Showing posts with label Mexican War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mexican War. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Turning the Tide in Ukraine (maybe) or at least helping them a bunch. What else the US can do. Part Two.

 

Gen. Clair Chennault.

Clair Chennault entered the U.S. Army during World War One, and resigned in 1937, going from there to China as a mercenary pilot for the Nationalist in their war against Japan.  Following a mission on behalf of the Chinese to the US in 1939, the US funded and equipped the American Volunteer Group of pilots, the legendary P-40 flying "Flying Tigers". They weren't in the US military, at least not at that time. They were, quite frankly, mercenaries, but specialized ones.

A bit different, as they were officially in the Royal Air Force, the British fielded three fighter squadrons made up of US volunteers.  "Eagle Squadrons"


There was a well-worn precedent for that.  During World War One, while Woodrow Wilson was promising to keep us out of war, the French fielded Escadrille N. 124, the  Escadrille de La Fayette.  It's pilots were Americans.


They weren't the only unit in the Great War like that.  Perhaps the most famous one was the Czech Legion, made up of Czech and Slovak volunteers who fought at first on the Eastern Front, and then fought their way across Siberia to Vladivostok so they could be taken to France, after the Russian Revolution broke out, to rejoin the Allied effort.

During the Mexican War, the Republic of Mexico fielded a unit of volunteer, mostly Irish and Irish American, artillerymen, known as the San Patricio's.  While Mexico lost the war, their performance was excellent.

The point?

Ukraine is taking in foreign volunteers for the Ukrainian Legion.  However, much more here could be done along the same lines as the AVG.  The AVG, basically, took in American military pilots used to American military gear, with that gear purchased for Nationalist China through an arrangement with the US.

This could be done in the war in Ukraine on a ground combat basis.

The US military was traditionally quite small before World War Two.  From 1947 through 1990, however, it was very large due to the Cold War, and it's not been inconsequential in size since that time.  The youngest of the Cold War warriors are now 52 years old, not young.  But maybe not as old, in modern terms, as it might seem.  At any rate, there are thousands of Americans in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who have served in the U.S. military.

Those men trained to fight the Soviet Union.  And they used, in many cases, late Cold War and early post Cold War US equipment.

This isn't unique to the U.S.  Germany only ended universal conscription of men n 2011.  France in 1996.  Thousands of men have served in the various NATO armies, using NATO standard equipment.

Why not create an American Volunteer Group and a European Volunteer Group and allow Ukraine to equip them with NATO standard weapons?  There's more than enough old NATO equipment, surely, to equip two divisions in this fashion.

Would they be elite?  Well, probably not, but they wouldn't be bad.  Some have actually trained to fight the very war that's being fought right now.

And then there's pilots and aircraft.

Lots of men trained to fly high test American fighters are now flying commercial jet liners.  Ukraine has asked for F-16s.  Why not give them the F-16s with volunteer pilots?

And, we might at this point, why not include A-10s?

Saturday, August 10, 2019

August 10, 1919. The Motor Transport Convoy rests in Laramie. Troop A, New Jersey State Militia Reserve trains at Denville.

The Motor Transport Convoy spent their Sunday in Laramie on this day in 1919.


The weather was "fair and cool", which would be a good description of most summer days in high altitude Laramie, which has some of the nicest summer weather in Wyoming.  Wind and rain in the late afternoon is a typical feature of the summer weather there.

In New Jersey, where the weather probably wasn't fair and cool, Troop A of the New Jersey State Militia Reserve was training.

Troop A, New Jersey State Militia Reserve, at Denville, New Jersey.

State units during World War One and World War Two are a really confusing topic.  All states have the ability to raise state militia units that are separate and part from the National Guard, but not all do. Generally, however, during the Great War and even more during the Second World War, they did.

State units of this type are purely state units, not subject to Federal induction, en masse. Their history is as old as the nation, but they really took a different direction starting in the Spanish American War.

Early on, all of the proto United State's native military power was in militia units. There was no national army, so to speak, in Colonial America. The national army was the English Army, which is to say that at first, prior to the English Civil War, it was the Crown's army.  That army was withdrawn from North American during the English Civil War of the 1640s and 1650s, in which it was defeated.  During that decade long struggle British North America was defended by local militias.  When British forces returned, which they did not in any numbers until the French and Indian War, it was the victorious parliamentary army, famously clad in red coats, which came back.

Not that this was novel.  Early on all early British colonies were also defended only by militias. The Crown didn't bother to send over troops to defend colonies, which were by and large private affairs rather than public ones anyhow.  At first, individual colonies were actually town sized settlements, with associated farmland, and they had their own militias.  Indeed, as late as King Philip's War this was still the case and various towns could and did refuse to help other ones and they had no obligation to do so.

Later, when colonies were organized on a larger basis, the proto states if you will, militia units were organized on that basis, although they were still local units.  I.e., towns and regions had militias, but the Governor of the Colony could call any of them out. That gave us the basic structure of today's  National Guard, in a very early fashion, and in fact that's why the National Guard claims to be the nation's oldest military body with a founding date of December 13, 1636.

Colonial militia's fought on both sides of the American Revolution, depending in part upon the loyalty of the Colonial governor at the time they were mustered as well as the views of the independent militiamen.  They formed, however, the early backbone of the Rebel effort and indeed the war commenced when British troops and militiamen engaged in combat at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775.

The Revolution proved the need for a national army to contest the British Army and hence the Continental Army was formed during the war and did the heavy lifting thereafter.   Militia, however, remained vital throughout the war.  Following the British surrender, there was no thought at all given to keeping a standing national army and it was demobilized and, for a time, the nation's defenses were entirely dependent upon militias, with any national crisis simply relying upon the unquestioned, at that time, ability of the President to call them into national service if needed.

The lack of a national army soon proved to be a major problem and a small one was formed, but all throughout the 18th and the first half of the 19th Centuries the nation's primary defense was really based on militias, with all males having a militia obligation. The quality of militia units varied very widely, but by and large they rose to the occasion and did well.  Interestingly enough, immediately to our north, Canada, a British Colony, also relied principally on militias for defense and its militias notably bested ours during the War of 1812.

The system began to demonstrate some stresses during the Mexican War during which New England's states refused, in varying degrees, to contribute to the nation's war effort against Mexico.  A person can look at this in varying ways, of course.  While we've taken the position here that the Mexican War was inevitable and inaccurately remembered, the fact that the Federal government had to rely upon state troops did give states an added voice on their whether or not they approved of a war.  The New England states did not.  The Southern states very much did, which gave the Mexican War in its later stages an oddly southern character.

The swan song of the militia system in its original form came with the Civil War.  Huge numbers of state troops were used on both sides, varying from mustered militia units that served for terms, to local units mustered only in time of a local crisis, to state units raised just for the war.  But the war was so big that the Federal Army took on a new larger role it had not had before, and with the increase in Western expansion after the war, it was reluctant to give it up.  Militia's never again became the predominate combat force of the United States.  Indeed, there was long period thereafter where the militia struggled with the Army for its existence, with career Army officers being hugely crabby about it.

That saw state militias become increasingly organized as they fought to retain a military role, and  by the Spanish American War they were well on their way to being the modern National Guard.  The Dick Act thereafter formalized that.  But the Spanish American War, which was also very unpopular in New England, saw some states separate their militias into National Guard and State Guard units, with State Guard units being specifically formed only to be liable for state service.  Ironically, some of the State Guard units that were formed in that period had long histories including proud service in the nation's prior wars.  This split continued on into World War One which saw some states, such as New Jersey, muster its National Guard for Federal induction but its State Guard just for wartime state service.

That pattern became very common during the Great War during which various states formed State Guard units that were only to serve during the war for state purposes.  Naturally, the men who served in them were men who were otherwise ineligible for Federal service for one reason or another, something that has crated a sort of lingering atmosphere over those units.  When the war ended a lot of states that had formed them, dropped them, after the National Guard had been reconstituted.  

This patter repeated itself in World War Two during which, I believe, every state had a State Guard.  After the Second World War very few have retained them, and most of the states that have, have a long history of separated militia units.  Today those units tend to provide service for state emergencies, but they also often serve ceremonial functions.  An exception exists in the form of the Texas State Guard, which was highly active on the border during the Border War period, and which was retained after World War Two even after the Federal Government terminated funding for State Guard units in 1947.  They've continued to be occasionally used in Texas for security roles.

In New Jersey, we'd note, the situation during the Great War was really confusing, as there were militia units organized for the war, as well as separate ones that preexisted it.  A lot of those units would soon disappear as the National Guard came back into being, although New Jersey is one of the few states that has always had a State Guard since first forming one.

Sunday, November 18, 2018

"‘Great War’ brought Catholics, bishops into mainstream of US society"? Not so much.

‘Great War’ brought Catholics, bishops into mainstream of US society

So claims the headline for a story in the website of   The Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau
The Roman Catholic Church of Southern Missouri.

Well. . .

I don't really think so.

One of the temptations when you study a certain era of history, or write a lot about it, or even look into it, is to attribute things to it that exceed the boundaries of where you ought to go.

Now, don't get me wrong, war brings about a lot of first.  Indeed, we've maintained here that War Changes Everything.  And that's true. But it doesn't change as much as we might think.

