Brothers In Arms Read online

  BROTHERS

  IN ARMS

  The Epic Story of

  the 761st Tank Battalion,

  WWII's Forgotten Heroes

  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  and Anthony Walton

  BROADWAY BOOKS | NEW YORK

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  PREFACE

  JANUARY 9

  1. Volunteers

  2. Soldiers

  3. ETO

  4. Blood Brothers

  5. Field of Fire

  6. The Saar

  7. The Bloody Forest

  8. Tillet

  9. Task Force Rhine

  10. The River

  11. Home

  ENDNOTES

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  To Colonel Paul Levern Bates

  and the men

  of the 761st Tank Battalion

  Men, you are the first Negro tankers to ever fight in the American Army. I would never have asked for you if you weren't good. I have nothing but the best in my Army. I don't care what color you are, so long as you go up there and kill those Kraut sonsabitches. Everyone has their eyes on you and is expecting great things from you. Most of all, your race is looking forward to your success. Don't let them down, and, damn you, don't let me down!

  —GEORGE S. PATTON, NOVEMBER 2, 1944

  NEAR NANCY, FRANCE

  Preface

  Leonard “Smitty” Smith was a Transit Police officer with my father, F. L. “Al” Alcindor, for more than two decades, beginning in the mid-1950s. They were good friends, and would often hang out together after they had finished their shifts. Sharing an enthusiasm for the Big Band sounds of their youth, they most enjoyed going to the jazz clubs together to hear Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Benny Carter, Maynard Ferguson, and the Thad Jones–Mel Lewis Big Band.

  Smitty was like a surrogate uncle to me. He is one of those people who has an intense opinion on just about any subject and he is never reluctant to share his views. The district office for the New York City Transit Authority Police in upper Manhattan was located at the 145th Street subway station, and I would often have to change trains there to get to whatever game I was playing in the Bronx. My Dad had asked Smitty and other fellow officers to keep an eye out for me, to make sure that I didn't get into any of those minor schoolboy hassles that occasionally turn ugly. Many a time Smitty would suddenly materialize at my side as I waited on the platform. His first words to me were always “Hey, young man.” We would chat while I waited for my train. He would ask about my grades or how my Mom was doing, or wisecrack about how badly the Knicks were playing.

  On one occasion, some of my friends were riding with me to check out that evening's game. Smitty gave them the once-over and told my friend Little Bob that should any trouble start, he wouldn't hesitate to shoot whoever was involved. Little Bob, not knowing Smitty's playful nature, took him seriously. He told Smitty that shooting a kid would get him fired from the police force. Smitty replied that Little Bob would be dead and so wouldn't get any satisfaction from that fact. It was a couple of days before I could convince Little Bob that Smitty had been pulling his leg.

  Black men on the New York City police force were unusual in the 1950s. My Dad, Smitty, and the few other blacks in the Transit Police were pioneers. They had to endure the critical eyes of the public, the hostility of some of the white cops, and occasionally the resentment of black people who felt that they were sellouts. The fact that they were eventually able to earn the respect of both the police hierarchy and the black community says a lot about their achievement. My Dad went on to become a sergeant, and later a lieutenant, advancing through the ranks: Smitty was always supportive; he was proud to see a black cop take up the challenge and succeed.

  Smitty's personal story never surfaced while he and my Dad were on the force together. Although he was a friendly face and welcome presence, I saw him as a grown-up; it never occurred to me that he even had a story. I never thought to ask about his life. I had no idea that Smitty, years before, had been a pioneer in an even more significant context.

  WHEN I MOVED OUT TO California to attend UCLA and later to play for the Lakers, I didn't see Smitty for many years. All that changed one night in 1992 at Lincoln Center. The lights had just been dimmed, and I was rushing to find my seat in the concert hall. The featured event was a documentary film about a black tank unit that had fought in WWII. I had been enlisted to assist in a number of public-speaking appearances in which members of the unit would describe their combat experiences. I'd been interested for some time in the struggle of black veterans to gain the recognition they deserved, in part because of my father's experience in the Army.

  Dad was trained in artillery at Fort Bragg—specializing in the 155mm howitzer—and was qualified and eager for an opportunity to fight the Germans. But like many African Americans in what was still a segregated Army, he never got that chance. Most blacks were allowed only to train; it was hoped that this limited gesture would be enough to ensure the black community's support for the war effort. Accepting the inevitable, my Dad chose to serve in a band unit and never left the States for the duration of his tour of duty. His experience in the Army had another, unexpected benefit, however, because it was during his military service that he met my Mom. He always said it was the high point of his time in uniform.

  African Americans in support roles performed important tasks from the outset of the war, including loading convoy ships, carrying out mess duties, driving supply trucks and ambulances through combat zones, and constructing military highways. Later, as Allied casualties mounted and replacements became an issue, some African American units were finally given the chance to fight. The 761st—the heroic tank battalion chronicled in the documentary film I was about to watch—was one of these units.

