Authors: Arnold Rampersad
Jack had another reason for not playing. His right ankle, the Achilles heel of his splendid body, was now a constant source of pain. Just after his return from California, Jack had twisted it badly on an obstacle course. In October, he hurt it again during a softball game. The pain was so intense that on October 21, and again on November 15, he had the ankle X-rayed. He was almost ready to think himself healed when a routine platoon training
exercise left him badly hobbled. Christmas found Jack laid up in the dispensary at Fort Clark, Texas. Yet another X-ray showed a large number of bone chips floating in the ankle joint; his medical record described his condition as “
arthritis, chronic, nonsuppurative, moderately severe, right ankle.” The history of the injury was noted, starting with the fracture in Pasadena in September 1937, at the start of his first season with PJC, and its refracture in Hawaii in 1941.
The decision was made to send Jack for further treatment to Brooke General Hospital at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, where he was admitted on January 5, 1944. Following yet another examination, on January 28 the Disposition Board at Brooke met and endorsed the findings of the doctors at Fort Clark. The board then recommended that Jack Robinson be declared “
physically disqualified for general military service, but qualified for limited service.” It further stipulated: “He is not qualified for overseas duty at this time.” It was also stipulated that he should be carefully placed so that “he will not encounter calisthenics, marching, drilling, or other duties requiring strenuous use of the right ankle.” The board further recommended that Jack be examined again after six months.
As annoying as this injury was, it was not nearly as disturbing to Jack as the heartbreak he felt early in 1944 when his engagement to Rachel Isum faltered and then collapsed after a furious clash of wills. From San Francisco, Rachel had written to say that she had decided to join the Nurse Cadet Corps, a student organization loosely affiliated with the Army. Although members had no obligation to the armed forces, Jack was appalled. “
I shook with rage and youthful jealousy,” he later wrote, “as I read the letter far away in Kansas.” To Jack, joining the corps was just about the same as starting a life of sexual promiscuity; women who served in the war were easy prey for unscrupulous servicemen. But Rachel’s reasons were both innocent and pragmatic. Without serious temptation, she watched the endless stream of virile young men pass in and out of her dormitory and the hospital. Once, in the lobby of a San Francisco hotel, a renowned bandleader, the friend of a close friend, invited her up to his room for a tryst. “
I told him I was engaged to be married,” she recalled, “and would only have sex with my future husband. I didn’t tell him I’d never had sex with anyone.” She joined the corps because “I was broke as a student. I had no money, and I could earn none in the usual student ways. When I was not working in the hospital I was in class; there was no time. The corps paid a stipend of twenty dollars a month.” Another reason was almost frivolous, except for the cool San Francisco weather. “I also liked the big, warm flannel coat that they gave you; I really wanted that heavy coat.” Yet another reason may have been patriotism. More so than Jack, Rachel believed in
military service. In World War I, her father had sacrificed his health for his country. In this war, her beloved older brother, Chuck Williams, was now listed as missing in action after his plane had been shot down somewhere over eastern Europe. Under the circumstances, joining the Nurse Cadet Corps was the least Rachel could do.
Nevertheless, Jack delivered an ultimatum: leave the Nurse Cadet Corps or end their engagement. To his astonishment, Rachel chose the latter. At Fort Riley one day, he opened a tightly wrapped, carefully insured package from Rachel and found his ring and bracelet nestled inside. His shock hardened into pride; their relationship was over: “
Stubbornly I vowed to forget her.” (Perhaps Jack operated with a double standard, or he felt himself freed by his breakup with Rachel to seek sex with other women, or he had a momentary lapse of loyalty. On February 29, he was treated at a Fort Riley dispensary for a case of “
‘New’ Gonorrhoea, Acute.”)
A few weeks later, on April 13, he and more than a dozen other black officers at Fort Riley received the news they had been waiting for: they were to proceed immediately to Camp Hood, Texas, and report there to the headquarters of the 761st Tank Battalion, which was scheduled to go overseas and into combat later in the year. Jack and his fellow officers reached Camp Hood with some foreboding. If Southern camps had a poor reputation among black soldiers, among the more notorious was Camp Hood, a massive new military installation carved out of about 160,000 acres of lonesome farmland in the Texas heartland in direct response to the war. The success of the German blitzkrieg, spearheaded by Panzer tank divisions, had spurred the development of U.S. antitank technology and antitank forces, which needed a vast area of land to explore the complex lessons of blitzkrieg. A month after Pearl Harbor, the Army announced that its new Tank Destroyer Technical and Firing Center would be located in central Texas. Nine months later, Camp Hood was activated; by 1944, when Robinson and his friends arrived, it was easily the largest military facility in the United States.