What this article touches on is something that we tend not to think a lot about today, even though it is still with us, that being the strong prejudice against Catholics that once existed in the United States.

On that, a little background. There was once a vast amount of prejudice against Catholics in the United States.   I've touched on this elsewhere, but the United States wasn't founded by a culture that wasn't tolerant of Catholicism in the first place, even if one of the colonies was, for a time, a refuge for English Catholics.  Indeed, contrary to what we tend to imagine about the founding of the American colonies, they weren't religiously tolerant in general.  England had gone from being a highly Catholic country prior to the reign of King Henry VIII (who no doubt always imagined himself to be a loyal Catholic of some sort in spite of everything) to being one that endured a long period of religious strife which broke out occasionally into open warfare.  By the time that the English planted their first colony in North America, the English were officially Protestant but it was still whipping around from one Protestant theology to another.  As noted, King Henry VIII basically thought of himself as the head of the Catholic Church in England, but still a Catholic.  More radical Protestant reformers were vying for position and would soon come into control with his passing, but not before the nation became Catholic again under Mary, and then ostensible reached a "religious settlement" under Elizabeth. Even that settlement wasn't really one. Things were muddy under King James I as a struggle between Calvinist and Anglicans went on during his reign over England and Scotland.  Puritans would come to be oppressed and flea to the Netherlands where they'd prove to be annoying and end up leaving later.  Various English colonies were strongly sectarian, so much so that Puritans coming down out of Rhode Island later would be tried and executed.  Religious tolerance was somewhat lacking early on.

Remains of the early church at Jamestown in the 1870s.  This was an Anglican Church, as the settlers at Jamestown were all members of the Church of England.  The Puritans (only part of the "Pilgrims") were not however, and in their Plymouth Rock settlement their church was not an Anglican one.  The two groups did not get along.

Anyhow, while Catholics were present in the colonies early on (and Catholics remained in varying stages of being underground in England but very much above grown in Ireland. . .and then there's the story of English crypto Catholics which I'll not go into as it complicates the story further) they were always a minority and knew it.  That might be, oddly enough, why the small Catholic population of the Colonies supported the Revolution in greater percentages than other colonists, in spite of the anti Catholic rhetoric of the Intolerable Acts.  Catholics remained looked down upon in the new nation even as it adopted a policy of prohibiting a state religion which morphed into officially accepting religious tolerance (the two aren't really the same).  And this continued on for a very long time.

Now, let me first note that it would be absolutely the truth to state that war, or more correctly wars, changed the view of a segments of American society and sometimes all of American society towards Catholics. But World War One wasn't really one of those wars. 

The Mexican War was.  By the time of the Mexican War, which ran from 1846 to 1848, lots of Germans and Irish were immigrating to the United States.  Indeed, the Irish were also immigrating in large numbers to Canada and some of them from Canada to the United States.  The Irish Great Famine (potato famine) commenced in 1845 and was driving millions of Irish from Eire causing a population that was already religious oppressed and living in primitive poverty to enter other lands where they were truly alien.  Political conditions in Germany were in turmoil which would break out in the revolutions of 1848, something that saw large-scale Catholic emigration out of Germany as Catholics sought to avoid living in a Prussian Germany.

A large number of Catholics therefore ended up serving in the American forces during the Mexican War as enlisted men, many of whom were Irish born or born in one of the various German states.  They were treated abysmally by their Protestant officers and particularly by Southern officers, who tended to detest Catholics.

They generally fought well however and their numbers caused the appointment of the first Catholic clerics to the U.S. Army.  That helped bring about a new relationship between the Army and Catholics, but what really did it is that the appalling abuse of Catholic enlisted men lead a group of them to desert and join the Mexican army, which formed its own artillery unit made up of American deserters.  That shock caused the Army to reevaluate what it was doing, and Catholics, particularly Catholic immigrants, found a home in the Army thereafter.

Mass hanging of captured members of the San Patricio's. The penalty for treason was death, but this would be the last act of its type and bring to an end outward discrimination against Catholics in the enlisted ranks of the U.S. Army.

That was built on during the Civil War, during which you can find several examples of very senior Catholic officers, such as Phil Sheridan.  Sheridan is notable in this context as he entered West Point in 1848, hard on the heels of the Mexican War, which shows how quickly things were changing.  By the time of the Civil War Catholics, and in particular Irish Catholics, were common in the Army.  The enlisted career Irish sergeant was a fixture in the American Army by that time.

Philip Sheridan, one of the most famous American officers of the Civil War and a Catholic.  By this time the oddity of having a Catholic general officer was gone. For that matter, William Sherman was married to a devout Catholic which is something that would have been held against him in an earlier era but was not, and he had converted to Catholicism but was not observant and sometimes disclaimed it.  His son would become a Jesuit Priest.

The Civil War brought about a wider change however as American society at large remained viciously anti Catholic prior to the Civil War.  Catholics may have found a place in the Army, but they were generally pretty isolated in every way otherwise.  Bizarre anti Catholic literature was common accusing Catholics of all sorts of things.

Following the war, however, this largely ceased. The country didn't grow suddenly tolerant, but rather open bizarre hostility stopped.  This was in part because the high degree of sectarianism also stopped due to the war. Going into the Civil War Americans not only tended to be strongly Protestant or Catholic (although the level of non observance was much, much higher than imagined, which is another story), but they also tended to strongly have opinions on other Protestant faiths if they were Protestant.

San Miguel Church in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Built between 1610 and 1625, this church is a contemporary to the Anglican church at Jamestown, but it remains in use today.  This Catholic church is emblematic of the act that with the large amount of Mexican territory taken in by the United States during the Mexican War, a Hispanic Catholic population was taken in as well.

The American Civil War had come in the wake of the Second Great Awakening, although its technically outside of the time period for that which historians have assigned it and instead in what they have framed as the Third Great Awakening.  The Second Great Awakening saw the rise of the a lot of American Protestant denominations including some that had strong millenialism beliefs.  Catholics weren't part of this in the United States, of course.  But the very strong sectarianism that came up in the period came to a bit of a hiatus due to the Civil War.  Prior to the Civil War Americans were ready to cite religion in support of their fighting positions.  Mexico's Catholic status had been a cited reason to fight it in some Protestant sermons prior to the Mexican War.  The United States had fought a small scale war with the Mormons in the 1850s.  Going into the Civil War both sides cited religious grounds for going to war, with both of those sides citing Protestant religious grounds at that.

Let's be clear.  Neither the Mexican War nor the Civil War were wars over religion by any means.  Protestant ministers who cited Mexico's Catholic nation status as a reason to fight it were sincere, but at the end of the day the Mexican War was fought because Mexico couldn't stomach the thought that it had lost the province of Texas and they couldn't agree to the border with the newly American Texas being where it was claimed to be by the United States.  Religion didn't have much to do with that. And the Civil War was about slavery, plain and simple. There were certainly religious overtones to the positions taken by both sides in the Civil War, and religion strongly informed some of those positions, but the war itself was not a religious war which is attested to by some of the oddities of the topic on both sides of the war. The Union had huge numbers of Catholic troops including some who were outright Fenians, but that impacted those units only within them.  The Confederacy, which had  much higher religious uniformity than the North; it was overwhelmingly Protestant except in Louisiana and many of its senior generals were devout Episcopalians including one who was an Episcopal Bishop found itself taking a position on slavery that had already been condemned by the Catholic Church in Rome but its president toyed with Catholicism throughout his life and the Confederate cabinet included a Jewish member.

But because of the Civil War Americans really backed down on citing religion in an extreme prejudicial way like they had before.  Indeed, it wasn't all that long, in spite of ongoing prejudice, that there would be a United States Supreme Court justice on the bench who was both a veteran of the Confederate army and a Catholic.

Which doesn't mean that the prejudice had ended.  Well into the 20th Century to be a Catholic was to be subject to prejudice.  Catholics were mostly blue collar or agriculturalist, with medicine and the law, two professions always occupied by minorities, the exceptions. They couldn't attend Ivy League schools and remain faithful to their faiths and they largely didn't go on to upper education at all.

Which was the status when the United States entered World War One.

And the status after the war as well.

St. Joseph's Polish Catholic Church, an active church in Denver Colorado today, was built in 1902 as the Polish Catholics wanted their own church separate from the southern Slavic (Balkans) Catholic church one a block away. This is a bit symbolic of the degree to which Catholics lived in ethnic Ghettos at the time, but it was also contrary to the policy of the Catholic Church to attempt to integrate all Catholics into non ethnic congregations. This church was built in 1902 just as Slavic immigration was becoming significant in the United States and obviously various diocese yielded to pressures on occasion.  This same neighborhood contains a Russian Orthodox cathedral of the same vintage, reflecting the Slavic nature of the neighborhood. At the time this church was built, Poland wasn't a state and was part of both Russia and Germany.


Indeed, going into the war there were real reasons to worry about some of the Catholic populations of the United States and their receptive loyalties.  At the time, Catholicism was heavily represented in Irish, German, French, Italian and "Mexican" demographics.  Irish populations identified heavily with their ethnic fellows in Eire, which remained part of the United Kingdom but which was struggling with obtaining home rule and which was suffering under the long impact of religious oppression that had come to an official end only in the 19th Century.  German Americans retained a strong sense of pride in their ethnic origin and openly celebrated their Germaness in various ways throughout the year.  Hispanics, who were of various origins but whom most of, at that time, traced an origin to from Mexico or Spanish Mexico, were a suspect people both because of their ethnicity and because there were fears that they may sympathize with Carranza who, it was feared, might be sympathizing with the Germans.

