Courage Has No Color Read online

  In addition to Eleanor’s involvement with policies, she was a sympathetic ear for those who reached out to her. She received frequent letters from black soldiers alerting her to discrimination taking place on military bases.

  Sergeant Henry Jones was one of many soldiers who wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt. He told her that the men in his unit were “loyal Americans . . . ready and willing to do their part . . . the fact that we want to do our best for our country and be valiant soldiers, seems to mean nothing to the Commanding Officer of our Post.” Jones was writing on behalf of 121 other soldiers who signed the letter. “We do not ask for special privileges. . . . All we desire is to have equality; to be free to participate in all activities, means of transportation, privileges and amusements afforded any American soldier.” Eleanor Roosevelt sent so many requests like this to Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall to investigate that Marshall had to assign two staff members just to answer them.

  Eleanor made it her business to stay on top of the news affecting black soldiers. In 1943, when reports began to surface that black combat units weren’t being sent to the front and that some of those units were being given service duties instead, she wrote to the War Department, saying they “should be given a chance to prove their mettle. I feel they have something to gain in the war.”

  In keeping with Roosevelt’s directive to form black aviation units, in July 1941, the Air Corps branch of the Army began training African-American pilots for the first time. That did not stop the chief of the Air Corps, General Henry “Hap” Arnold, from sending out a memo. It said that if the corps was forced to accept blacks, it would be limited to enlisted positions because he couldn’t have black officers presiding over white enlisted men, as “this would create an impossible social problem.” Regardless of Arnold’s opinion, the nondiscrimination act was in place.

  When Howard University law student Yancey Williams’s application to be a pilot was ignored, he sued the War Department for violating the nondiscrimination act. The NAACP took up Williams’s cause. Soon after the lawsuit was filed, FDR announced that the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama would host an aviation training program for black pilots.

  A group of Tuskegee airmen in Ramitelli, Italy, March 1945. One of the only photos taken of them overseas by a professional photographer, this was shot by Toni Frissell, who was documenting war conditions in Europe for the U.S. government.

  The 99th Pursuit Squadron — known as the Tuskegee Airmen — was the first group of black aviators to be trained. They proved to be exemplary pilots. Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr., son of Davis Sr., was among the first cadets and became their commander. Davis had applied to the Air Corps six years earlier but had been rejected then based on the explanation that “no black units were to be included.”

  Even having cleared this hurdle, the Tuskegee Airmen did not escape racism. They were kept apart from the white pilots, “white only” and “black only” signs went up on base, and the townspeople of Tuskegee, Alabama, treated them atrociously. Perhaps even harder to stand, almost 1,000 black pilots had been trained by the spring of 1943, but not one of them had been sent into combat.

  Tuskegee pilot Louis Purnell wrote, “The Air Corps brass couldn’t decide what to do with us so we flew and flew for nearly a whole year simply to maintain our proficiency.” When that situation was finally rectified and the pilots were sent overseas on April 15, 1943 — in part due to Eleanor Roosevelt’s insistence — it was a major move forward. Colonel Davis said, “As we left the shores of the United States, we felt as if we were separating ourselves, at least for the moment, from the evils of racial discrimination.”

  Benjamin O. Davis Jr., January 1942. Ten years earlier, when he was a cadet at West Point, no one would room with him and he ate alone. The leadership did nothing. Davis said, “It was designed to make me buckle, but I refused . . . I was not missing anything by not associating with them. They were missing a great deal by not knowing me.”

  The Tuskegee Airmen went on to achieve glory in World War II, flying more than 1,500 missions without ever losing one of their own to an enemy bomber, and earning a collective one hundred Distinguished Flying Crosses. What had started as an experiment to test whether black men were capable of handling aircraft — with some of the top brass in Stimson’s War Department thinking they would fail — resulted in a spectacular success.

