on Nov. 16, 1944. His right leg was laid open to the bone above the knee. Rivers refused a morphine injection, refused medical evacuation and took command of another tank at the head of the column. He fought on, refusing evacuation even though personally urged to go by his commanding officer, Captain Williams.
Three days later, on November 19, Rivers's battalion was attacking toward the town of Bourgaltroff when its lead tank was hit by 88-mm antitank fire. Although ordered to pull back, Sergeant Rivers radioed that he had spotted the enemy positions--"I see 'em; we'll fight 'em"--moved forward and engaged in a duel that ended when a German shell hit his tank turret and killed him.
1ST LT. CHARLES L. THOMAS of Detroit was the commander of Company C, 614th Tank Destroyer Battalion, 103rd Division. He won a DSC for heroism in combat near Climbach, France, and died in 1980.
On Dec. 14, 1944, Lieutenant Thomas volunteered to lead one of his tank platoons as point and decoy for an armored and infantry task force attacking Climbach, 5 miles from the German border.
Thomas led the way in an armored M20 scout car. The Germans waited until the platoon was well advanced before they opened up with mortar and artillery fire. One blast shattered the scout car's window, spraying Thomas with glass and metal shards. The next round blew the tires off the car. Thomas was wounded but scrambled on top of the vehicle, grabbed a .50-caliber machine gun and kept shooting at German infantry although he was hit several more times in his arms, chest and legs.
Thomas then crawled under the scout car and directed the placement and firing of his troops' antitank guns, refusing to be evacuated until he was sure the survivors were well positioned and firing. Said Thomas in an oral history recorded before his death: "I know I hung on to one thought--deploy the guns and start firing or we're dead."
When Lieutenant Thomas, recuperating from his war wounds, came home to Detroit in March 1945, he was hailed as a conquering hero, featured in glowing stories in the black press, depicted in comic books and feted at a big banquet at the Hotel Gotham. Thomas tried to play down his heroics. "I was sent out to locate and draw enemy fire, but I didn't mean to draw that much," he remarked. He was promoted to major, but when he died in 1980, the local newspapers didn't even print his obituary.
PVT. GEORGE WATSON of Birmingham, Ala., 29th Quartermaster Regiment. Watson drowned rescuing others when his ship was sunk by Japanese bombers near Porloch Harbor, New Guinea, on March 8, 1943.
Private Watson was the first black to receive the DSC during World War II. He was 28 years old, had been drafted into the Army and was assigned to the 29th Quartermaster Regiment.
Watson's ship was damaged so badly by Japanese bombs that everyone was ordered overboard. Watson remained in the water and helped other soldiers who could not swim reach the life rafts. Exhausted, Watson was unable to get clear of the turbulence when the ship went down, and he disappeared beneath the waves. His body was never recovered, and Watson is remembered on a memorial at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in the Philippines and by George Watson Memorial Field at Fort Benning, Ga.
FIFTY YEARS LATER , it seems incredible that such heroes were never even considered for the Medal of Honor. The Army's review of its awards to blacks who fought in World War II did not begin until 1992, when Army leaders contracted with a team of military historians assembled by Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C., a historically black college, to search the records. They produced a closely held 272-page report titled "The Medal of Honor and African Americans in the United States Army During World War II," a copy of which was obtained by U.S. News.
The Shaw report proposed three other DSC winners for the Medal of Honor: 1st Lt. Robert Peagler of New Milford, Conn., who died on Okinawa on June 24, 1945; Pfc. Jack Thomas of Albany, Ga., who won the DSC in Germany on April 9, 1945; and Staff Sgt. Leonard Dowden of New Orleans, killed in the Pacific on July 17, 1945. Sources say the Army Senior Officer Awards Board deleted one of the three and the Joint Chiefs of Staff removed the other two from consideration.
The Shaw study--by Daniel K. Gibran, Elliott V. Converse III, Robert K. Griffith Jr., Richard H. Kohn and Army Col. John Cash (Ret.)--found no evidence to prove that any black soldier in World War II was ever put in for the Medal of Honor, although commanders and comrades and the archives indicate that no fewer than four of the seven men who are now candidates were recommended. And the study could find no official document that proves racial bias affected the Army's award policies.