Only French Americans, who were mostly Acadians, Cajuns, or Creole's, and Italian Americans, were not suspect. But the French population was so remote from France that it had no real sympathies with France itself and was highly concentrated in Maine and Louisiana.  The Italians were recent arrivals who did sympathize with Italy, an Allied power in World War One, and were not accordingly suspect.

Indeed, the Italians were hugely celebrated during World War One in the United States.  The Germans, Irish and Mexicans were worried about.

For no reason, as it turned out. They were not disloyal to the United States at all and served loyally.  Prejudice against the Germans was vicious in the U.S. but the German population in the country reacted basically by burying their culture to such an extent that it was largely lost.  The Irish did not do that, but their service in the Great War, including the fact that they were well represented in the Regular Army and made up the bulk of some National Guard regiments, put aside any fears that people had.

But it didn't do much, indeed anything at all, to address the ongoing prejudice that remained in the country.  In that fashion, they found themselves in the same position, but to a much lesser degree, as African Americans. African Americans served very loyally during the war and, unlike World War Two, there were significant numbers of black combat officers in some all black units, but after the war, prejudice against them didn't abate at all.

It'd really take the Second World War to address all of that.

Thursday, February 23, 2017

Today In Wyoming's History: February 23. The Past as Prologue for the Future.

I was up rather early this morning, 3:00 am.  I should still be in bed, but as I was working on a rather large matter I concluded last night, and my mind was still on it, I woke up at the time that I have been waking up.  When I did I logged on and updated this blog and our companion Today In Wyoming's History Blog, for of course, this day.

It's interesting in that context how the past, truly, is the prologue for the future.   Consider some of the following:
Today In Wyoming's History: February 23:

February 23

1847     U.S. troops under Gen. Zachary Taylor defeated Mexican general Santa Anna at the Battle of Buena Vista in Mexico.
I'll note this as I was listening just yesterday to another inaccurate comment on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo.  I'm going to come in and post on that, but it strikes me that the Mexican War, perhaps the most forgotten of all U.S. wars, has been getting a little more press recently than it normally does, and as usually for that war, not very accurate press. This comes up, of course, in the context of discussion on the "wall" and immigration, which makes for a lot of inaccurate discussion of this event, to the extent its discussed at all.  The war turns out, of course, to really mater as its long reach is still with us, even if we think about it very little.
1941  Blizzard conditions stalled traffic in the state.  This was, of course, in the pre 4x4 days.  Prior to World War Two 4x4 vehicles were almost unheard of and were limited to industrial vehicles. Almost every vehicle was a rear wheel drive 2x4.
This item in particular is what caused me to link this day in here.

When I came home last night it was probably in the 50s.  A storm was predicated.  A bad one.

They were right. There's a titanic blizzard going on right now.  My guess is that there may not be school today.  We'll see of course.

Wyoming weather, what can you say?
1969  Gov. Hathaway signed into law a State severance tax bill. The bill had been extremely controversial, with there being strong arguments by the opposition that passing it would cause Wyoming's extractive industries to greatly reduce their activity. The arguments failed to stop the bill, and the severance tax did not greatly impact the
extractive industries.  Today, Wyoming's is nearly entirely funded by severance taxes.
This is the only item that got any comment on our This Day post.  But no wonder it did.  Governor Hathaway's 1969 actions revolutionized our schools here and gave us decades of solid educational funding.

Now, of course, coal is in real trouble and we're debating what to do. We haven't figured that out.

1985  The Bison adopted as the state mammal.
And a tasty one too.  I'll note.  My son, brother in law, and I are going to put in for licenses.

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

The Zimmerman Note sent

A encoded telegram was sent from the Foreign Secretary of the German Empire Arthur Zimmermann to the German ambassador to Mexico, Heinrich von Eckardt reading as follows..
We intend to begin on the first of February unrestricted submarine warfare. We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States of America neutral. In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The settlement in detail is left to you. You will inform the President of the above most secretly as soon as the outbreak of war with the United States of America is certain and add the suggestion that he should, on his own initiative, invite Japan to immediate adherence and at the same time mediate between Japan and ourselves. Please call the President's attention to the fact that the ruthless employment of our submarines now offers the prospect of compelling England in a few months to make peace.

Signed, ZIMMERMANN
The text proposed to invite Mexico into World War One as a Germany ally with the enticement that it was to receive those territories lost during the Mexican War.  Rather obviously Germany lacked a concrete understanding as to the degree of Mexican military strength, but as absurd as it sounds, in 1915 some vague Mexican revolutionary forces actually considered, and indeed attempted, to sponsor an uprising in that territory, albeit to little effect.  And Carranza's government did study the proposal, finding it unrealistic.

The note was decoded by the British in subsequent days, as will be seen, with negative consequences for Germany

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

The Wyoming National Guard and the Punitive Expedition

I'll confess, in making this post, that I have a soft spot for the National Guard.  In no small part that may be because I was in the Army National Guard for six years.  From 1981 to 1987, I was a member of the HHB 3d Bn 49th FA.  It is, in my view, one of the unqualified smart things I did after turning 18 years old, i.e., in my adult life.

 I've repeated this photograph of mustered Wyoming National Guardsmen from Powell several times, but its' the only such photo I have ready access to.  There are other photos of the Wyoming National Guard from this period, but not which I'm certain as to the rights to publish to.  This photo is quite interesting. The Guardsmen are dressed in the what appears to be the current pattern of Army uniform including the newly adopted M1911 campaign hat. They carry M1903 Springfield rifles which were then quite new (and in this case probably almost brand new manufacture).  They carry bed rolls rather than back packs, however, showing the retention of a Frontier Army method of carrying personal equipment.

Having been in a Guard unit, however, does make you cognizant of how unfairly they are sometimes viewed.  My unit, the 3d Bn 49th FA, was rated as combat ready the entire time I was in it and it often had the highest combat rating that the Army recognized, higher than many Regular Army units.  That it was highly rated isn't a surprise when it is considered that everyone who was in the unit wanted to be there. Moreover, in the early to mid 1980s the unit was really still in the wake of the Vietnam War and it was full of Vietnam War combat veterans.  The unit even had some Korean War combat veterans still in it, including a couple who had served with the Guard in the Korean War, and there was one remaining World War Two veteran, although he wasn't a combat vet.  Suffice it to say, the depth of knowledge in the unit was vast.  If we were, on average, older than a comparable Regular Army unit, we were also a lot more experienced as a unit as well.  Not too many Regular Army artillery units had men who wore Combat Infantry Badges nor did very many Regular Army units have NCOs who had been officers in the Marine Corps or Navy.  We did.

So, in that context its  hard not to feel a little insulted by the term "weekend warrior", although admittedly you don't hear that much anymore given that so many Guard units have served overseas in our recent wars.  Even so, its definitely the case that the Guard hasn't received its due over the years, sometimes simply by default, but sometimes because its been unfairly slighted.

Anyhow, given as we've been posting nearly daily here for awhile on the Wyoming National Guard in 1916, it  might be nice to fill that story out a bit.   What was the unit?  What was it like?  What became of it?  It's a story we haven't really told here.  And for that matter, it's a story we haven't told on our companion site on Wyoming history, This Day In Wyoming's History.  We really should.  

Indeed, we thought about posting this as a sidebar there, and we in fact will, but we will post it first here, as this blog is the one that's really been looking into 1916.

But in order to do that we need to go back a bit further, indeed, all the way back.  Prior, that is, to 1776.  If we don't, we can't really understand the story of the National Guard in any context.

For most of this nation's history the bulk of our military manpower hasn't been in the Regular Army, it's been in the militia.  And that was both by accident and design.  Few now realize it, but every American had a militia obligation prior to the 20th Century, an obligation that has been transferred over to the Federal government by statute but which many state's still retain as an uncalled upon obligation as well.  Prior to at least the Civil War, however, the obligation was very real indeed.

In the Colonial era all men of military age, which was generally men over 16 up until age 60, were members of the militia.  The militia mustered at least once a year to drill; not much training, but it was an era when not much training time was available and such training as there was often took little time.  Failure to make muster was a crime, but then generally most people somewhat looked forward to the muster as it was the occasion for a community party as a rule.  Colonial militias, early on, did a lot of fighting however, almost all of it in brutal Indian wars the nation has more or less forgotten.  Some spectacularly violent Colonial wars, such as King Philips War, were entirely fought, on the colonist side, by militias.

When the Revolution broke out it was militia that really filled the ranks of the American forces, keeping in mind that state units were little removed from militia even if purpose raised for the conflict.  This would be the pattern all the way through the Civil War.  A Continental, i.e., regular, Army was raised, but it was state units that formed the ranks everywhere.  Units raised by the individual thirteen colonies and dedicated to the conflict alongside the national army, and local militias called out for individual fights.  Indeed, the term "Continental Army" doesn't even make sense until a person stops to consider that it was drawn from, and fought for, the entire continent (ignoring the fact that the Spanish on the continent and the French, and well even 1/3d of the English colonist in the thirteen colonies didn't agree with that suggestion).  This army defeated the British army on the continent although its worth noting that the British also used a militia system, although they did not attempt to deploy mustered English militiamen beyond their shores, at least not until World War One.  They did deploy colonial militia, however, during the Revolution themselves, something that's often somewhat forgotten, and some Minute Men mustered for the Crown, not the Congress.

