As unbreachable as the color barrier seemed to be, however, the realities of combat in the ETO eventually produced the first cracks in the walls separating the races. In the months after D-Day, casualties mounted at a terrifying rate. Six months after the landings, losses among U.S. forces in Europe had risen to nearly 350,000 troops killed, wounded or missing. The Battle of the Bulge, which began on December 16, 1944, inflicted an additional 80,000 casualties. The problem that Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower faced in January 1945 as he planned for the final offensive into Germany was that he desperately needed riflemen — and he did not care where they came from or what color they were.

Back in the States, training time for recruits was shortened and noncombat units were culled for anyone who could be spared to hold a rifle. Next it was the turn of Army Specialized Training personnel and aviation cadets, who were wrenched from the comfort and security of their classrooms and taught the nomenclature of the M-1 rifle and the intricacies of drill. Even these measures were not enough, and when the demand for men could not be met, the Army sent out word that it would accept volunteers from black units.

The original proposal came from Lt. Gen. John C.H. Lee. As the Service of Supply (SOS) commander in the European theater, he was in charge of many of the African-American units and was more familiar than most with the caliber of the men. Even with the pressing need for troops, however, Lee’s suggestion hit like a bombshell. Nothing could have been more drastic than making combat soldiers of substantial numbers of black men, historian Russell Weigley would write years later.

Lee saw the hundreds of thousands of black service troops under his command as an untapped resource, and his initial proposal called for the Army to take 2,000 African Americans and insert them individually into the ranks of white infantry units. Two thousand men represented the largest number that could be trained at one time at the Ground Forces Reinforcement Center (GFRC) in northern France. More could be trained later.

Old attitudes die hard, however, and despite the pressing need for manpower, the European high command rejected Lee’s proposal to treat blacks as individual replacements, and as a half-measure instead opted to integrate by platoons.

Even this half-hearted breach of the color line was not enough to prevent some 2,000 blacks — many of whom were long-serving NCOs willing to give up their stripes — to immediately volunteer for combat duty. With a stroke of the pen, Eisenhower soon had enough men to form 53 all-black rifle platoons that after training would be assigned as the 5th Platoon to all-white infantry companies. By March, 37 of these platoons were ready for combat, and a number were formed into all-black company-sized units and assigned to the 12th and 14th Armored divisions.

Even though many of the volunteers were soldiers of long service and considerable experience, they would still be led into combat by white officers. As was expected, many of these shavetails were unhappy with their new assignments. First Lieutenant Richard Ralston, a combat veteran with the 99th Division, was assigned to command the 5th Platoon of K Company, and he remembered the disdain of many white lieutenants upon learning they were to command black troops.

Ralston didn’t mind his new assignment, but when he arrived at the GFRC, he immediately assessed that his men were not properly trained for combat. A combat veteran, Ralston also recognized the need to instill trust in the men. There was a learning process on both sides, he remembered. They were pretty ginger about me because I was white, but once they were convinced that I was talking serious stuff and wasn’t racially prejudiced, they got down in the dirt and did what they had to do. They knew then I was talking survival.

Each volunteer had his own impression of the infantry training. It was a lot of run and jump in small unit tactics in the mud and snow, recalled Waymon Ransom, a volunteer infantryman and a former engineer. But it wasn’t any worse than doing construction work in the mud and snow back in the engineers.

We kept training in earnest, Ralston remembered. I exaggerated considerably about how many of them were going to die to try and scare them out of the unit. I only wanted the best and bravest. But nobody quit. They were pretty darned good.

As the training progressed, the men impressed Ralston. They were oddly superior to whites [as soldiers] in some respects, he recalled. They weren’t book smart; they were street smart, and they were cunning.

Once training was complete, the 5th Platoon of K Company was assigned to the 394th Regiment, 99th Infantry Division. The men broke camp in France and, after a two-day trip by train and truck, they crossed the Rhine at Remagen on March 12, 1945. The next day they reinforced K Company and went into combat in the hills above the bridge around Erpel.

After some bitter fighting to expand the bridgehead, where the reinforcements suffered their first killed and wounded, they moved north with the rest of their outfit to join in the massive Allied envelopment of the Ruhr industrial area, which netted hundreds of thousands of German prisoners. Their next assignment was to join Lt. Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army in its relentless march into southern Germany. The 5th wound up in Austria at war’s end.

Other 5th Platoons also were put to the test in combat and were praised for their performance. Brigadier General Edwin F. Parker, commander of the 78th Infantry Division, whose black platoons also fought at Remagen, asked for more black soldiers. In addition, the 104th Infantry Division filed glowing reports about these unique units. Morale: Excellent. Manner of performance: Superior. Men are very eager to close with the enemy and to destroy him. Strict attention to duty, aggressiveness, common sense and judgment under fire has won the admiration of all the men in the country, a division report stated.

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