But the study's authors make it plain that the climate of those times, and common practices within the Army, guaranteed that no black could receive the military's highest award. "Segregating units by race complicated and slowed training, exacerbated relations between officers and enlisted men and between commanders and their units, and undermined the morale of these units in both subtle and obvious ways," the study concludes. The resulting failures were unfairly blamed on black soldiers, who were seen as inherently inferior warriors, to be used only reluctantly or in secondary roles. In fact, early in World War II, America's black community had to plead to send its sons into combat; had to demand that they be allowed to fight and die for a segregated America.
That meant blacks had a far smaller chance than white soldiers to win combat awards because fewer of them ever saw combat. "There weren't that many blacks in combat in the first place, let's not kid ourselves," says Maj. Dennette Harrod (Ret.), 78, of Washington, D.C., who won two Bronze Stars for valor while fighting in Italy with the all-black 366th Infantry Regiment.
Waverly Woodson Jr., now 73 and retired in Clarksburg, Md., grew up in Philadelphia and first encountered racism at Camp Tyson, Tenn. "The atmosphere was terrible," he recalls. "Everything was totally segregated. The feeling was that blacks were inferior to whites. Most of the officers were white. There were not many black officers, and they only made it to 1st or 2nd lieutenant."
Corporal Woodson received a Bronze Star for heroism on D-Day in France. "Four or five of us were recommended for higher honors, but we didn't get them," he says. "Our white superiors recommended us but the War Department didn't approve it. Silver Stars and Congressional Medals of Honor did not go to black officers or black enlisted men."
Maj. Dale Wilson, a historian who teaches at Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pa., blames three influences, which he says converged in the years leading up to the 1940s: the spread of Jim Crow laws and attitudes from the South to the North; the acceptance of eugenics and social Darwinism, which argued that blacks were inferior; and the increase in the power and prestige of Southern officers in the Army.
The Shaw study found that nowhere in the Army was racial prejudice and stereotyping more common than in the largest black combat unit, the 92nd Infantry Division, commanded by Maj. Gen. Edward (Ned) Almond, a native Virginian and a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute. Almond blamed the poor performance of the 92nd in combat not on its white leaders but on "the undependability of the average Negro soldier to operate to his maximum capability, compared to his lassitude toward his performing a task assigned."
"Ned Almond wasn't a sensitive man," recalls Lt. Gen. William McCaffrey (Ret.), a white officer who soldiered from captain to colonel in the 92nd Division under Almond. "Almond came out of Luray, Va., and he had the attitudes of that time and that place. Hell, everyone in the Army then was a racist."
When Maj. Gen. Cunningham Bryant (Ret.) arrived at the 92nd in Fort Huachuca, Ariz., in May 1944, he found that most of the officers commanding units were Southern whites, apparently because the Army believed Southern officers were better at "handling" black troops. "I've never seen a bunch of people with an attitude as bad as it was out there," Bryant remembers. The general feeling, he says, was: "Whatever we do, nothing good is going to come of it."
Something good, however, did come of it, albeit slowly. By the time the Vietnam War rolled around, Uncle Sam was an Equal Opportunity Employer. Black soldiers, in fact, saw so much action that some black activists complained about too many blacks in combat, not too few. And with the service almost paralyzed by racial tensions after Vietnam, then Chief of Staff Gen. Creighton Abrams began a series of reforms that helped make the Army one of the nation's most level playing fields for minorities and women. Still, delayed justice for seven heroes is a symbolic act, one that cannot recognize the countless other African-Americans who were denied the medals they earned, or got lesser ones than they deserved, because of the color of their skin.
Continue reading more about the Medal of Honor
BY JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY WITH PETER CARY, JIM IMPOCO IN IDAHO, WARREN COHEN IN DETROIT, SUSAN HEADDEN, MISSY DANIEL, JILL JORDAN SIEDER IN ATLANTA, MICHAEL SATCHELL, TRACY LENZY IN CLARKSBURG, MD., RICHARD J. NEWMAN, BRUCE B. AUSTER AND JAMES FIEDLER JR.
Pattern of discrimination?
Black soldiers have won only a fraction of America's Medals of Honor
Medal of Honor recipients:
Vietnam War : Total--239; Black--20
Korean War : Total--131; Black--2
World War II : Total--433; Black--0
World War I : Total--124; Black--1
Spanish-American War : Total--109; Black--6
Civil War : Total--1,520; Black--24
USN&WR--Basic data: Congressional Medal of Honor Society
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