  One special aspect of the 761st's role in the war concerned their involvement in the liberation of some of the Nazi concentration camps. That night at Lincoln Center, Harlem Democrats Percy Sutton and Charles Rangel, who both served with the Tuskegee Airmen, were in attendance, as were such notables as Lena Horne, Roy Haynes, Sidney Lumet, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, and other highly regarded members of New York's black and Jewish communities. As I hurried to my seat, I heard an oddly familiar voice call out, “Hey, young man.” Something about that voice transported me back in time, to my teenage years. I turned, and there was Leonard Smith.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked him in surprise. Smitty replied that he had been a member of the 761st. With the lights flickering on and off, signaling the imminent start of the film, we had to get to our separate seats. Running into Smitty after all those years was a pleasant shock. But what I saw in the film left me speechless. Smitty had been involved as a tank gunner in some of the most intense fighting of World War II. He had fought in five countries and had been awarded a Bronze Star for valor.

  When I found Smitty after the screening, I was unable to adequately express how deeply I'd been affected by what I had just seen. Being exposed to a side of a person you've known that has been hidden or ignored for so long can be very disorienting. Smitty had never mentioned his war record, even to my Dad. In the years since I learned of his service, I've come to find out that many soldiers, both black and white, who returned from the war never mentioned the ordeals they faced in combat. They all seemed to feel that they were just doing their jobs and deserved no special acknowledgment for performing their duty.

  Unfortunately, some of the events referred to in the documentary I saw that night, Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II, had not been adequately researched. The film was produced wi
th the best of intentions, but crucial facts were incorrect or transposed. The resulting controversy tarnished the record of one of the most highly decorated and courageous combat units in the war, and made me aware of the need to tell the 761st's story in a way that would attempt, insofar as possible after almost sixty years, to set the record straight.

  THAT EVENING IN 1992 SENT me off on a twelve-year journey to find out more about the battalion, and the more I learned, the more I wanted to know. I began to collect memorabilia, which included articles and the first book written about the 761st, Come Out Fighting, by war correspondent Trezzvant Anderson, as well as photographs of battalion members and of the unit in action. A later book, The 761st “Black Panther” Tank Battalion in World War II, written by Joe W. Wilson Jr., the son of a unit member, became an illuminating and invaluable resource. I continued to research the 761st's combat record; the records of the infantry divisions they fought beside; the history of African Americans in the United States military; and the history of the Second World War in general, so that what the men witnessed and achieved could be seen and appreciated in the largest possible context. I began to arrange and conduct a series of audio and video interviews with several of the battalion's surviving members. Beginning in 2002, I worked along with Anthony Walton to arrive at a way of telling this story that would reflect the courage, honor, and integrity of these men.

  In telling the story of the 761st Tank Battalion, we have chosen to focus on three members of the 761st in particular. In so doing, we in no way mean to diminish the bravery and contributions of the other soldiers in the unit. Rather, these three men serve as guides into and through the experiences of a distinguished group of American citizens and soldiers during one of the most difficult periods of our nation's history.

  I believe theirs is a story that should be known.

  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  Los Angeles

  January 1, 2004

  January 9

  The German Mark IV Panzer tanks, concealed by dense pine woods, waited until the Sherman was halfway across the snow-covered field, fully exposed. They opened fire with a barrage of machine guns and artillery. The stillness of the morning was shattered by the explosion of shells and whistling bullets.

  On the ragged, disorganized battlefield, the American tank and its supporting infantry had somehow found themselves behind enemy lines. Several infantrymen fell at the opening onslaught; the rest fled in disarray. The Sherman tank's commander, Teddy Windsor, yelled for the gunner, William McBurney, to return fire with armor-piercing and high-explosive shells, while frantically directing his driver to turn. Leonard Smith, the loader, rammed one shell after another into the breech as the Sherman fired back into the trees. Suddenly, the tank was rocked by an explosion as it struck a German land mine. It shuddered to a stop.

  A rain of high-velocity 75- and 88-millimeter artillery began falling all around it. Smith, McBurney, and Windsor fled the paralyzed vehicle, diving out the turret hatch. Their driver, however, hesitated. He stood up in his seat but didn't move. The others called his name, begging him to jump. A moment later, he was virtually decapitated by a direct artillery hit; the explosion also ignited the ammunition stowed on board. Smith wept openly as he watched flames lift from the turret. His friend McBurney grabbed him and pulled him back.

  “I don't belong here,” twenty-year-old Leonard Smith thought to himself. He was supposed to be back in bivouac, repairing “Cool Stud,” the tank in which he had landed on the debris-strewn aftermath of Omaha Beach two months earlier and driven across France. But after sixty straight days on the front lines, “Cool Stud,” like more than half the tanks of Charlie Company, one of the five companies of the 761st Tank Battalion of George Patton's Third U.S. Army, had broken down.

  The unit itself had been dangerously thinned during Patton's fall Saar Campaign, with casualties approaching 40 percent. Patton's attack had been halted by a surprise German counteroffensive, the Battle of the Bulge. On Christmas Day, the 761st had rushed north across the icy roads to Belgium to help stop the Germans.

