A Harlem Hellfighter’s Searing Tales from the WWI Trenches

By: Missy Sullivan & Volker Janssen

Photo: By The Metropolitan Museum of Art - http://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/ph/web-large/DP72106.jpg, CC0

Like many veterans of the killing fields of World War I, Horace Pippin had a tough time shaking off the memories. So in the decade after the war he captured them, and tamed them, inside sketch-filled journals.

He had no dearth of stories to tell. There was the terrified young recruit who hauntingly foresaw his own death. The foul trenches, with their unending soundtrack of screaming artillery shells and staccato machine-gun fire. The gas clouds that suddenly appeared from the sky. The forays across fields littered with wounded and dead. And the trauma of being hit by a German sniper and then pinned in a foxhole, bleeding out.

Pippin poured out his war memories into a few small composition books, filling page after page with his tidy handwriting. The spelling and grammar are often makeshift. The humble drawings are rendered in pencil and crayon. But the stories—even in Pippin’s muted, matter-of-fact telling—offer a rare first-person account of the harrowing combat experience of the Harlem Hellfighters, the most celebrated U.S. regiment of African American soldiers during WWI.

The Harlem Hellfighters were an African American infantry unit in WWI who spent more time in combat than any other American unit. Despite their courage, sacrifice and dedication to their country, they returned home to face racism and segregation from their fellow countrymen.

Signing on for Uncle Sam

When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, Horace Pippin was almost 30 years old. Born in West Chester, Pennsylvania and raised in Goshen, New York, he left school after the 7th grade to help support his family. He took an array of menial jobs (hotel porter, coal-wagon driver, feed-store helper); lived intermittently in New York City as a laborer; then moved to Paterson, New Jersey in 1912, to work as an iron molder. At this point, there was little evidence he would go on to become one of the most renowned African American artists of the 20th century.

On June 1, 1917, not long after the U.S. entered the war, Pippen volunteered for the 15th New York National Guard, later christened the 369th regiment and nicknamed the Harlem Hellfighters. That November, during training, he earned his corporal stripes. They landed on the Atlantic coast of France the following month.

From the time the Hellfighters arrived in France late in December 1917, it was unclear if they would ever see combat at all. In the heyday of Jim Crow discrimination, the U.S. military’s all-white leadership questioned whether black soldiers had the intelligence or courage to fight, so most were relegated to support roles. Roughly 10 percent of the 380,000 African Americans who served in the war actually fought, according the U.S. National Archives.

Eager to Fight, Hailed as Heroes

Assigned to the infantry under General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force, the Hellfighters initially toiled as laborers, constructing a railroad yard, building roads and unloading ships. “It were slow work and wet work and you would go to bed wet, for there would be no fire to dry by,” Pippin wrote of the latter duty. But the black troops were eager to fight from the front-line trenches. “It were a place we all wanted to see,” he wrote. “We did not think it right to go there and not see it.”

They ultimately did see the trenches—and combat—in northern France, where they played a crucial role in helping to blunt the German advance across the Western front.

The 369th proved themselves able and fearless fighters. Serving 191 days on the front—more time in continuous combat than any other American unit—the Hellfighters never lost ground to the Germans or had a man captured. And they were the first unit of all the Allied armies to reach the River Rhine, a key strategic victory. “My men never retire, they go forward or they die,” said their commanding officer, Colonel William Hayward, to a French general who urged retreat after one particularly bruising battle. The French government honored the entire regiment with the Croix de Guerre; many individual members received medals of valor. (U.S. recognitions wouldn’t come until decades later, if at all.)

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Of his unit, Pippin wrote, “I never seen the time yet that…[they] were not ready. They were always ready to go and they did go to the last man….We were good. Good a nuff to go any place.”

Fighting for the French

But it wasn’t alongside American forces that the Hellfighters made their mark. With the French looking to the U.S. to help replenish their badly depleted armies, Pershing handed the 369th over to their allies.

Seeing the shoddy equipment given to America’s black troops, the French re-kitted the Hellfighters with French rifles, helmets, belts, gas masks and canteens (with wine). They also beefed up the 369th’s military training: in trench construction, machine gun operation, the construction and use of grenades, and preparations for a gas attack.

“They proved apt pupils,” wrote journalist and educator Emmett J. Scott in Scott’s Official History of The American Negro in the World War, the first major chronicle of African American contributions to WWI, published in 1919. “In grenade-throwing they easily outdid their instructors, and in bayonet work they demonstrated great skill.”

After months of training, the 369th first saw action in Bois d’Hauze, in the Champagne region, on March 12, 1918. The Hellfighters went on to fight major battles at Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood and Minancourt.

Dogfights Above, Vermin Below

Life on the front, in what Pippin called “them lonely, cooty, muddy trenches,” was a miserable, terror-filled slog, where one day blurred into the next. Soldiers had to constantly bail out water with pails, he wrote, to keep their bottom bunks from being inundated. Rats and lice were constant companions. And the steady German barrage meant that death could arrive at any moment.

“We were all in the dugout when…the shells were dropeing all around our trench,” he wrote. “Soon as we came out of our dugout I could smell gas… I looked around me and I seen that they all had their gas mass on… Every step we took a shell would land somewhere near the trench.” He went on to describe how mortar shells caved in parts of the trench, forcing them to fall to their bellies and crawl like worms through the muck.

Clouds of poisonous gas drifted in without warning. They could be so thick, he wrote, “that it all looked blue… [The Germans] put so mutch gas in one place and it were so thick that it looked like fog.”

And hardly a day went by without a dogfight overhead. Once, Pippin witnessed a French plane score a direct hit on a German one: “All at once he were afire and came down to rise no more.” He ran to the crash site, where the cockpit’s two occupants looked “like mush.” Meanwhile, the victorious French pilot circled above “like a king over his great foe.”

Airborne gunners would also strafe the ground with bullets. Anywhere men were out in the open, on roads or in fields, “the Germens would come in a plain and would deel out Death to them,” Pippin wrote. “I never gave it a thought ontill one afternoon, it were a cloudy day… I were not thinking of anytheing in the line of danger at that time…when all at once I heard a sound like a gush of air… I fell to one side of the trench as he fired at me. I lade lo ontill he were gon. I said to myself he near had me this time.”

Not that there was ever time to recover from such close calls. Afterward, as Pippin sat on a box, smoking a cigarette to calm his nerves, the gas alarm sounded, alerting the platoon to an incoming cloud of strong mustard gas. Later that night, a runner arrived; soon after, Pippin and others were sent out into no man’s land in the pouring rain to root out a nest of German gunners; the mission failed.

Men as Machine Gun Fodder

Pippin vividly described the 369th’s hellish forays into the battlefield. When the artillery opened up, he wrote, “You would have thought the world was coming to an end… To see those shells bursting in the night…the gas, dust and smoke was terrible.”

Sometimes they would be out for days, without food, trying to advance as enemy machine-gunners targeted them continuously. “Men layeing all over wounded and dead, some was being carryed. We wished we could help the wounded by we couldn’t. We had to leave them there and keep advanceing, ducking from shell hole to shell hole all day.”

He described one afternoon in summer 1918 when virtually all of his platoon had been felled by heavy machine-gun crossfire. “It only left four unhirt in that pit,” he wrote. After one friend got killed right behind him while peeking up to spot the enemy position, Pippen creeped away. “The bullets were hitening in front of me and would throw dirt in my face. I knew that if I stayed there I would get it. So I said to my budy, when I say go be ready and make it for the little bridge and cross the swamp if we can. I said go and we made the bridge.” The whole way, he wrote, “the Germans were shelling the swamp with gas and scrapnel.”