 American troops evacuating New York, 1783.

Following the Revolution, Congress sought to  avoid having a large Regular Army, so it didn't.  The founding fathers were well aware that standing armies were a threat to a democratic government, and indeed to any government. They all knew the example of the Praetorian Guards in Rome well.  And if, in hindsight, that example seems remote, France reminded us of how current it remained when the French Army deposed the Republic and ultimately put a new Emperor, Napoleon, on the thrown of allegedly Republican France.   The US didn't want a big standing Army.  It needed a standing Navy, but navies, being deployed or deployable at sea, rarely pose a threat to their government.  So a small army it would be.  The land forces of the United States would be principally vested in the state militias with it being acknowledged that "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."  In the event of war Congress would rely mostly on state troops, was the thinking, and state part time troops wouldn't pose a threat to the republic and might even form its guardian in the event of undemocratic impulses somewhere.

Only in really big wars was it necessary to go much beyond that.  It proved necessary to do so during the War of 1812, although the Federalized militias formed the bulk of the US forces then. Ironically, in Canada, it would be mustered Canadian militias that would toss the  American forces back out, proving that a force nearly entirely made up of militias, the Canadian one, was adequate to defeat a force made up mostly of militias, the American one.  The Mexican War also saw the mustering of state troops, some raised just for the war, the latter of which were nearly a species of militia.  

This latter example was the rule for the Civil War in which both sides fought with regular armies, but which also saw both sides commit the bulk of their forces in the form of state forces.  That's forgotten by some but the Union and Confederate armies were not simply national armies by quite some measure.  The Confederate regular army was actually quite small.  The Union one was bigger, but the bulk of the Union forces were state troops raised for the conflict, a type of mustered militia.  Pre war militias also fought as Federalized units during the war, and quite often non Federalized militias, in both the North and the South, were mustered when the war came to their areas. The Battle of Gettysburg, for example, provides a classic.  The Union forces included units that were Regular Army units as well as many state units, but even the militia from Gettysburg itself fought on the first day (successfully, it might be noted).

New York militia in camp, Harper's Ferry.

The Civil War was the high water mark of the old militia system. By that time war was becoming increasingly more complicated and hence required increasingly more formal training.  Pre Civil War militia varied enormously in every measurable respect, although Congress had sought to provide some uniformity, and some equipment, right from the onset. After the war the United States government sought to impose more uniformity on state militias so that they would match more closely the United States Army.  Generally, state militias were happy to cooperate and conform to Federal requirements wherever they could, with Federal assistance.  In some rare instances, however, state units would actually exceed the Army in some respect, such as the New York National Guard, which was equipped with better arms than the U.S. Army was in the late 19th Century.

 Rhode Island Zouave, Civil War.  Popular with some New England states (and there being at least even one Confederate such unit) these units were regarded as elite and patterned their dress after French North African troops.  In Union service they tended to be issued the M1863 .58 variant of what had been the M1841 .54 rifle which ad the advantage, if it was one, of taking a huge sword bayonet.

By the Spanish American War most states had a National Guard that was equipped with Federal equipment, although it was often the case that the Guard's equipment was older than the Army's.  Federalized National Guard units in the Spanish American War, for example, often had old Army uniforms rather than the current ones.  Nonetheless they were brought up to Army standards for the war and the following Philippine Insurrection.

 8th Illinois, 1899.  This was a black Illinois militia unit.  The uniforms are correct for the period but are a pattern that was being phased out of the Army at that time and wouldn't be around much longer.

The Spanish American War and the Philippine Insurrection were the last instances in which states raised forces specifically for the war, although this was done within the context of mustering the National Guard.  Wyoming, for example, sent over 1400 men to those wars which was far more than served in its very small pre war National Guard.  Indeed, while Wyoming had a National Guard dating back to territorial days, it had been minuscule and the ranks of its state units, raised just for the war, swelled during the Philippine Insurrection.

 By the Spanish American War and Philippine Insurrection war photography had begun to take on a more modern appearance.    California and Idaho troops in churchyard at San Pedro Macati, Philippines.

During the Philippine Insurrection Wyoming contributed the 1st Wyoming Infantry Battalion and the Wyoming Light Battery to the war, units that were formed principally from mustered Wyoming National Guard units.  This is complicated, however, by the fact that the Army was authorized (or more properly instructed) to raise volunteer cavalry units and these units were in fact organized on a regional basis.  In Wyoming's case Wyoming volunteers to these units went to the 2nd United States Volunteer Cavalry and the 36th United States Volunteer Infantry.  While units within the Army's establishments, these were not really Regular Army units in practice, existed only during the conflicts and were really basically an extension, or perhaps more accurately an evolution, of the Civil War state forces system.  The Wyoming Army National Guard today still uses a unit patch for some units of a cavalryman of the 2nd United States Volunteer Cavalry, showing how close the connection was.

 

After the Civil War a struggle broke out between backers of the National Guard and the Army over incorporating the Guard officially into the Army as its reserve.  While this is fairly clearly an aspect of what the Guard was, up until that time that last formal link had not been established and some in the Army establishment resisted it even giving thought to forming a separate Army reserve.  The reasons that can be debated but there were individuals who were quite partisan on either side of the debate  They failed in their effort, however, and the Dick Act, named after a Congressman who supported it and who served in the National Guard, became law in 1903 and the Guard was officially made the reserve of the Army, bringing the ties even closer.  By 1908 Congress authorized deploying the Guard outside of the United States although Woodrow Wilson's Attorney General would opine that to be illegal, which resulted in a Congressional act providing for simply conscripting  Guardsmen into the Army should that be necessary.

This is the Guard that existed in 1916 when Columbus New Mexico was attacked in Villa's raid.  It was officially a reserve of the Army, but its quality varied by state.  In some rare instances small units were still very much the province of a local community or even individual, who contributed funding to the unit and who sometimes even purchased non standard arms.  Some units were social units, made up of social elites, who actually spent more money being National  Guardsmen than they received back in the form of drill pay.  Others were made up of rough and tumble locals who needed the drill pay, in an era when drills tended to be weekly, on a week night.  Pay was provided, as noted, but retirement, which is now a feature of long Guard service, was not.

The Wyoming National Guard (there was no "Army" National Guard at the time, Army units were National Guard, states with Naval units had them Naval Militia) between the Spanish American War and World War One were infantry.  This often surprises people but there are real reasons for it.  People want to believe that a state like Wyoming must have had cavalry but even by the Spanish American War that was not true.

Early on, even before statehood, Wyoming had militia units that were in fact cavalry, but that was in the context of contemplating deploying them against highly mobile Indians. After statehood the expense, probably, and difficulty, of keeping mounts for cavalry would likely have made that impractical.  Infantry was much easier to keep.  Indeed, while I do not know a great deal about the early cavalry units chances are very high that the horses used by those units belonged to the individual troopers and not to the state.

The forces committed by the state to the border in the Punitive Expedition were to be eight companies of infantry. Wyoming had nine on paper.  One was to be kept home, something fairly typical for big deployments.  But that didn't mean that nine full strength companies actually existed.  They did not.  So, after the Guard was called up the state spent weeks recruiting to bring the unit up to full strength.  We've read about that in the newspaper articles that have been posted on this site.

The mustered  Guard assembled at Cheyenne but it wasn't allowed by the  Army to to use Ft. D. A. Russell as a training ground, a raw deal really that was fairly inexcusable as the post's training range was enormous.  Instead, the state formed Camp Kendrick which is where Cheyenne's Frontier Park is today.  The Guard trained there all summer long. By late summer there were constant rumors about immediate deployments, and as we have seen, when the official orders came it was at first thought the unit would be deployed to San Antonio, but it was instead sent to Deming New Mexico.


At Camp Cody outside of Deming it trained further and took up the role of patrolling and garrisoning as infantry.  By the time the Wyoming Guard was deployed other Guard units had been on duty on the border for quite some time and were rotating back home.  Principally the unit trained, however, until the Regular Army returned from Mexico and the Guard was released on January 17, 1917, to return home.  In a real sense its mere presence was its mission as it served as a ready force, along with many other units, if Villa became fully resurgent or if war broke out with Mexico.

Their return in January 1917 would be brief.  The United States would enter World War One in April of that year and the recently mustered out National Guard would be called back into service.  In 1917, prior to the call up, the strength of the active Army was 200,000 men, 80,000 of which were still serving  Guardsmen. During the Great War 40% of the combat soldiers in the U.S. Army were Guardsmen who were formed into nineteen divisions.  While the U.S. Army balked at relying heavily on the Guard at the start of the formation of the Allied Expeditionary Force in 1917 the truth of the matter is that the Army would have been incapable of deploying when it did but for the Guard.  This didn't keep the Army from looking down on Guardsmen, particularly on National Guard officers, but during the war the Guard proved its mettle and served very ably.

