Courage Has No Color Read online

  At his own post, while training to be a paratrooper, Morris experienced the sting of seeing German and Italian prisoners of war buying cigarettes and candy at the post exchange. “Those men,” he later recalled, “prisoners who killed American soldiers . . . [could] buy cigarettes or whatever they wanted to, but we . . . couldn’t go into the post exchange.” He also remembered watching the prisoners “sitting down at the same table with the white soldiers, drinking Cokes, and smoking, and having a good time. . . . We’re in uniform, but we’re not good enough to sit at the table with the prisoners of war!”

  Ted “Tiger” Lowry was a 555th man with another impressive credit to his name in addition to being a paratrooper. He was a lightweight professional boxing champion who fought heavyweight champion Joe Louis while in the Army and went on to become the only person to last ten rounds with heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano — and did so twice — after the war. He was a fun-loving, outgoing guy, always smiling and a bit of a prankster. His wife, Alice, described him as “a man who never met a stranger.” Lowry had his own vivid recollection of prejudice during the war.

  Ted “Tiger” Lowry

  One day, he stepped onto a bus. His U.S. Army dress uniform was crisp, his pants creased, his brown boots polished to a shine. Pinned to his jacket were the kind of silver wings that signify only one thing: paratrooper. But this accomplished soldier couldn’t occupy any of the first open seats in the front of the bus.

  He walked past the two front rows as the white soldiers sitting there laughed and pointed. He ignored their taunts. He knew better than to risk everything he was working toward. He held his temper and walked to the back of the bus.

  From his seat, his eyes traveled up the length of the bus, up to the front. They settled on some of the men who laughed. That’s when he saw it: three simple letters stamped on the backs of their jackets.

  POW.

  Prisoner of war.

  Lowry was from the North, born in New Haven, Connecticut, and raised in Portland, Maine. This kind of racism was new to him. “There, in the South,” he said, “I found out that I was black.” It was bad enough that the black soldiers had to suffer this treatment from the white American soldiers, but to have to take a backseat to the POWs was even worse.

  Bradley Biggs’s cool-tempered demeanor changed when he reflected on the prisoners of war the 555th encountered. “That irked us no end,” Biggs said, frowning. There was pain and anger in his voice. “That hurt the living blazes out of us. Why should we be treated as second-class citizens when . . . prisoners of war can come here and get service and treatment that we’re denied?”

  These trailblazing black paratrooper students were completely segregated from the white students on their post. As Morris put it, “We were in one section of Fort Benning, and they were in another. . . . We had nothing to do with the white soldiers; they had nothing to do with us.”

  This is the area at Fort Benning where the Triple Nickles put on their parachutes and loaded the planes.

  Clarence Beavers has a sharp memory and has given many interviews about being in the Triple Nickles. “We trained, ate, were housed, and made our five jumps as a separate unit,” he said. “We had four white training instructors who had volunteered for the job. While other trainees came through the front door and went to [the] counter for their food, we had to come in by the side door and go right to the first table on our left. We were not allowed to go to the counter.” The irritation in his voice was clear. “They didn’t want us to stand on line with the white trainees, so they had someone bring us our food.”

  There were other mistreatments. The Triple Nickles were barred from the post’s main theater, a principal source of entertainment. “We had no recreation over there whatsoever,” Clarence Beavers recalled. The men also found their housing unacceptable. “We were put in a hut,” Beavers said with audible disdain, “with twenty of us, double-bunked, it really should have held no more than fifteen men at the most, but . . . being black, we were put in there separate from all the others. It was heated by one potbellied stove in the dead of winter.”

  Even though the military was allowing the Triple Nickles to become paratroopers, discrimination practices affected their training. They were not, for example, allowed access to ammunition. “Our rifles were empty,” Morris told a radio interviewer. When asked why that was, you could almost hear Morris shaking his head: “I have no idea, other than the fact that the Army did not trust the black soldiers to handle munitions because he didn’t have the intelligence. . . . They thought we might have shot ourselves in the foot by mistake.”