  If the Air Corps could produce stellar black pilots, then why couldn’t the Army produce stellar black paratroopers? That was the question that seemed to be on some people’s minds. Bradley Biggs was the first officer accepted to the 555th. The story Biggs tells in a book he wrote about the Triple Nickles is that President Roosevelt visited The Parachute School in April 1943 (before Biggs arrived) and asked the commandant, “Where are your Negro paratroopers?” Over the years, different versions of this story have been told and retold. Some of the Triple Nickles men heard that it was Eleanor Roosevelt who had asked that probing question. Fort Benning’s newspaper documents Roosevelt’s 1943 visit there, putting him on the scene at the right time. Whether or not a Roosevelt actually did pose that question to the commandant, it certainly seemed to be a timely idea. And one thing is certain, as Morris says: “Blacks were asking, ‘Why can’t we have black paratroopers, too?’”

  All of these things came into play the day General Gaither summoned Morris to his office. “He let me know that President Roosevelt had ordered General Marshall to form an all-black paratrooper unit,” Morris said.

  The Trainasium, used during B Stage, is for agility exercises and tests a student’s ability to carry out simple instructions and activities above ground level as well as conquer any fear of heights.

  Before the four-week paratrooper class began, Morris was given a little time off. He went home to share his proud news. “I showed off my boots — I had no business wearing them, but I had them.” They were the tall, shiny, brown boots worn only by paratroopers.

  Back at Fort Benning, training started in January 1944. Twenty black soldiers, including Morris, were about to go through the program. Morris, Clarence Beavers, and Elijah Wesby came out of Fort Benning. The other seventeen were recruited from the 92nd Infantry Division, stationed at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. These were tough guys who had already gone through infantry training.

  The 92nd was historically an all-black unit — with white officers. Its roots can be traced back to the Buffalo Soldiers — African-American regiments in the Civil War. Historians generally agree that the nickname Buffalo Soldiers began on the western frontier, where these black soldiers’ Cheyenne opponents were impressed with their fighting skills and thought their hair resembled that of the buffalo, which the Cheyenne held in high honor. The black soldiers accepted the nickname as a compliment. This early history has a direct connection to the 555th’s nickname, the Triple Nickles. Since nickels had a buffalo on them for many years and most of the men came from the 92nd, “we became ‘Triple Nickles’ in honor of the Buffalo Soldiers,” Morris recalled.

  Roger Walden was one of the men from the 92nd. Like Morris, he had signed up for the Army voluntarily, but Walden was increasingly unhappy at Huachuca and eager to leave: “At Huachuca,” he said, “it was obvious that very few black officers had command positions. . . . White officers who had goofed elsewhere were being sent [there]. . . . They had no compunction about letting it be known that they were being punished when sent to Huachuca. . . . I began to have misgivings about following this kind of officer into battle, and I became determined to get out.” When the recruiters arrived to find good men for paratrooper training, Walden quickly volunteered.

  Roger Walden

  The black officers who would be in charge of the 555th — three of whom also came from Fort Huachuca — went through the same training as the first group of twenty. Bradley Biggs was one of them. He was just twenty-two years old and had already served as a lieutenant in the 92nd Division. Biggs was so intent on making a good impression that he splurged for a taxi ride from the Columbus, Geo
rgia, train station to Fort Benning instead of taking the chance that his pressed uniform would get wrinkled on the bus. The white cabdriver did not speak to him once during the forty-five-minute drive.

  Bradley Biggs

  Biggs met Morris his first morning at Fort Benning. Morris stood at attention and introduced himself.

  “So here we stand,” Biggs said to Morris. “You, the first Negro enlisted man accepted for the airborne forces, and me, the first officer.”

  They smiled at each other.

  Biggs had grown up in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Newark, New Jersey, and was determined to do something of importance with his life. Being a part of the Triple Nickles offered him that opportunity. “We realized if we did it for ourselves, the rest would follow,” he wrote. “We felt the pride of Negro America rested on our success. We were, in effect, on trial every day.”