The Punitive Expedition service, therefore had served as a nearly year long training period for the Guard that would serve it well.  In Wyoming's case that service would not be as infantry, however, and the Guard would experience a phenomenon that's not atypical for Guard units of being re-formed into some other type of unit at the start of war.  The Wyoming National Guard was converted into heavy artillery, predicting a role that it would resume after World War Two.  That conversion is a bit surprising, really as conversion into artillery during the Great War was common for cavalry, but not really infantry.  However, the Wyoming National  Guard was not a large unit and the Army created for World War One was an enormous Army, so the conversion of a unit about 600 men in strength into artillery made some sense. The bucking horse symbol came into military use at that time, as the Wyoming National Guard painted that symbol on its artillery pieces, something that they would do again during the Korean War.


Bad photograph of World War One era Wyoming National Guard symbols on monument in Cody Wyoming.

After being re-formed following World War One; the Wyoming  Guard would in fact become cavalry during the the 1920s, and remain so until converted into Horse-Mechanized Cavalry just before World War Two, and then armored cavalry during the war, and finally to artillery after World War Two.  Various designations have come and gone, but its been the Wyoming Guard all along.  Just recently, infantry returned to the Wyoming Army National Guard in the form of a small infantry unit; the first one the state has had since the 1920s.

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Further reading and partial sources:

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

The Wire Agency: News and the telegraph

I went to search for our "recent comments" here, as I was looking for a comment that LeAnn had made, which inspired this post.  I ended up having to find it another way, but I did find it.  Here it is:
Loving these posts on the Punitive Expedition. I'm so curious if you find any articles from the local paper that list the 28th Infantry, the unit my great-grandfather was in. In one of my first grad classes, I wrote a paper about how the events of the Punitive Expedition were reported in the newspapers, both national ones such as New York Times or the like and more local papers such as the Baltimore Sun. I found that the articles were essentially the same as the Associated Press was already in existence. So, there didn't seem to be any huge focuses on the local units in the local papers. Anyway, I'm finding these posts quite interesting. Thanks
The post appeared in the post on technology and the Punitive Expedition.

What LeAnn had noted about locals papers had also surprised me.  I hadn't expected such up to date news, quite frankly, .and I also expected it to have a highly local character.  It doesn't.  And that's for the reason she noted.

Now, having said that, what I will say, and which emphasizes this, is that if I take a step out further in news coverage this isn't true. That is, I was putting mostly up the Casper paper, with the Cheyenne paper on occasion.  But if you start looking at the newspapers of the smaller towns, the Punitive Expedition hardly appeared at all.  In any of them.  Now, why was that true.

Just what LeAnn noted. The wires services.  Those small papers weren't subscribing to the wire services.

Here's the first one we recently ran:

The Raid on Columbus New Mexico: The news hit.



Most towns and cities in 1916 were served by a morning and an evening newspaper, or a paper that published a morning and evening edition.  Therefore, most Americans would have started learning of the Villista raid around 5:00 p.m. or so as the evening newspapers were delivered or started being offered for sale.

Here's the evening edition of the Casper Daily Press, a paper that was in circulation in Casper Wyoming in 1916 and which is the predecessor of one of the current papers.
Here's the Encampment Record, from southern Wyoming, on the same day:


Quite a bit different.

From the Encampment Record, for the same day, we learn that improvements were being made to the city hall.  Registered livestock were being brought into the valley, something that urban sophisticates might make fun of today but real news.  A local road needed improvement.  And, some distance away, the Virginian Hotel in Medicine Bow, named for the 1902 novel by Owen Wister, and which is still there in Medicine Bow, had closed.  It only closed temporarily, of course, as it remains open today.

 
The Virginian Hotel, which has been featured on this blog before, with this photo being from Railhead.  It's interesting to note that Wister's novel was such a hit that it was inspiring the naming of a hotel in Wyoming so close to the date of its publication.

News Agencies got started in Europe as early as the 1830s. When telegraph came about, however, that really opened the door for the wire agency, a type of news agency that depended on the transmission of news by telegraph.  In the United States, the Associated Press was founded in 1846 as a nonprofit organization.  It originally only included five New York newspapers that had founded it, and it conveyed the news of the Mexican War by boat, horse and telegraph.  In 1900 the Illinois Supreme Court held that wire agencies were a public utility and that meant that the Associated Press had to let in any newspaper that would pay for the service.  The United States Supreme Court upheld the Illinois Supreme Court in Inter Ocean Publishing v. Associated Press, a decision that really opened up reporting in the United States (but which I doubt the Supreme Court would have ruled the same way in today.  Soon, any paper that wanted AP wire reports could have them, and soon thereafter competition spring up, including United Press and International News Service.

That brought in the golden age of the news reporter, as we so often imagine it today. Reporters working for the agencies going to the field and wiring in their reports to the agencies, who in turn spread them rapidly throughout the nation.  

News reporters and photographers interviewing Alma Gluck, 1917.  Gluck was a celebrated opera singer and would have been 33 years old at the time of this photograph.  There are a lot of interesting details in it, including a depiction of a fedora by a couple of gentlemen in the photo, sowing their early spread,  as well as a reporter taking his notes by hand.  That reporter, if he was a wire reporter, would then wire his story in. Note also the early large cameras, including at least one motion picture camera.

This was an amazing change in the way that things had been done.  Local newspapers before this, and there were many, simply reported on local news for the most part, until a story became so big it had to be reported in the local paper.  But now, the major news, including in our examples war news from Europe, was appearing the next day in small cities.  The world had become very connected.

Before we close in this amazing change in the transmission of news, let's observe a couple of things.  One is that the news was being wired, but photographs weren't really yet.  Some early news photos were appearing, but wire photography wouldn't come in until the 1920s with the invention of additional technology.  Secondly, lets consider the reporters.

One of the really amazing things about reporters of this era, and well after, is that these were not, as a rule, college educated men.  That says something about the nature of education at the time.  By and large, these were men with high school educations.  People didn't go to college and major in journalism.  If they wanted to be reporters, they took what they'd learned in high school and went out as a cub reporter for a paper.  Some really astounding writers are included in this group.  Francis McCullagh, an Irish born writer who traveled all over the globe writing for English, Japanese and American newspapers is one example. With a Catholic school education, he reported on wars everywhere from the Russo Japanese War all the way to the Spanish Civil War, writing several books along the way.  Robert Leckie is another.  He started writing for a local newspaper while still in high school and then went on to be a wire reporter after World War Two, later writing his famous memoir A Helmet For My Pillow as a reaction to seeing South Pacific.  It'd be hard to get in the door of a newspaper as a writer today without a university education.  Perhaps that says something about education standards of the era, or should, and expectations then and now.

Monday, April 25, 2016

The Casper Daily Press for April 25, 1916.

And, a couple of days after it occurred, a new violent event for 1916, the Easter Rebellion, hit the news.

Casper had a lot of Irish expatriates at the time for whom this news would have been of intense interest.


Thursday, March 10, 2016

Lex Anteinternet: My thesis « Ramblings of a teacher, Redskins fan, and scrapbooker.

My thesis « Ramblings of a teacher, Redskins fan, and scrapbooker (Punitive Expedition Entry)


Leann, the author of the Ramblings of a teacher, Redskins fan, and scrapbooker blog  has posted a series of entries on her Master's Thesis, which deals with a family member who was a soldier during the Punitive Expedition and World War One..  Given the focus of this blog, I"m glad to see her do that, and I've mentioned her prior blog entries before.  Anyhow, she's serialized the entries, the first of which is here:

My thesis « Ramblings of a teacher, Redskins fan, and scrapbooker

Interesting stuff.

Monday, October 12, 2015

Blacks in the Army. Segregation and Desegregation

WE recently posted this item on our Some Gave All blog, the one that's dedicated to memorials. I'm repeating that post here, in its entirety, as it deals with something that's very much on point for this blog, but which we haven't addressed yet. And I'm adding significantly to it.
Some Gave All: Cheyenne Wyoming's Buffalo Soldier Monument, Verno...: These are photographs of a small park in  Cheyenne Wyoming, just off of F. E. Warren Air Force Base, which was formerly Ft. F. E. Warren...


These are photographs of a small park in  Cheyenne Wyoming, just off of F. E. Warren Air Force Base, which was formerly Ft. F. E. Warren, and originally Ft. D. A. Russell.  the park memorializes various things significant to Cheyenne's military history, which has always been  a significant aspect of Wyoming's capitol.


The most notable feature of the park is an African American cavalryman, a "Buffalo Soldier".  Ft. D. A. Russell saw troops of the 9th Cavalry, one of the two all black cavalry regiments in the segregated Army, stationed at the post.










The monument includes a memorial to 1st Lt. Vernon J. Baker, a Cheyenne native, who won the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions during World War Two.



This blog, of course, tracks history and changes, and here we see a truly huge one in terms of American society. A story of race relations that's well known to students of the U.S. Army and American history, but often off the map for those who have only occasional or passing familiarity with these topics.

For many years, at least since the 1950s, the Armed Forces have been a significant employer for American minorities with American blacks having had a particularly strong association with it.  And yet, this is really a fairly recent story in some ways, while not in others.  It's also one that appears to be changing.

When I went to basic training in 1982, one of my two Drill Instructors, SSgt Ronald E. Adams, was black. The Senior Drill Instructor for our Battery was black.  Our Battery Commander, Cpt. Harris, was black.  None of this seems the slightest bit remarkable. And yet this wouldn't have been the case in 1942, nor even probably in 1952.  A significant change certainly occurred, and what that change was, was the desegregation of the Armed Forces.  And by extension, the Armed Forces became a major factor in the change in American race relations, and a major factor in black employment.