  Jesse Mayes, who came to the 555th wearing his polished brass second lieutenant wings with honor in 1945, had previous experiences with discrimination in the Army. “I remember when I applied for OCS [Officer Candidate School]. My commanding officer . . . said, ‘I’m not about to send you to OCS. Smartest Negro I know is on my farm in Mississippi.’ Now, sure, I wanted to slug him in the mouth. . . . It would have got me a court-martial. That guy would have won. So you learn. You learn by what my granddaddy called stooping to conquer.”

  Jesse Mayes

  Like Lowry and Biggs, Carstell Stewart was raised in the North and was not accustomed to living with southern racist attitudes. Wincing, he said, “You could cut prejudice, you could see it . . . you could smell it.” He had a particularly ugly experience in a store in Columbus, Georgia, where he was taunted and threatened with a gun if he didn’t do as he was told. Stewart told himself, “Be cool and get through it and move on.” He said, “[I] swallowed my pride because I knew what I was there for. They thought we were going to be failures. . . . That’s what they wanted to do, to cause problems, to make us not be able to bring about a successful conclusion, being a black parachute group. . . . We had boots and they figured we shouldn’t be wearing boots.”

  Some of the white soldiers even doubted that the 555th was going to make the cut. Morris said, “Both officers and enlisted were making bets that we wouldn’t jump — we’d be too afraid. The thing that inspired us was that . . . it was an opportunity for black troops to enter something they could be proud of.” Intelligent and well spoken, Walden confirmed Morris’s view: “The general feeling on base was that African Americans simply were not good enough to be paratroopers. At the time, bets were made that blacks would never jump.”

  In his book about the Triple Nickles, Biggs talked about encountering both prejudice and acceptance as a paratrooper. Some of the positive interactions may be attributed to his officer status, as well as to the attitude he knew he had to maintain to succeed. He wrote that although his training instructors were white and some were from the South, “because of the camaraderie of the airborne club, or out of respect, or simply because they were professionals, we sensed no racial undertones in their attitudes or actions, no resentment that men of a different color were now entering their special world.” He also noted that after graduation, the Triple Nickles officers “would often go to [the] theater with the white officers who had been their instructors. Once we had earned our wings, something of a brotherhood developed. . . . This relative racial calm upset the racists on the post.”

  About the racism they did encounter, the always polished and professional Biggs wrote, “We were determined . . . to concentrate on our main mission. Always on our minds was the thought that, if we failed, the arrogant aristocrats at the Army’s helm would have the excuse to say, ‘See? We gave them a chance and they couldn’t handle it.’” His outlook came from personal experience.

  Bradley Biggs

  A year earlier, a white officer had given Biggs an order that he felt was unfair. Biggs was outspoken to his superiors about the incident, and his resistance was labeled insubordination, for which he had to endure court-martial charges. Biggs met face-to-face with Benjamin O. Davis Sr., who lectured him on how to better handle prejudice.

  “If you learn to keep your mouth shut and your eyes open, you’ll go far in the Army and I will tell you why.” Davis
proceeded to tell Biggs that there were going to be openings for more black tankers, pilots, and even paratroopers. “When he said paratroopers, that sparked my ears.” Biggs’s voice lit up with excitement.

  Davis told Biggs, “Curb your tongue” and “quiet your temper. . . . Your anger will ruin your hopes for a military career,” he scolded. “More opportunities will come to our soldiers but we must be ready for them.”

  These types of experiences — being coached by superiors like Davis, coping with the bets that they wouldn’t jump, being kept out of restaurants and movie theaters — brought home the knowledge that the 555th had a double burden to shoulder. They had to prove to the world that they had the bravery and skill it took to succeed, and they had to do it while not reacting to the prejudice they ran into around every corner. But Biggs and company were stoic. “We fought segregation and discrimination and intolerance. They tried to burn us out. . . . It made us stronger. It made us angry. It made us persevere.”

