Report on the Negro Soldier

From a sympathetic observer last week came a report on an infantry division which the U.S. Army has watched with keenest interest: the Negro 92nd. The man who made the report was Truman K. Gibson, Negro civilian aide to War Secretary Stimson. The essence of what he had to say: the 92nd's battle performance had been something less than good.

Censors have never permitted correspondents to tell the whole story of the 92nd. It is recorded that the division was activated in October 1942 and, under its white commander, Major General Edward Mallory Almond, and key white officers, packed off to Italy last summer. Three weeks after their arrival in Italy they were assigned to the front, east of Pisa.

After that, few stories of the 92nd came through; those that did were wistfully played up by the U.S. Negro press. Gibson, on a special assignment to Europe, made his report from firsthand sources. In an interview in Rome he told some of the things which correspondents have never been allowed to cable.

He cited many instances of personal bravery on the part of the men of the 92nd. But, he admitted, units of the 92nd have too often "melted away" before the enemy. Certain units have been thrown into "more or less panicky retreats, particularly at night when the attitude of some individual soldiers seemed to be, 'I'm up here all alone; why in hell should I stay up here?''

Gibson said he had found cases of panic in other units of the polyglot Allied outfits on the Italian front, but these were mostly individual cases. With the 92nd, he admitted, "the disintegration was likely to be the behavior pattern of ... patrols or platoons."

Said Gibson, commenting on his own account: "It does not prove that Negroes can't fight [see below]. There is no question in my mind about the courage of Negro officers or soldiers and any generalization on the basis of race is entirely unfounded."

His chief explanation for the 92nd's poor showing: 17% of the division's men are illiterate; 75% are semiliterate. (Among white troops only 4% are in the illiterate class; only 16% are semiliterate.) The bewildered blacks, according to Gibson, were never given the psychological preparation they needed.

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