761st Tank Battalion &Amp: Fill & Download for Free

There was a saying among German troops that if you had to surrender seek out the Americans for the best treatment and for the best treatment from the Americans seek out the colored troops. On the Western Front in 1945 there were black tank and tank destroyer battalions as well as a number of black infantry platoons attached to divisions in the First and Seventh Armies along with a number of Black field artillery battalions. In one case eleven soldiers of the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion attached to the 106th Infantry Division who were captured by members of the 1st SS Panzer Division at Wereth and murdered see The Wereth 11, a Little-Known Massacre During the Battle of the Bulge. Also in Italy, the 92nd Infantry Division with the Japanese 442nd Infantry Regiment (Japanese) fought against German and Italian Fascist units.So although the overall number of Black American combat troops was small, German troops in 1945 had no problem surrendering to them. An interesting historical note in 1945 units of the 1st SS Panzer Division surrendered to elements of the 761st Tank Battalion and the 71st Infantry Division at Steyr, Austria on the Enns river, (the 761st Tank Battalion was a Black unit that had served in the U.S. Third Army).P.S. this answer refers to American Black military units. French colonial units at the beginning of the war certainly had a different experience from American Black units and the French colonial units in 1944–45 like those in the French 2nd Armored Division and the French First Army.

Maybe not quite what the questioner is looking for, but here’s a good one.On July 6, 1944, 2nd Lieutenant Jackie Robinson (yes, that Jackie Robinson) of the US Army 761st Tank Battalion, stationed at Camp Hood (now Fort Hood), refused to move to the back of a civilian bus when ordered to by the driver. Lieutenant Robinson was talking to the light-skinned, but technically black, wife of another officer, and, in the words of his CO, Lieutenant Colonel Paul L. Bates:… “told the bus driver he had a choice of either driving the bus himself or he would drive it. The bus driver got on the radio, called the dispatch and said he had an uppity kind of Negro here and I’m going to drive to the MP station, have them wait there for us.”They didn’t physically resist the MP captain, one Gerald M. Bear, and two enlisted who arrested Lieutenant Robinson, but Colonel Bates refused to consent to the Army charging and court-martialing his subordinate. The Camp Hood brass promptly transferred Lieutenant Robinson to the 758th Tank Battalion, whose commander immediately signed off.Lieutenant Robinson was charged with disrespecting a superior officer (Captain Bear, who in actual fact had called him the n-word several times) and disobeying an order from him (to stay in a receiving room at the MP station). Surprisingly, he was not charged for the actual incident on the bus, and he was acquitted at the court martial thanks to good representation by a JAG officer named Cline. However, that was effectively the end of his military career: he spent the rest of the war kicking around stateside and was placed on inactive duty in October 1944. Although given that his original unit deployed to Europe in August and was to suffer 50% of its original numbers KIA, he may have come out ahead on that one.Source: The 761st "black Panther" Tank Battalion in World War II by Joe Wilson, Jr.

To add to the answer already given African American soldiers fought on the front lines in both Europe and the Pacific. The 92nd Infantry Division fought in Italy along with the 784th and the 758th Tank Battalions and the 93rd Infantry Division fought in the Pacific in the Solomon Islands. The 761st Tank Battalion as well as numerous artillery and tank destroyer battalions fought in Western Europe. To alleviate a manpower shortage Black Americans were assigned as a fifth platoon to a number of divisions in the 12th and 6th Army Groups in the spring of 1945.A very large percentage of the engineer troops who built the Ledo/Stilwell Road in Burma, and fought off the Japanese, were African Americans. I should add that African American Marines fought at Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.