It surprises many now to learn that the Armed Forces ever enforced a racial policy, but for over 150 years it did. And that policy was to put blacks, but not other minority races (normally) in separate military units in the case of the Army, or later, in the case of the Navy, in separate duty roles.  Interestingly, this policy did not always exist so that itself reflects something about our society.

The Revolution to 1792

Blacks, the poor, and immigrants were so common in the Continental Army that a French commentor at Yorktown noted his amazement that an army of poorly equipped, disheveled, poor, blacks and immigrants could defeat the professional British army.

When the US first formed its military, during the Revolution, policies were interestingly mixed and remained so throughout the war.  Depending upon what colony a person came from, blacks could be admitted to service or not, or even compelled to services in some instance.  Slavery, of course, existed everywhere throughout the thirteen colonies that rebelled (it's often forgotten that there was a fourteenth, the Canadian one, that didn't), but it was already in the decline in the northern colonies which did not feature plantations as part of their agricultural economy.  Slavery, even at that time, was particularly associated with, but certainly not limited to, plantations, a distinct type of production agriculture.

Early in the war some blacks volunteered and served with various colonial units that were raised or mustered for the war. And keep in mind that being a member of the militia was mandatory, not elective, for free men, or at least free white men.  When Congress formed the Continental Army, however, its commander, George Washington, a Southern planter, did not want blacks in it and banned their enlistment at first.  This reflected  his origin, no doubt, as he also found the northern soldiers he commanded, at first, to be rather difficult to take culturally.  However, he acclimated himself to northerners in various ways, including accepting that northern units had recruited and employed black soldiers. Some northern units in the Revolution had up to 1/5th of their ranks made up of black soldiers.  One militia unit from Rhode Island was completely made up, in the enlisted ranks, of black soldiers.  The Navy, a Continental force, took blacks into its ranks, unlike the Continental Army (at least outright), reflecting a bit of a different culture that existed in seafaring communities and also the need, right from the onset, to equip a force that competed with commercial fleets for manpower and which required special skills that were concentrated in maritime communities.

The British, taking advantage of the official prohibition on blacks enlisting in the Continental Army, openly declared that they would do it, which they did, and that service in the British Army would mean freedom after the war.  This was in fact attractive to blacks, so much so that at the end of the war slaves from both Jefferson's and Washington's plantations were among the "property" that were returned to the victorious Americans (a quite raw deal, in my view, for those black British servicemen).  In reaction, Congress reversed the official prohibition on the enlistment of black soldiers in the Continental Army and authorized the reenlistment of blacks who were already in it.  Washington, it should be noted, ordered this to be done prior to Congress officially approving it, which says something about the evolution of his views, but also about the fear that blacks would see the British as their protectors, which clearly some did, and not without good reason.  While this didn't authorize recruitment of free blacks, that fairly clearly did occur, and moreover, the owners of slaves were allowed to be provided as substitutes for their owners in militias in the north and the south, a fairly surprising policy if a person thinks about it carefully.  These enlisted, black, slave, militiamen served in what were otherwise white militia units.

As noted, the policy was different for the Navy. The Navy enlisted black seamen and it had little choice but to do so.  A fairly significant number of blacks served in the Navy during the Revolution.  And while there are source that claim otherwise, the nature of sea duty at the time didn't really allow for segregation.  Blacks surely wouldn't advance in sea service, but as yeomen sailors their lot and service was about the same as whites.

While the concept of Marines as a truly separate service didn't exist at the time of the Revolution, with Marines being sea borne infantry in the classic sense at that time, a few blacks are known to have served in the very small American Marine Corps that existed for the period of the Revolution (and which went briefly out of existence thereafter). There to, that reflected the realities of sea service.

The overall story of our early history in these regards is therefore quite interesting.  Blacks were not at liberty for obvious reasons to join as freely as whites, and there was no way that they were going to become officers, but they did see some integrated service in the land armies of the United States, and further integrated service in the Navy.  A fairly promising start, eh?  Well, things would soon change.

1792 to 1862

Following the Revolution, in 1792, Congress acted to prohibit the enlistment of black soldiers into the Army, a policy which remained in place until 1862.  Congress did not, however, prohibit the enlistment of blacks into the Navy.  This has to reflect the retrenchment of views following relief from the threat of the British, who were threatening to free black slaves, and who were clearly headed that way in general in terms of the evolution of their views.  Indeed, contrary to our common concept of the American Revolution standing purely for liberty, the British held much more egalitarian views towards Catholics, Indians and Blacks within their domain than the thirteen rebelling colonies did. Following the Revolution, only repression towards Catholics slackened a bit, but probably mostly because they constituted such a tiny minority of American colonist and also because it wasn't really practical to repress Catholics officially without repressing the various Protestant minority faiths as well, so legislative efforts to do that were abandoned.

The Navy was, quite frankly, the more significant service at the time, as the United States came out of the Revolution as a maritime power, not really a land power, and navies cannot be rapidly built, but must rather be maintained. The size of the Army shrank to tiny following the Revolution, a policy that the Unites States generally followed, basing its land defense on militias, until after World War Two, save for time of war itself.  As the United States had to keep a Navy, and navies were recruited from men in maritime communities, and as commercial employment was better paying than Navy duty, omitting blacks from the Navy was impossible.  But, and not to be too cynical, it also seems to have at least partially reflected the port culture that exists in all maritime communities which have always been very mixed in terms of populations and races.  Indeed, the Navy is known to have had at least one black junior officer at the time of the war with the Barbary Pirates, which is truly an amazing thing, in the context of those times, to contemplate.  A large number of enlisted sailors were black, with estimates ranging from 1/4 of the enlisted ranks early in the 19th Century to well over half of the enlisted ranks, although that later estimate strikes me as high. Suffice it to say, with so many sailors being black, blacks served in all enlisted rolls in the Navy, not in just segregated duties.

Interestingly, when the Marine Corps was reconstituted blacks were banned being enlisted in it, along with "mulattoes" and Indians.  This was a policy much different from the remainder of the Navy's, of which the Marine Corps was very much part, but apparently it reflected a policy in the British Marines, upon which the United States Marine Corps was based, to have high social cohesion among Marines.  One of the roles of Marines in those days was to put down mutinies aboard ship, and the thinking was that men who had to do that had to be bonded mostly to themselves, and not to anyone else, and therefore they should all have as much of the same background as possible. That resulted in Marines having an official all white policy starting in 1798. 

While blacks were officially banned from Army service, a little occurred in the tiny Army, probably on a blind eye basis.  In militias, Louisiana, which was exempted form the 1792 law by way of a treaty with France securing its acquisition, was an exception in chief as it had an all black militia unit, making it an interesting exception in that, of course, it was one of the states that would attempt to depart in the Civil War.  This is really remarkable for a Southern state, in that in stark contrast to northern militias, southern ones often had suppression of a slave rebellion distinctly in mind in terms of their organization and purpose.

This was the basic situation that existed at the time of the War of 1812. The support of that war, however, would start to show a trend that would seemingly reflect itself in regards to this history for some time.  Support for the war was stronger in the South, than the North, and the largely militia forces that were raised to fight in the war were heavily southern as the war moved on from its initial stages, while the Navy remained a maritime navy.  Opinions over the war itself were sharply divided by region as the war dragged on, with New England becoming increasingly disenchanted with the war to the point of near resistance to it in some fashions.

The patterns developing during the War of 1812 continued on after the war that, by the Mexican War, they were pretty fixed. The Navy remained integrated at the enlisted level while the racial exclusion in the Army, if anything, increased as the officer corps of the Army came to be increasingly influenced by the South. The South, being much less economically developed than the North, sent a higher percentage of its sons into the Army.  While this should have been counteracted to a certain degree by an officer corps that was largely provided by West Point, the better educational opportunities in the North tended to mean that Northern officers disproportionately entered the Corps of Engineers and also tended to to have greater outside economic opportunities, while Southern officers were more likely to remain in combat arms and stay in the service.  During the Mexican War this expressed itself in the form of an officer corps that was heavily prejudiced against Catholic German and Irish immigrant soldiers.  This resulted in a high rate of desertion and the only instance in American history of a unit of defectors serving in the opposing army.

The high desertion rate, combined with the formation of the Mexican artillery unit made up of American deserters, the San Patricio's, shook up the United States Army severely, and caused it to do what it later would be very adept at.  It acted as an agent of social change well before the society it served did, and that would in some ways be significant in terms of the later development of this story. The Army entered the Mexican War a white, Anglo Saxon, American institution. But it soon worked its way to peace with its Catholic Irish and German soldiers.  Not long after the Mexican War the Army would develop into a haven for them, and by the time of the  Civil War, the officer corps was beginning to see the incorporation of them.  The Civil War would also see the reintroduction of blacks into the Army.

The Civil War

 Black cavalry sergeant.  This sergeant is dressed in the classic late war fashion, complete with high riding boots which only entered cavalry service late in the Civil War.  Photographs like this demonstrate that, contrary to myth, black troops, while not paid at the same rate as white troops, were equipped equally as well as any other soldier.

