Marine defense battalions were seen as an ideal platform for integrating African Americans into units with white leaders, since they trained independently and fought in isolated areas. Those recruits slated for defense battalions were trained at the then-segregated Montford Point (now known as Camp Gilbert H. Johnson, part of the Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune complex in North Carolina). They would then be assigned to the two black defense battalions, the 51st and 52nd
Throughout the first six months that blacks served in the Marine Corps, the focus of attention was the 51st Composite Defense Battalion of which my father was a part. It was to be the first (and for a time the only) black combat unit. Its initial stages of training were hampered by equipment shortages, but even more by the complete unfamiliarity of the men with the weapons and supporting equipment they encountered.
On June 07, 1943, the qualifier "Composite" was dropped from the title of the 51st Defense Battalion; the 155mm Battery became a group, and the Machine Gun unit evolved into the Special Weapons Group, with 20mm and 40mm weapons, as well as machine guns. A month later, the 155mm Group became the Seacoast Artillery Group, and the 90mm outfit, with its searchlights, the Antiaircraft Artillery Group. No further changes took place before the battalion went overseas.
The tempo of training picked up throughout the summer and fall of 1943 as African-American noncommissioned officers replaced white enlisted men who had taught them to handle weapons and lead men into combat. On August 20, 1943, the 51st Defense Battalion suffered its first fatality. During a disembarkation exercise, while Marines of the 155mm Artillery Group scrambled down a bet draped over a wooden structure representing the side of a transport, Corporal Gilbert Fraser, Jr. slipped, fell into a landing craft in the water below, and suffered injuries that claimed his life. In memory of the 30-year old graduate of Virginia Union College, the road leading from Montford Point Camp to the artillery range became Fraser Road.
Although the men of the 51st Defense Battalion had to assume the responsibilities of squad leaders and platoon sergeants even as they learned to care for and fire the battalion's weapons, the black Marines met this challenge, as they demonstrated in November 1943. During firing exercises - while Secretary of the Navy Knox, General Holcomb, and Colonel Johnson of the Selective Service System watched, an African-American crew opened fire with a 90mm gun at a sleeve target being towed overhead and hit it within just 60 seconds. Lieutenant Colonel Stephenson, listening for the Commandant's reaction, heard him say, "I think they're ready now." Few other crews in the 51st could match this performance, and a number of them clearly needed further training, as some of their officers warned at the time. The four days of firing at the end of November could not be repeated, however, for the unit would depart sooner than originally planned on the first leg of a journey to the Pacific. Whatever its ultimate destination, the 51st Defense Battalion started off to war early in January 1944, and by the 19th, most of the unit - less 400 men transferred to the newly organized 52nd Defense Battalion - and the bulk of its gear were moving by rail toward San Diego.
The 51st Defense Battalions's move across a segregated America began with a confrontation in Atlanta, Georgia, where one of the trains stopped so the men could have breakfast. Unaware of the layout of the Jim Crow railroad station, the noncommissioned officers moved the black Marines into a waiting room reserved for whites, only to be halted by white military police determined to uphold local law. The African -Americans stood ready to push their way through, but the train commander arrived, conferred with the officer in charge of the MP's, and prevented a tense situation from turning violent.
Elsewhere, the move to the West Coast went more smoothly. During a rest stop at Big Springs, Texas, one of the officers warned that this was Jim Crow country and urged the black Marines to be careful. They swarmed over the small town, however, and encountered no open hostility, obtaining service at the soda fountain or shooting pool at the facilities maintained for troops whose trains stopped at Big Springs. Further west, during a two-hour layover at Yuma, Arizona, Red Cross volunteers distributed candy, ice cream, fruit, magazines, and Bibles. One of the African-Americans, John R. Griffin, got the impression that "the entire city, including the Mexicans and Indians, came to the station to see the first Negro Defense Battalion go overseas."
At Camp Elliott, California, where the battalion made its final preparations for deployment to the pacific, the racial climate more closely resembled Atlanta than Yuma or Big Springs. At an open-air movie, Jim Crow seating prevailed and the black Marines were ordered to the rear of the natural amphitheater that served as a theater. A spontaneous protest resulted in the expulsion of the men of the 51st, whose anger still boiled when they arrived at the battalion area. Colonel Stephenson tried to make up for the mistreatment of his Marines by liberally granting passes so they could find entertainment in nearby San Diego.
Because they were replacing 7th Defense Battalion already established in the Ellice group, the black Marines turned in all of the heavy equipment they had brought with them from Montford Point and boarded the merchantman SS Meteor which sailed from San Diego on February 11, 1944. Less than a month had elapsed since the last train left North Carolina on the first leg of the journey to war. While Meteor steamed toward the Ellice Islands, the 51st Defense Battalion divided into two components. Detachment A, led by Lt. Colonel Gould P. Groves, the executive officer, would garrison Nanomea Island, while the rest of the battalion, under Colonel Curtis W. LeGette, manned the defenses of Funafuti and nearby Nukufetau. By February 27, the 51st completed the relief of the 7th Defense Battalion, taking over the w hite unit's weapons and equipment. One of the African-American Marines,upon first experiencing the isolation that surrounded him, suggested that the departing whites "were never so glad to see black people in their lives."
The 51st Defense Battalion remained in the Ellice Islands rough;y six months. When the black Marines received orders to depart, they carefully cleaned and checked the equipment inherited from the 7th Defense Battalion before turning everything over to the white 10th Defense Battalion. Colonel LeGette's , of which my father, James Albert Ferren was a member, unit set sail on September 8, 1944 for Eniwetok Atoll, a vast anchorage kept under sporadic surveillance, and occasionally harassed, by Japanese aircraft. The battalion stood ready to meet this threat from the skies, since it had reorganized two months earlier as an antiaircraft unit, losing its 155mm guns but adding a fourth 90 mm battery and exchanging its machine guns and 20mm weapons for a second 40mm battery. The reconstructed unit kept its searchlights and radar. While the black Marines manned positions on four of the atoll's islands, Colonel LeGette on December 13, 1944, handed over the battalion to Colonel Groves. A member of the unit, Herman Darden, Jr., whom I had the pleasure of meeting in 1998 at the Montford Point Association's 33rd Annual Convention, remembered that the departing commander "took us out on dress parade before he left, and stood there with tears in his eyes, and told us......"You have shown me that you can soldier with the best of 'em.' "
The possibility of action l 5 February, 2014bmarines and the possibility of aerial attack. One night, while the men were watching a movie, the film abruptly stopped. Condition Red; Japanese aircraft were on the way. "I never saw such jubilation in my life," recalls Darden, for everyone responded eagerly. A Marine on a working party unloading ammunition might grumble about lifting a single 90 mm round, but with combat seemingly minutes away, men "were running around with one under each arm. "By dawn, the alert had ended; not even one Japanese aircraft tested the battalion's gun crews, and from that moment on," Darden said, " the mental attitude seemed to dwindle."
Routine settled over Eniwetok, enveloping the unit Colonel Groves now commanded. As one of its sergeants phrased it, "routine got boresome." punctuated only by the occasional crash of forced landing by American planes. A major change occurred on June 12, 1945, when the battalion commander formed a 251-man composite group, under Major William M. Tracy, for duty at Kwajalein Atoll. Two days later, the group, consisting of a battery of 90mm gun, a 40mm platoon, and four searchlight sections, boarded an LST for the voyage. The contingent saw no combat at Kawajalen, nor did the remainder of the battalion at Eniwetok.
Portovrij? In NL boven € 200,-