- April 18, 2024
-
-
Loading
Loading
They left at dawn. From three planes, they’d watch the bald desert hills surrounding their eastern Oregon base give way to the jagged evergreen forests of the Cascade Mountains. They’d pick a spot in the closely packed trees and jump from their planes, one by one, trailed by brightly colored parachutes.
They were the Triple Nickles. The 555th Battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division. The smokejumpers.
They were also America’s first all-black unit of paratroopers.
Months before, they didn’t think their time in the Army would amount to more than working as laborers. In a still-segregated military, only the most menial jobs were delegated to black soldiers.
Instead, the Triple Nickles spent the final years of World War II fighting fires started by Japanese balloon bombs in Washington, Oregon and California.
The six-layered silk bombs, 35 feet in diameter, were released from the shores of Japan, where they caught in the Pacific jet stream, which carried them across the ocean and toward the American coastline.
They were told to find the bombs and stop the fires. It was called Operation Firefly.
Soldiers without purpose
In 1941, Walter Morris, who now lives in Palm Coast, was a first sergeant stationed in Fort Benning, Ga. He led a company of men — all black — whose job was to guard a military parachute school.
That job was about all an enlisted African American could hope for in the military, whose barracks, post exchanges and theaters were still segregated.
“One summer day, I walked by the white post exchange — I couldn’t go in, but I could walk by,” Morris said. “I’ll never forget it. The doors were open, and there were German and Italian prisoners of war sitting at a table with white soldiers, drinking and smoking. They could go in, but I wasn’t allowed.”
Morris had enlisted in two wars. For him, the Second World War was first of all a struggle against segregation. It's hard to believe the world then and the world now could exist in the same lifetime, he said, fingering a Barack Obama campaign button left over from Tuesday's election.
Morale among his men was low, and he needed a way to keep his bored soldiers out of trouble. So one day, after training at the parachute school had concluded for the day, Morris took his men to the empty calisthenics field and started running drills.
He did this every day. There was no reason for the 45 men to train each afternoon; they knew that only white soldiers were trained in combat and deployed. But they did it anyway.
After a few weeks, Morris found himself in charge of transformed men. Their dress was neater, their demeanors more respectful, their self-esteemed heightened.
But late one afternoon, the commanding general of the parachute school drove by the calisthenics field and was surprised to find it filled with men running, jumping and training.
The general told Morris to report to his office the following morning. When Morris arrived, he could tell the general was angry.
“Who gave you permission to use the calisthenics field?” he asked.
Nobody, Morris said. He tried to explain that his men needed something to keep their spirits high, that the effort spent in drills was worth the benefits.
The commanding general paused for a moment. He knew the military had been facing criticism of its segregation policy.
“Sergeant, I’m going to tell you a secret,” he said. “In a few weeks, I’m going to get an order from headquarters, and we’re going to start a colored parachute company. Would you like to be the first sergeant of that company?”
Morris was thrilled. That’s how the 555th Battalion started.
Soldiers without a mission
Nineteen men from Morris’ company volunteered to join him in training. After four weeks of intensive training, 17 of them graduated. They were the first all-black unit of paratroopers.
The Army was impressed, so it decided to open its training to any black men who wanted to volunteer. The catch: Soldiers enlisting in paratrooper training had to shed any rank they’d earned during their time in the military. That meant losing the salary and benefits they’d earned with their rankings, too.
They came by the busload. Their numbers swelled to 600.
But there remained a problem: Black and white soldiers had never fought alongside one another, and generals wanted to keep it that way. None of them was interested in America’s newest paratroopers.
“Nobody wanted to accept us, and the reason they gave was, ‘We have a war to win,’” Morris said. “They said having colored and white soldiers together was another war altogether.”
The Army had a battalion of paratroopers and nothing to do with them.
That’s when the U.S. Department of Agriculture came to the military for help. Wildfires from the Japanese balloon bombs were more than fire crews could handle. The department hoped the Army could spare some paratroopers to help.