  They had been fighting for over a week in the Ardennes Forest during the coldest winter in Europe in thirty-five years, a cold beyond imagining. They had no winter gear, garbed in regular combat fatigues and boots without lining. After another brutally cold night, the crew of “Cool Stud” had been more than happy for a short break from the action, huddled around the fires the GIs made from twigs, boards, fences, anything that would burn. Smith, who in the folly of youth had continued to view the war as an extended game of Cowboys and Indians, had eagerly volunteered that morning to round out the depleted crew of his friend's tank.

  SMITH, MCBURNEY, AND WINDSOR crawled slowly across the open field, past the bodies of infantrymen fallen moments before, as well as bodies frozen solid in grotesque poses from the previous day's fighting. The bitter cold had turned the skin of the dead the purplish red color of wine. Smith found himself face-to-face with a dead German soldier whose eyes were a vivid clear blue. Windsor and McBurney, dragging their .45-caliber submachine guns with them, returned fire at intervals on the German tanks and white-clad infantry as they struggled to make their way. Mortar fire burst behind and in front of them. Machine guns spat at their feet. In their green regulation uniforms, they were easy targets against the freshly fallen snow.

  Windsor led, followed by McBurney, with Smith at the rear. They had gone about three hundred yards when McBurney stopped. It was so cold it hurt to breathe. His fingers were now too numb to pull the trigger of his submachine gun. The edge of the woods they were painfully making their way toward was still a mile away—impossibly far. Smith came up beside him. “Come on, man, come on—think wabout the Savoy. We got to get back there and do some more dancing.” The Savoy was a legendary ballroom in Harlem, known for its Big Band roster and polished oak floors.

  “You go on,” McBurney told him.

  Smith persisted. “We got to get the hell out of here so we can get back and party.”

  McBurney wasn't thinking about the Savoy; he certainly wasn't thinking about dancing; he was thinking they were going to die here, in this hell on earth, thousands of miles from home. He was thinking Smith must be out of his mind. But Smith refused to leave him. Exhausted past the point of caring, McBurney simply wanted to lie there, close his eyes, and go to sleep. But at Smith's insistence, he started moving again.

  Three green targets in the open white field, three miles from any aid or shelter, the bullets continued falling all around them, sending up mists and vapors in the waist-deep snow.

  1

  VOLUNTEERS

  The atmosphere of the whole country was

  to get in the service and help.

  I wanted to do my part.

  —WILLIAM MCBURNEY

  When seventeen-year-old Leonard Smith stepped off the United States Army troop train in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, in the fall of 1942, it was the first time he had been outside of New York State. For the last three days, he had been traveling with fourteen other recruits, headed to Camp Claiborne, seventeen miles southwest of Alexandria. There, they were to join a recently established armored unit. To Smith's surprise, the train stopped in an open field. The sergeants on the train threw the young soldiers' bags out and told them to get off. Smith and his companions, in full dress uniform and carrying their regulation duffel bags, waited for four hours in the empty field on the outskirts of the Kisatchie National Forest, watching the sun move across the sky. Finally, two of them set off on foot to find help.

  Leonard Smith was one of the more than six hundred men who would come together at Camp Claiborne during the Second World War to form the 761st Tank Battalion. They would hail from over thirty states, from small towns and cities scattered throughout the country, from places as varied as Los Angeles, California, and Holtulka, Oklahoma; Springfield, Illinois, and Picayune, Mississippi; Billings, Montana, and Baltimore, Maryland. Most had volunteered. Some were the middle-class sons of doctors, undertakers, schoolteach
ers, and career military men; among the officers were a Yale student and a football star from UCLA who would later make his mark in American sports and American history. Many more were the sons of janitors, domestics, factory workers, and sharecroppers.

  Their combat record in Europe during the war was noteworthy. They were to earn a Presidential Unit Citation for distinguished service, more than 250 Purple Hearts, 70 Bronze Stars, 11 Silver Stars, and a Congressional Medal of Honor in 183 straight days on the front lines of France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland, and Austria. These accomplishments carried a significance, however, beyond the battlefield. The unit's official designation was “The 761st Tank Battalion (Colored).” As they waited in that hot Louisiana field, Leonard Smith and his fellow recruits were on their way to becoming part of the first African American unit in the history of the United States Army to fight in tanks.

  IN THE FALL OF 1942, the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific seemed far from the backwater post of Camp Claiborne, Louisiana. They were as far from Leonard Smith's experience as Camp Claiborne had been before he boarded the train in New York City. Smith was born in Harlem Hospital on November 2, 1924; he was a sickly child at birth, weighing less than five pounds, with both colic and a heart murmur. His mother abandoned him shortly after he was born. Lulu Hasbruck, who worked for New York City taking in children with medical complications, cared for Smith during those early, precarious years. Other foster children regularly moved in and out of Hasbruck's home, but Smith and two girls, Thelma and Flora, remained. Smith would come to regard Lulu as his mother, though she never formally adopted him.

  Despite his short, skinny frame and the heart murmur that kept him from playing school sports, Smith became an active, adventuresome child, regularly challenging other kids in his Brooklyn, and later Queens, neighborhood to footraces around the block. The neighborhood kids didn't seem to mind losing to him. There was something about him that adults and classmates immediately responded to, a combination of good-naturedness, irrepressibility, and naïveté that made him impossible to dislike.