That blacks would enter into the Army during the Civil War now seems so obvious as to be self evident, but they were not serving in any numbers in the Army prior to the war. Blacks were not allowed to enlist at first, in spite of a pronounced desire to do so, in part because there was a fear that their recruitment would push border states into the Confederacy.  Congress, however, authorized their enlistment in 1862 and by the war's end over 180,000 blacks had served in the Union Army.   

 
  Black infantry First Sergeant, Civil War.   The saber is likely a studio prop, which together with revolvers frequently appear in Civil War studio photographs where they'd otherwise be surprising.  This infantry NCO's bayonet can be seen carried on his belt.  He wears the full frock coat, which became less common as the war went on.

In spite of its long history of enlisting free blacks the Navy also had some trepidation of receiving escaped slaves into service, but it was soon doing so.  Navy service continued to be more egalitarian, no doubt based on the long  history of blacks in the Navy, and unlike the Army the Navy did not discriminate in terms of pay or privilege, although it did in promotion.  By the wars end, some black sailors were serving as Petty Officers, a fairly significant enlisted rank in the Navy.

 
 A black sailor of the U.S. Navy during the Civil War. This sailor appears to be very young, but very young sailors were common in navies throughout the world at the time.

Confident looking black sailor, Civil War.  Note the pinky ring.

It is worthy to note, however, that the position of blacks, not surprisingly, fared poorer than that of Indians to some degree, depending upon the region of origin of the Indians at the time.  Not all Indians were citizens by quite some measure at that time, but those who were saw no segregation in service and at least one rose to the rank of a general officer in the Army.  Indians also saw service in the Confederate army, showing that the South was uniquely prejudicial in these regards.

1865 to 1914

 Cavalryman of the 9th Cavalry.

Black troops had performed well and had proven themselves during the Civil War which caused Congress to authorize the retention of four black regiments, two infantry and two cavalry, in the post war Army.  These became the 9th Cavalry, the 10th Cavalry, the 24th Infantry and the 25th Infantry.  It is to these troops that the nickname "Buffalo Soldier" attached, and it is a soldier in this service, one of the cavalrymen of the 9th or 10th Cavalry Regiments, which is depicted in the monument above.  The term itself is lost to myth and the exact origin of it is unknown, although the modern assumption that it was associated with particular heroism is probably simply a myth.

Soldier of the 9th Cavalry.

This is not to say that the various black regiments did not give admirable frontier service. They did.  Their performance was on par with the other regiments of the U.S. Army, although they were certainly unique and made up of men who had somewhat different motivations, although only somewhat, from the remainder of the Army.  All in all, the enlisted ranks of the Frontier Army were made up of the economically disadvantaged, to say the least, with the other regular regiments heavily populated by Irish and German immigrants.

White officers of the 9th Cavalry.

The frontier period, and the period immediately following it, was the highwater market of black units in the U.S. Army.  Serving in a segregated society, and in a segregated Army, the units were white officered but otherwise had exclusively black ranks. Their service was the same as for white units and they served very well, proving themselves as able combat units in the Indian campaigns of the West.  A few, very few, blacks were commissioned as officers, with only one graduating from West Point, but until the 20th Century their lives were impossibly difficult and the service simply did not accept the presence of black officers, even though it did black enlisted men, even if within the same unit.

Lt. Henry O. Flipper, 10th U.S. Cavalry. A United States Military Academy graduate, Flipper's career was cut short by a charge of conduct unbecoming an officer which resulted in his discharge.  His sentence was reduced in the 20th Century, but long after his 1940 death.  In essence, his status as a black man doomed his military career, but he went on to a successful civilian career.

By the end of the Frontier era, black soldiers had proven themselves and their status was firmly established within the U.S. Army.  In some ways, that Army saw its final hurrah in the Spanish American War, which was of course a conflict with a European power and not a Frontier campaign, but which was fought by troops and officers who were closing out the Frontier era.  Black troops saw regular use in the war along side of the regular white regiments, just as they had continually since 1862.

 Black cavalryman, probably in the 1870s or 1880s.

Starting very slowly, in 1887, the Army began to open up to black officers with John Hanks Alexander being the second black officer to graduate from West Point.  Alexander was commissioned into the cavalry and unlike earlier black students at the United States Military Academy he received very little poor treatment while there.  Alexander was soon joined by Charles Young, who received more resistance but, as Alexander died unexpectedly at age 30,  the forceful Young was to be the much more influential figure.

 
 Lt. Col. Charles Young.  Young was an exceptional individual and was the third black to graduate from the United States Military Academy and the first black officer to reach the rank of Lt. Col. and the first to command white troops in combat.  He was retired for medical reasons at the start of World War One in an act which is often regarded as one that based on prejudice, but he did in fact die of a stroke while subsequently serving as the military attache to the American embassy in Liberia.
Young, like Alexander, entered the cavalry in a segregated regiment, but he was to later become notable for what turned out to be the curious last fully accepted deployment of black troops, that being their use in the Punitive Expedition.  By that time Young was a Lt. Colonel in the 10th Cavalry, the first black soldier to achieve such a high rank in the U.S. Army, and he was the first black officer to command white troops in combat, which he did in an instance in Mexico when he was the senior officer when white and black troops were present.

 Troopers of the 10th Cavalry who were taken captive in the June 1916 Battle of Caarrizal in Mexico.  The battle was one that did not go well for U.S. forces and resulted in the capture of these men, something which has caused me to sometimes wonder, but without any written support, if this resulted in the sidelining of U.S. black combat troops during the Great War, to some extent.

The Navy, in contrast, started to go surprisingly backwards in this same time period.  Having been the service which allowed blacks to serve on an unsegregated basis for all of its history, in the enlisted ranks, in 1893 it prohibited black enlistment except into the messmans corps, and thereafter black sailors served in the mess with a growing number of Filipinos. What caused this big change in direction is not clear to me, although it would seem to be evidence of a growing degree of prejudice in society in general, perhaps.  Or perhaps more accurately, it may have reflected the big change in Navy demographics that came on with the end of the age of sail.  Up through the Civil War the Navy had been a sailing ship Navy with crews that were drawn almost exclusively from maritime communities, which included blacks.  Only shortly thereafter, however, the Navy became recognizable as the modern steel ship Navy, complete with battleships and entire classes of fast steel ships.  The crews of these ships no longer really resembled the sold crews of seamen so much as they did technicians and the Navy populated the ships with crews drawn from across the country, and indeed very often young men entering the Navy came from the interior of the country, not from the ports. As this occurred, the prejudices of the interior seem to have entered the Navy, and blacks, who had served in all roles, no longer did after 1893.

 Soldiers of the 24th Infantry in the Philippines, 1902.  Fighting in the Philippines would carry on until just prior to World War One.


World War One 

At the start of World War One, it would have been logical to suppose that the four black regiments in the U.S. Army would be joined by additional black volunteer units, and indeed they were, but there was significant resistance towards this being done, and black units received some resistance.  Not one of the U.S. Army's regular black combat units saw service in the war.  The 10th Cavalry and the 24th Infantry spent the war on the border with Mexico, where they did see combat with Mexican forces, but they never deployed to Europe. Of course, in the case of cavalry, cavalry remained an important element of our forces along the border, which was very active, throughout the war, so perhaps that's understandable.  The 9th Cavalry spent the war in the Philippines, which was also a somewhat active ongoing responsibility for the Army. The 25th Infantry spent the war in Hawaii.  While perhaps all of this is understandable, it is a bit odd under the circumstances.

Over 300,000 blacks entered the Army during the war as wartime volunteers, but most were assigned to support units, in a move that was to become the hallmark of the remaining days of the segregated Army. Still, some black units did see combat duty, such as the black 369th Infantry Regiment, a National Guard unit from New York.  Black National Guard units had appeared in several states by that time, and it was more difficult to relegate these units to service roles, and it was also politically difficult to sideline them to roles that weren't part of the great effort in Europe.. Another such unit was the 366th Infantry Regiment, which was an all black regiment that had, very unusually, black officers.

Officers of the 366th Infantry Regiment.

While I have no strong evidence to support it, it is curious that a military resource that had been actively used in every American war since 1862 was sidelined to this extent during World War One during an administration that was headed by one of the most racist Presidents in our post war history.  Woodrow Wilson, who is otherwise regarded as a symbol of the Progressive movement, was a product of the post Civil War American South and held very racist views regarding American blacks.  The country seems to have slid backwards in this period, which also was witnessing the rise of the Klu Klux Klan. Wilson famously said of the revisionist Southern film Birth of a Nation that "it is as it was", which it clearly was not, and the sidelining of black troops during his administration is curious. 

As noted above, black sailors served in combat roles during World War one, and even some recently retired black servicemen were recalled to service during the war, demonstrating their value to the modern Navy.  They served in combat roles when called upon, like all sailors, but as noted, they were recruited as messmen and were exclusively enlisted men.

1919 to 1941

 10th Cavalry, early during World War Two.

Black troops had been relegated, in many instances, to support roles during World War One, but where they were allowed to fight, they preformed very ably.  The 369th, for example, was highly decorated during the war.  None the less, the prejudice that really started to assert itself against black soldiers indicated something that was to set in and exhibit it self again in the nation's next conflict.

During the interbellum period, however, the Army seemingly returned to normal. The four black regiments returned to their normal duty and training and were fully incorporated back into their peacetime roles. 