The 555th Battalion was heading west.
Soldiers without fatigue
Morris stayed with his original unit of 17 while they were trained to fight fires and took a train to their new base in Pendleton, Ore., a town nestled in the desert land of the Columbia Basin and within easy access to forests in western Washington and Oregon and northern Idaho.
The smokejumpers, who called themselves the Triple Nickles for the digits in their battalion’s name, were urged to find as many of the balloon bombs as they could, motivated with the knowledge that, as biological warfare advanced, the weapons could soon bring more than just fires to the Northwest.
The men fought natural forest fires, as well. Weighted with heavy equipment, they’d leap from the planes, landing in trees and using ropes to lower themselves several hundred feet to the forest floor.
There, they’d try to contain the fires that ate at the thousands of acres of timber in the Northwest mountains. They worked with local lumberjacks and fire crews to contain the fires. Morris answered calls for 32 fires during his time there.
“You don’t really fight a fire; you contain a fire,” Morris said. “We knew the fires were coming, so we’d create fire lanes. We’d remove all the brush so the fire wouldn’t have anything to feed on. Theoretically, that would stop it.”
But what they found was when the fire reached its barrier, rather than stopping, it would scale the trees and burn above them. They were surrounded. It was hard, slow and dangerous work.
During the years Morris and his unit spent in the woods, they lost just one man, who fell 250 feet from a tree after a landing. It took days for the Triple Nickles to find his body.
The worst of the fires happened just outside of Hanford, Wash., the small farming community that was depopulated in 1943 to make room for a nuclear production facility as a part of the Manhattan Project. There, the military studied atomic weaponry.
An uncontained fire at the Hanford Site would be devastating. As they worked, the Triple Nickles knew their failure could result in an explosion of unknown caliber.
But Morris and his men stopped the fire before it got too close. They never got to go overseas, but they did get to do work they knew mattered, he said.
Desegregation
Morris and his unit left the Pendleton base in the summer of 1947 for Fort Bragg, N.C. — the headquarters of the 82nd Airborne Division. The base was entirely populated by white soldiers.
The Triple Nickles were put in subpar barracks miles away from Fort Bragg, Morris said. They may have been allowed to serve as smokejumpers, but segregation was far from over.
But one day in Fort Bragg, Col. James M. “Slim Jim” Gavin noticed the living conditions supplied for the 555th Battalion. Gavin, an avid opponent of military segregation, fought to bring the colored paratroopers into the 82nd, visiting the nation’s capital to plead their case.
“They thought he was crazy,” Morris said. “But they didn’t want to upset him, so they gave him permission. He brought us back into Fort Bragg and integrated us into his division.”
This was a crucial moment for the military, Morris said. The 555th Battalion became the first integrated Army unit. The integration was successful, and it proved to other Army personnel that it could be done.
“The white soldiers learned that we put on our pants the same way as them; we bum cigarettes the same as them; we’re the same as them,” Morris said. “We really had quite the experience.”
At the time, Morris thought he'd won the battle against segregation. But this was just the start.
He left the military and started working as a foreman in Seattle, Wash. Years later, he returned to New York, where his mother was. He remembered the year the 555th Batallion was formed, when he'd returned home to the Bronx in a paratrooper's uniform. He was the first black soldier to walk the streets as anything higher than a laborer. People on the streets applauded as he passed.
But when he asked for a job years later, he was declined. Black men can't be foremen in the Bronx, he was told.
Things didn't change overnight. In all of Morris' 91 years, he had to prove himself competent because of the color of his skin. Young people don't understand this struggle, he said, and for that, he's glad.
HIs children, and his children's children, know a different world, and that's what's important. Morris turned proudly to a framed photo. In it, he's beaming, his hand resting on the uniformed shoulder of his grandson, who served in Iraq.
Morris grinned, his blue eyes crinkling. Nobody ever made decisions about his grandson's role in the military based on the color of his skin.