  Week one — or A Stage — was rough. “It was from daylight to dark, running, jumping, doing push-ups, getting our body in physical shape for the other three weeks of training,” Morris remembered.

  They ran several miles before breakfast, and that was just to warm up. They then maneuvered around obstacle courses, scaled walls, climbed ropes, learned hand-to-hand combat techniques, and ran some more. Even for men like Biggs, who had already trained as an infantry soldier and had played professional football for the all-black New York Brown Bombers, it was brutal. He recalled “running until our lungs begged for air and our boots felt like they were made of lead.” It was the kind of training meant to push their limits — to see if they could stand it without collapsing or giving up.

  June 1944. The second platoon of the 555th doing push-ups during A Stage.

  One of the men, Carstell Stewart, who was already in top physical shape as a former track star and football player from Morgan State College, said, “They were trying to break us — that was a normal thing in that position. . . . It was a type of hazing situation: Are you tough enough? Can you compete? Can you be one of us? . . . It wasn’t that they were white and we were black. It was just a one-on-one, man-to-man thing.”

  During A Stage, they were also taught about the equipment they would be using. There were lectures and demonstrations on how to handle parachutes on landings, how to keep from getting dragged, and how to keep themselves safe during a jump. Mock jumps from the C-47 fuselage taught them how to exit an aircraft in the right position to avoid spinning when they fell, as well as how to position their bodies for landing. Learning how to hit the ground without injury is a key first step to becoming a paratrooper. What Morris’s men had begun to learn while mimicking the white students was now a formal part of their training.

  During B Stage, the men began to practice operating their parachutes. The chutes used were modeled after the emergency parachutes pilots used to evacuate an aircraft in trouble. There was no quick release to detach the parachute from the harness after landing. Instead, you could either get up on your feet and run around your parachute — impossible in windy conditions — or lie down and pull one set of risers until the chute collapsed. It was tricky business, and important to shed the chute fast before it deflated to avoid being dragged by a gust of wind. Mastering how to unfasten the harness as swiftly as possible was crucial to success.

  B Stage also brought the first real jump — from a height of thirty-four feet. This jump required them to put into practice the tight body position they had learned from the C-47 mock-door jumps and gave them a chance to maintain control on the way to the ground. No parachute opened on this jump; instead, the harness was hooked into a zip line. The thirty-four-foot tower was nicknamed the Great Separator because it separated those who had the courage and guts to go through with the jump from those who did not. Only one of the original twenty men couldn’t bring himself to jump. The rest went right through the door.

  Elijah Wesby has just jumped from the thirty-four-foot tower and his straps are still attached to the cable. Roger Walden assists in pulling Wesby down to unhook him. From the look of their clean uniforms and calm expressions, this appears to be a posed photo of their training.

  The jump-sequence language that the men had already learned became very real at this point in their training. As each man took his place, he heard the instructor boom part of the same sequence (the full sequence wasn’t needed because you can’t sit down in the tower): “Stand in the door.”

  Then: “Go,” and a slap on the leg. Most times, out they went. Sometimes an encouraging shove was needed. That was usually all it took, because each man, as Biggs observed, “knew that if he walked down those [tower] stairs, he walked away from his airborne career.” That was the last thing any of them wanted.

  Years later, Biggs described in his book what the jumps from the tower were like: “You would leave the mock tower placing both feet together, legs straight, head down with the chin on your chest, and both hands on the parachute counting, ‘one thousand, two thousand, three thousand.’”

  They all knew there were plenty of ways to get it wrong. Jumping with your eyes closed, called a blackout jump, and jumping with your hands grabbing for air or with your legs askew were just some examples of jumps that didn’t receive a good mark — and several passing jumps were needed to move on to the next stage. Hubert Bridges was determined to get it right and asked two of his fellow Triple Nickles members — Leo Reed and McKinley Godfrey — to help him with some extra practice sessions late at night.

