BY: JEFFREY C. ALFIER

In June 1918, the 369th advanced against German units that had reestablished themselves on the edges of the Argonne forest. They were fighting a two front war, for “the stress of combat was augmented by the stress of racial feeling” – they knew they were still a segregated unit despite proving their equality in combat. The veterans of the 369th became heroes to African-Americans, though the major presses were continually subverting their achievements. But after the war when the parades faded, African-Americans truly wondered whether or not the military achievements of the 369th “were making Whites more willing to address their grievances;” the persistence of Jim Crow and the incipient Red Scare’s inferences that Blacks were susceptible to Bolshevik influences never left the dispiriting answer in doubt. Amid a racial and jingoist atmosphere as ludicrous as it was virulent, how could a book like ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ not come about as it did in 1917? By 1939 a public opinion poll revealed that most Americans thought Jews and Italians made the worst citizens.

The units of the 77th Division entered combat in Baccarat in June 1918 – the same month the 369th did. They were attacked with gas, followed by infantry assaults. One platoon suffered 40 to 50 casualties. Their combat apprenticeship had ended. The 77th’s 308th Infantry became the infamous ‘lost battalion’ when it was cut off and unsupported for five days in a slowly dissolving pocket of defense near Charlevaux Mill. The regiment’s leader, Lt Charles Whittlesey, gave his men all the encouragement he could through repeated attempts at their relief during the long failure to break out of the pocket, which finally occurred when Jewish-American soldier Abe Krotoshinsky slipped through enemy fire and summoned relief. Whittlesey was stalwart throughout the crisis, but one man remembers how he cried in his sleep, a portent for later years when he stepped off the back of an ocean liner at midnight, having never resolved the deep-seated fear that he caused so many men of his regiment to perish, a regiment that emerged from the pocket with a 72 percent loss rate in a battle, which, despite the myth-making back home, was one Whittlesey quite likely believed was an “unnecessary, and quite possibly pointless ordeal.” 

Many times, what battlefield breakdowns and human losses there were among ethnic formations occurred for the same reasons they did for any American unit: a failure of American commanders to learn what their Allies had in nearly four years of fighting, that frontal assaults against entrenched gun emplacements raised casualties on a steep increment. In the course of it all, both the 369th and the units of the 77th suffered days of combat typical of that war – endless hours of bombardment by both high explosive and gas artillery shells, aggravated by “Pershing’s plan to clear the St. Mihiel Salient before shifting forces to the Meuse-Argonne.” A crisis in morale affected most of the AEF forces by late September and early October of 1918. Despite this, the 369th took and held Bellevue Ridge on September 28th. Meanwhile, White officers that served with African-American regiments did their best to counter myths of Negro inferiority and to remind the public of their battlefield accomplishments. Indeed, though the high command of the U.S. Army would continue to show ethnic and racial prejudice long after the war, their prejudices were “offset by the daily demonstration of trust by most of the company [grade] officers.”

The combat successes of the 307th and 308th regiments should have been a permanent rebuke to anti-Semitics in the States, but such a lesson was lost on a nation filled with many trying to pin the Bolshevik Revolution (1917) on New York Jews. Such a belief was fueled by furtive fallacies of the worse kind that saw Bolshevism as “an anarchistic offshoot of Kaisersism.” Incredibly, in 1917, the U.S. Army War College identified “Negroes and immigrant races as the destabilizing elements” in a potential national uprising. In 1919, Black militancy and White resentment clashed in violent riots. By the late 1920s many of the war’s veterans began to see the ‘war to end all wars’ for the myth it was. By the time the Depression hit in 1929, 805,000 veterans were out of work, and many were indifferent to the veteran’s plight, symptomatic of the larger phenomenon of the discrediting of American nationalism. The failure to make the world safe for democracy meant the idealization of state power had fallen out of vogue.

In the decades after the war, praise for veterans of the 369th and the 77th came mainly from their own communities at home, while conservative newspapers praised by slight-of-hand, saying that various ethnicities were becoming better at boxing and wrestling. Though the press was kinder to the multi-ethnic soldiers of the 77th Division, the “double image of Black soldiers as heroic Hell Fighters and ridiculous Sambos was mirrored in the bipolar image of Jewish-Americans as loyal members of the Lost Battalion and sinister agents of Yiddish Bolshevism.” Soldiers of both Jewish and Italian descent were praised for their fighting, but slyly denigrated as gunmen and thugs. Though public life was measured against a “White Anglo-American standard” all was not lost: “Pride in the achievements of immigrant soldiers lent confidence to their communities and a sense of moral authority to their demands for social and economic justice.”