  Bets or no bets, the Triple Nickles did persevere. They were ready for Jump Week.

  This was it. No turning back. “D Stage was the real thing,” Biggs wrote. It was time to move beyond the towers and jump out of airplanes. Become airborne.

  Before that could happen, the Triple Nickles had to finish learning how to pack parachutes (some of which was taught in A Stage) and review everything they had learned up to this point. There is no room for error at this stage of paratrooper training. Error can result in death: “a tangled mess of bones and flesh that had to be dug out of the ground.”

  Everywhere they went, they practiced their techniques. Stepping off a curb? They stepped off with the correct form as if they were jumping —“heels together, knees slightly bent, hands folded across his chest, counting ‘one thousand, two thousand, three thousand.’” Leaving a room as a group? They went in stick formation — a line of paratroopers one after the other, as if they were exiting a plane. Every routine had to be so much a part of them that it was second nature.

  And then it was time.

  Fear was not shameful. It was part of the process. Normal. If you didn’t have a healthy respect for the danger, you were a fool. The men dealt with the fear through humor, sometimes making jokes about staying behind.

  “I remember every second of my first jump,” Morris said. The memories stayed fresh for Samuel Robinson, too. Eyes twinkling, he seemed to be right back in the moment: “I guess I was doing a little praying when I come out and count that one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, and the chute would open at two and a half seconds, and then I would get relieved.” He said the last part with a grin.

  Samuel Robinson

  Clarence Beavers reflected on the moments just after a jump. Pensive, he said that there is “a lot of enjoyment in the ride. . . . It’s that still quiet.”

  When the officers took their first jump, the mood was serious. “I slept very little the night before our first jump. . . . The usual banter was missing. Each of us knew that we were about to do something no other black officers in military history had ever done before,” Biggs said.

  Alvin Moon was one of the original test platoon members of the 555th. Here, in September 1944, he practices securing a container loaded with weapons and ammo to the container rack of a C-47.

  February 24, 1944. The original platoon is ready to climb aboard an Army transport plane. The first four men in line are Elijah Wesby, Roger Walden, Jack Tillis, and Daniel Weil.

  Each of the two groups going through training — the twenty enlisted men and the six officers who followed just after them — had to complete four daylight jumps and one night jump in order to earn their wings.

  That first jump into the dark black night, counting on their skills, their instincts, their guts, is the turning point for paratroopers. Once that was under their belts, they knew they had what it took. “It was the moment of real truth,” Biggs wrote.

  During their third jump, a distinguished guest visited. General Davis wanted to see how they were doing. He was flown in a spotter plane to watch them jump. After the men were back on the ground, Davis approached Beavers.

  “What is the minimum size parachute unit the War Department contemplates using in combat?”

  Beavers responded that he believed it was a battalion — 300 to 1,000 soldiers.

  “Then why are you training a cadre for a company-size unit of black parachutists?” Davis asked. (A company is made up of 62 to 190 soldiers.)

  Beavers replied, “That is all the War Department sent us.”

  It is likely that this interaction helped the 555th receive their orders just a month later: to increase their size from a company to a battalion.

  The original test platoon riding high in a C-47 transport plane as they prepare to make one of their required five qualifying jumps. The first four men (right to left) are Calvin Beal, Clarence Beavers, Ned Bess, and James Kornegay.

  Test platoon member Lonnie Duke shown just after landing from a jump at Fort Benning.

  Only three of the twenty men from the test platoon failed to graduate — Cleo Washington, James S. Williams, and Emerald Jones. Jones was out when he wouldn’t jump from the thirty-four-foot tower, but he was well liked and stayed on as the company cook.

  On February 18, 1944, sixteen soldiers made history by becoming the first African-American paratroopers.