  Hubert Bridges

  C Stage raised the stakes even higher. The men moved on from the thirty-four-foot tower to ones that were 250 feet tall. The first jump from this height was from what was called a controlled descent tower. Although the parachute was attached to cables, there was still a dizzying view from the top of that tower. Here is how it worked: The first time down was on a two-man seat, to get used to the height. At the bottom, the seat was stopped before the riders reached the ground. The second time, a soldier was strapped into a harness, above which an attached parachute had already been opened. Then a cable would pull him straight up to the top of the tower. When it reached the top mark, a special hitch would release the jumper, who would then descend — slowed only by his parachute kept in line by cables. These preparatory runs give a jumper a sense of the height and the feeling of the chute taking him down before he is in charge of actually controlling the parachute himself.

  The 250-foot “free tower,” on the other hand, was a whole other experience. No gently guided ride there. Once the jumper and chute were raised to the hitch at the top of the tower and the chute was released, the jumper was in full control of the parachute. The instructor on the ground hollered out directions: “Keep your feet and knees together . . . elbows locked, go to the left,” and so on. There were no cables to keep him from crashing into the tower if he failed to control his direction.

  Rigging up a landing practice parachute to one of the 250-foot towers. This photo was taken in 1941 at Fort Benning, Georgia.

  Actual operation of the two 250-foot towers. The one at the right is the controlled descent tower. After the parachutist is hoisted to the top with the chute open, wires guide him straight down onto the ground. The tower on the left releases the parachutist at the top to drift with the wind in landing. This photo was taken in 1941 at Fort Benning, Georgia.

  Sergeant Roger Walden was incredulous: “They looked to me like the Eiffel Tower. I thought, my God, what have I gotten into? I couldn’t believe I’d go off one of those towers, yet I felt I had a mission that was [above] and beyond me, and I would give it all I had.” That is exactly what he and the others did.

  Then it was time for their final phase. D Stage. Jump Week.

  Walter Morris gets his equipment checked before taking his first jump.

  The Triple Nickles were already beating the odds, already pushing the boundaries, but the reality of discrimination was never far enough away to be forgotten or ignored. African-American citizens and soldiers alike were still being kept out of “white” establishments,
sectioned off into the back aisles of movie theaters, called vicious names, and targeted with unprovoked attacks. The irony of the bigger picture could not have been lost on anyone paying attention. “Soldiers were fighting the world’s worst racist, Adolph Hitler, in the world’s most segregated army,” historian Stephen Ambrose later wrote.

  Right in the heart of the nation’s capital, one soldier reported a common occurrence: “While in uniform, I was not allowed to eat in white establishments. . . . It was not only insulting but hurtful because I was one of those fighting for the country.” There were brutal results of prejudice as well. In January 1942, white military police in Alexandria, Louisiana, arrested and beat a black soldier. When black soldiers came to his defense and white civilians joined the side of the military police, the situation exploded into a full-scale riot.

  In June 1943, on a hot day in a crowded park in Detroit, Michigan, fighting broke out among a few black and white people there. Tempers flared, and the violence spread like a virus as rumors of who had done what to whom incited rage in both blacks and whites in the vicinity. Windows were smashed, people were beaten, and by the next day, twenty-five black people and nine white people had been killed, and 1,000 more had been hurt.

  Even as progress toward treating black citizens more fairly was being made — or perhaps because of it — clashes broke out. In May 1943, at the ADDSCO shipyard in Mobile, Alabama, a group of black welders had been promoted and were to work alongside white welders on the same job. One of the white welders wrote, “We don’t any more want to work . . . alongside a Negro than you would want to take one into your dining room.” When their joint shift was about to begin, the white welders arrived “armed with bricks, clubs, and bars, [and] attacked the Negro welders.” The situation was resolved only when the company backed down and agreed to keep the black and white welders segregated.