The Navy, on the other hand, did not return to normal.  Departing strongly with its prior history, the Navy joined its subordinate branch the Marine Corps in completely prohibiting black enlistment in the Navy after World War One. The basis for this completely escapes me, but it would appear to reflect the very significant institutional racism at the time.  This policy was reversed in 1932, but only to the extent that blacks were allowed to enlist once again as messmen, a role which was heavily populated by Filipino recruits at that time in sort of a special license granted to Filipinos.  A long history of the Navy being relatively progressive on race relations thereby came to an end.  Servicing black sailors were allowed to complete their careers in their roles, but new black sailors were relegated to the mess.  From 1919 to 1932, there was no recruitment of black sailors at all.

Ironically, during the same time period a small exception to this progression on the sea took place in the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service, a forerunner of the Coast Guard.  From 1887 until his retirement in 1895 Captain Michael Healy served as the cutter of the Revenue Cutter Bear.  At the time of his retirement in 1895 Healy was the third highest ranking officer in the Revenue Cutter Service.  Healy was of mixed descent, but that mixed descent would have kept him from this role in the Navy.

World War Two.

 
 Army mechanic.  This type of role was the most common for American black soldiers during World War Two.

World War Two was in some ways to be a reprise of World War One for black troops for much of the war, but it did change as the war went on. At the start of the war, there was a conscience effort on the part of the Army to use blacks only in support roles, in spite of their being four standing black combat units.  This only changed as the war went on, and really only towards the end and in ways that are small enough that much that has focused on these very real efforts has tended to exaggerate them to an extent.

World War Two saw a very high volunteer rate on the part of black Americans, which has sometimes been regarded as surprising but which shouldn't be.  African Americans had started the process of immigrating from the South to the North during the prior two decades and the war accelerated that process dramatically, which also put them in a new context where prejudice, while very real, was less pronounced. Also, as a population, the sympathetic nature of a conflict to liberate oppressed peoples likely had a natural appeal to a population that had suffered oppression itself. Finally, there was a widespread belief in the black population that black service during the war would lead to the acceleration of the cause of black civil rights, which turned out to be a correct assessment.

The old black Regular Army units saw service, but in disappointing was to some extent. The 24th Infantry Regiment saw service in the Pacific throughout the war, making it a bit of an exception. The 25th Infantry Regiment was incorporated into the 93nd Infantry Division, an all "colored" unit, which was not sent to the Pacific until 1944 and which saw itself often being used in support, rather than combat, roles.  The 9th Cavalry was used to supply replacements in the ETO, and therefore did not see combat as a unit and was disbanded in 1944.  The 10th Cavalry Regiment suffered the same fate.

 Soldiers of the 93d Infantry Division in Bouganville.

All of this was partially due to a belief by career Army officers that blacks made poor combat soldiers, a belief that does not seem to have been founded on anything.  Late during World War Two, however, the shortage of infantrymen in Europe became so severe that the Army began stripping support units for combat soldiers and allowed black service troops to volunteer for combat duty, which they did in high numbers, even though it meant taking a reduction in rank to do so.  Interestingly, while the intent was to deploy them in segregated units, one Southern officer misunderstood his orders and used them as conventional replacements, in spite of a personal belief in military segregation. While this was reversed once the mistake was understood, the experiment worked well and blacks integrated into largely white units did not prove to cause disruption.

 92nd Infantry Division in action, Italy.

A few black combat units, such as the 92nd Infantry division, the 332nd Fighter Group, the 93d Infantry Division did see active combat service as the war went on, and black combat units had good combat records during the war.

Soldier of the 12th Armored Division with German prisoners.  He carries an M1 Garand and a captured German ceremonial  military knife.

The story for the Navy was somewhat similar, in that it saw the return of blacks to active combat service.  Starting off the war being relegated to secondary service roles, as the war progressed blacks were reincorporated, on a segregated basis, into combat service. By the wars end it was the case that even two ships had all black crews and blacks had
The all black enlisted crew of a submarine chaser.

Black sailors of the USS Mason, a ship crewed by all black enlisted men.

Under pressure from the Roosevelt Administration, the Navy also commissioned a handful of black officers for the first time since the Navy's early history.  The officers largely saw service limited to shore roles due to the segregated nature of the Navy, but at least one was assigned as an officer on board one of the two entirely black crewed ships.

The first black Naval officers during World War Two.

The Marine Corps broke with is prior history during the war, and enlisted blacks for the first time starting in 1942.  In November 1945 the first black Marine Corps officer was commissioned.  Marines served in service roles in the Marine Corps, but given the nature of the Marine Corps, that did place them into combat.

Black Marines on Saipan.

1945 to 1948

After World War Two, it could no more logically be argued that blacks made poor soldiers. Black units, and the very few other racially segregated units (such as those made up of Nessi soldiers), had proven effective in combat.  None the less, it was only due to a bold move by President Harry S. Truman that military segregation ended on July 26, 1948.  On that date he issued Executive Order 9981, which stated:
It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes without impairing efficiency or morale.
The move seems obvious now, but it shouldn't be taken that way.  Racial segregation remained fully legal and very common in American civil society, and racist views were not only common, but largely accepted to at least some degree nearly everywhere in American society.  It was a bold move and it was one that Truman didn't have to make. There was very little to be gained politically by it.  But, while the integration wasn't instant, it did change things quickly and significantly.  The era of a divided military was over.

Integration of the services was not instant, and interestingly it was not fully left to the services themselves. The first service to fully integrate was the U.S. Air Force, which had only come into existence in 1946 and which fully committed itself to integration, achieving it by 1949.  The Air Force as a separate service inherited the structure of the United States Army Air Force, which would partially explain why there were segregated units in it, but it did accomplish the policy quickly.   The Army, in comparison, took on the project piecemeal, but the Korean War was soon to change that.

1950 to 1990, the Cold War, with some hot ones.

There was an assumption in the immediate post World War Two era that the era of major wars was over.  The use of the atomic bomb to end World War Two brought about an assumption that all future wars would be short, and nuclear.  The assumption wasn't founded on reality at the time, and it would soon be proven to be wildly inaccurate.  

The peace that ended World War Two didn't really bring about a global termination of war in the first place.  It's popular to think of there being a gap between World War Two and the Cold War during which there was a short hopeful period of deluded peace, but that isn't really true. A civil war broke out in Greece before World War Two ended, pitting Communist against Anti Communist. Guerrilla wars followed in the wake of Soviet advances in World War Two as well, with some actually breaking out within the liberated areas of the Soviet Union itself.  China's long running civil war broke back out.  The US seemed to assume there'd be a peace, and a nuclear peace at that, but that was simply wishful thinking. That wishful thinking would be broken by the Berlin Blockade and then, shortly after that, by a new war, the Korean War.

The Korean War was the first war the United States Army fought with an integrated Army, and the process worked fairly seamlessly, although not universally so.  Even though Truman ordered the service integrated in 1948, it was also the case that it didn't come about fully until the Korean War, and the Army entered the war with some segregated units remaining.

Soldiers of the 24th Infantry Regiment in Korea. The 24th remained segregated when deployed and was disbanded in 1951, it's reputation somewhat tarnished by performance in Korea that was later determined to be caused by poor leadership. The unit itself fought well prior to it being disbanded for purposes of integration.  By this time, black draftees were going right into regular units so the 24th was an anachronism.

Following that, in the 1950s, the Army quickly became an American institution that was colorblind, and hence a good place for poor blacks to get a start or a career. Quite quickly the blacks became a significant demographic in the U.S. Army. This was reinforced during the Vietnam War, during which the economic demographic many blacks fit into meant that they were in the likely to be drafted category for the first of the two Vietnam era drafts. But by that time blacks were also becoming significant in the Army's officer corps.  All this was true of the other services as well.  And it remained the case all the way through the Cold War.

 Vietnam, 1967.

Oddly, it was the Navy again where a hiccup occurred, although one that did not prove to be disruptive long term.  Racial tension on board the USS Kitty Hawk erupted in what might be regarded as a near mutiny, or even a mutiny, lead by black sailors on the ship when it was ordered to return to service off of Vietnam after a long deployment.  The ship had a large contingent of sailors who were enlisted under a wartime program that had brought in many who were below the general standards of the Navy and the entire service was suffering from poor moral in the late stages of the war.  The riot was actually diffused by a black officer, at great threat to his own well being, although his actions resulted in the destruction of his career.  This instances stands out as a singular example of a real mutiny on board a U.S. ship and a surprising one, given the era in which it occurred.  It's also interesting that it occurred in the all volunteer Navy, where as tensions in the Army did not result in something similar.

After the Vietnam War, the service suffered in general from a tarnished reputation that the country now regrets, but it kept on being a haven for blacks to enter middle class employment and black entered the service in large numbers.  Interestingly, it apparently isn't so much the case today.  According to a recent set of articles I read blacks are decreasing as a demographic in the service.  This appears to be worrying some people, but it probably shouldn't.  Poor Irish and Germans decreased as a percentage of the service long ago.  Hispanics are rising as a percentage of the service.  All this means that the service continues to be a place where the poor often tend to get their start.  If blacks are decreasing as a percentage of servicemen, it likely means that the service no longer seems as necessary to them as an economic opportunity as it once did, and that's a good thing.