Word: 369th
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...order last week transformed the 369th Infantry, New York National Guard, into a Coast Artillery anti-aircraft outfit. From commanding officer to rawest recruit, it is an all-Negro regiment, one of two in the Guard (the other: Chicago's 8th Illinois...
...Negro can be a first-class fighting man. Of the 404,348 black soldiers drafted and enlisted during World War I, only about 10% were put into overseas combat outfits. With one exception their battlefield record was not so good. Exception was Harlem's 369th. Officered mostly by white men the 369th was brigaded with the French who called its black men les enfants perdus (the lost children) because of their separation from the rest of the A. E. F. The regiment lost 1,100 men killed and wounded, won 172 individual French and American decorations, was able...
Today, with its white officers superseded by a group of lean, soldierly Negroes, the 369th is a concentrated figure of the problem the U. S. Army faces with expansion. For the call of the National Guard into active service will put many another Negro officer on duty, and about 500 Negro reserve officers are also subject to call. Based on Negro population, 10% of the men drafted under a conscription bill may well be black soldiers. Today, while recruiting officers are beating the bushes for white soldiers, Negro applicants are clogged up on a waiting list. There is no place...
...regular Army there are five Negro officers. Three of them are chaplains, two combat officers. One of the combat soldiers is the commanding officer of Harlem's 369th: blocky, tea-colored Colonel Benjamin Oliver Davis, who came up from the ranks in 1901, has spent a large part of his service on such details as military attaché to Liberia, professor of military science and tactics at Negro colleges. The other is his son, Lieutenant B.O. Davis Jr., who was graduated from West Point in 1936, the fourth of his race to make the grade at the Army school...
...questions the bravery of the American Negro soldier, let me relate the story of Sergeant Butler, of Company L, 369th Infantry, who pursued a German raiding party into No Man's Land after it had captured a white American officer and four or five Negro soldiers, and who alone and unaided, except by the small machine gun he carried, freed the white officer and the Negro soldiers and killed a half dozen of the German raiding party and seriously wounded the German officer, who later died in our trenches...