  The seventeenth man, Carstell Stewart, had to interrupt his training when his mother died but quickly returned to finish his course. It was harder for Stewart without his buddies. He had to train with the white students, who, Robinson attested with a look of sadness, “were really down on him.” In a very matter-of-fact way that indicated he had come to terms with the situation, Stewart said, “You know what they think about you. They really don’t like you, they don’t want you.” He said this next part with some punch, emphasizing each and every word: “But you’ve got to stay in and hang.” Just because he understood how things were didn’t mean Stewart didn’t feel some resentment. You could hear it in his voice when he added, “In that situation, nobody wanted to help me pack a chute, nobody wanted to . . . cooperate with me, so I had to pack my own chute. . . . I didn’t have anybody to lean on. . . . I had nobody to talk to. I was out there by myself.”

  Graduation photo of the first black paratroopers. Front row, left to right: Walter Morris, Jack Tillis, Leo Reed, Daniel Weil, Hubert Bridges, Alvin Moon, Ned Bess, and Roger Walden. Back row, left to right: McKinley Godfrey Jr., Elijah Wesby, Samuel Robinson, Calvin Beal, Robert Greene, Lonnie Duke, Clarence Beavers, and James Kornegay. Not pictured is Carstell Stewart, who graduated a week later.

  Decades later, Walden reflected on Stewart’s situation. With a sympathetic tone, he acknowledged, “It was rougher for him probably than those of us that were all together, because we could talk about things at night in the barracks, and we would encourage each other.” Morris noted, “Technically he was the first man to integrate the Army!” Carstell’s wings were pinned on his chest just a week after the others.

  On March 4, the six officers completed jump school and received their wings. Even in the middle of this positive and exciting event, there was still an undercurrent of prejudice the men couldn’t shake.

  “When we got our wings,” Biggs said, “we went off to Main Post, and I asked for membership in the Officers’ Club. They said, ‘No, we are going to give you your own club.’ What they did was convert a service area . . . gave us a cook, and called it an officers’ club. It was insulting. . . . We were part of the Army’s elite troops. We completed some of the Army’s most intense and demanding training . . . so why should we be treated as second-class citizens?”

  The first six officers graduated on March 4, 1944. They are, left to right: Jasper Ross, Clifford Allen, Bradley Biggs, Edwin Wills, Warren “Cal” Cornelius, and Edward Baker.

  With the officers on board, the 555th was now the first all-black paratrooper unit in the U.S. Army. The Army let it be known that it wanted more volunteers. “We got ap
plications from everywhere,” Morris said. As before, soldiers who got word of the opportunity were eager to make a difference. Carl Reeves was a mess steward when he found out about the 555th. “This was a chance for me, really, to prove that I could do something besides serve food to cadets.”

  For the second time, Morris was summoned to General Gaither’s office. This time, he wasn’t worried.

  Morris has a knack for infusing his sense of humor into a serious story. “He was serving as my godfather,” Morris jested, chuckling for a second. “And he said, Morris, I want you to go back to OCS [Officer Candidate School]. This is going to be a battalion. . . . They’re going to need more officers.”

  The platoon did expand, adding new recruits who needed to be trained. Meanwhile, the first twenty-three men embarked on specialized training for combat. The men assumed they were headed for battle. Morris said, “We started combat training preparing troops to go overseas.” As Beavers remembered, that included “how to . . . shoot under combat, how to respond to enemy attack, how to . . . fight as a squad in enemy territory . . . and how to assemble and fight as a company.” They also learned to be jumpmasters, parachute riggers, pathfinders, and communications experts.

  This still from a video shows the 555th carefully checking their chutes before a jump.

  In April 1944, General Gaither took the 555th’s combat training even further by putting them through four weeks of Advanced Tactical Division (ATD). They were taught individual survival skills as well as skills to support one another as a team in combat. These included judo, hand-to-hand combat, machine-gun operation, and rapid-fire shooting with rifles. During their continued jump training, each paratrooper had the chance to command the squad. It was training that, Biggs said, “molded us into a smoothly running and highly skilled combat company.”