To the military, Camp Hood was a triumph that helped dispel the myth of Panzer invincibility. The proud Tank Destroyer insignia featured a black panther crushing a tank between its jaws, encircled by the fighting motto “
Seek, Strike, and Destroy.” To the sixty thousand servicemen stationed there in 1944, Camp Hood was often a horror. The hot land crawled with rattlesnakes, tarantulas, black widow spiders, and scorpions, and the humid air buzzed with mosquitoes and other sniping insects. In addition, black soldiers and civilians had to deal with raw aspects of Jim Crow (the Army had named the camp after a Confederate hero, General John Bell Hood, a West Pointer who had commanded a brigade of Texans against the Union). Black
soldiers, quartered in the least desirable part of the camp, in makeshift housing, lived segregated lives at every turn, with a separate USO and a separate officers’ club; venturing off the base, they faced a hostile, narrow-minded local population backed by stringent Jim Crow state laws and customs. “
Segregation there was so complete,” a black officer said, “I even saw outhouses marked
White, Colored,
and
Mexican;
this was on federal property.”
Jack quickly found out that his lieutenant’s bars meant little to whites at Camp Hood. A soldier recalled: “
One day Jackie was on his way to town when he realized he didn’t have enough money. He stopped at the white officers’ club to get a check cashed and they barred him at the door; he wasn’t allowed across the threshold. Jackie became very bitter about this.” Fortunately, the 761st Tank Battalion, Company B (to which he was not assigned but only attached), was an oasis in this desert of human relations, not least of all because of its leader. Activated in 1942 and now part of the armored forces in training at Camp Hood, the 761st was commanded by
a white fellow Californian, Lieutenant Colonel Paul L. Bates, a thirty-four-year-old former star football player and graduate in economics at Western Maryland College. Among the black men under him, Bates had a reputation as a white man who appreciated their troubles but who was also determined to mold them into a powerful fighting force. He set high standards, from personal hygiene and dress to battlefield efficiency. “
Our boots were shined like you couldn’t imagine,” Bates remembered; “our men would go out of their way to salute officers and to look them straight in the eye.” He also channeled the racial indignation of his men into a desire to succeed as no black U.S. outfit had succeeded before. Of the battalion’s later military success in Europe, which was substantial, he would say with satisfaction: “I believe they fought against Germans not as Germans so much as against the white man.”
Jack and the other Fort Riley officers were each assigned to head a platoon. For Robinson, this spelled trouble. At Fort Riley, some officers had trained in mechanized cavalry, but he had been a genuine horse soldier and knew nothing about tanks and tank warfare. The M-4 medium tank (the General Sherman) used by the 761st was a mystery to him. Rather than pull rank and bluff his way through, he decided to confess his ignorance openly and rely on the goodwill of the men under him. He recalled his first meeting with his platoon. “Men,” he recalled saying, “
I know nothing about tanks, nothing at all. I’m asking you to help me out in this unusual situation.” A “deep and impressive silence” followed. He turned to a veteran sergeant standing beside him and allowed that the sergeant, not Lieutenant Robinson, was in charge of the platoon. Evidently, Jack’s candor and humility had an energizing effect on the men: “It turned out to be one of the smartest things I ever did.”
A white fellow lieutenant, David J. Williams, a Yale graduate who later wrote a book about the 761st, captured a graphic snapshot of Robinson as army officer: “
He was kind of aloof, very straight, dressed really sharp, didn’t swear much, was religious. He was a really good person, but he was never close to anyone.” Although Robinson was a friend, Williams never really knew him: “He was a very private person.” No doubt, Jack’s toughness and asceticism offended a few men. One veteran would recall him as someone “
who tended to pick on people who were smaller than he was or who he felt were less important than he was.” Under oath, however, Colonel Bates would testify that Robinson was held “
in very high regard,” especially by the enlisted men but also by Bates himself: “I tried to have him assigned [not simply attached] to the battalion because of his excellent work.”
Despite Jack’s bad ankle, Bates asked Robinson to consider going overseas with the battalion as morale officer. (On June 9, the War Department had alerted the 761st that it would soon be heading for Europe and combat. The advance party would leave on July 20; the rest of the men were to follow about three weeks later.) Not only had Jack done an outstanding job with his platoon; his leadership in the battalion in sports, especially in organizing baseball and softball teams, had boosted the morale of the men. Clearly Bates’s request pleased Jack. To go overseas, however, he would have to be examined again and sign a waiver releasing the Army from any financial claim or benefit in case of reinjury to his ankle. “
I said I’d be willing to do that,” Jack later recalled. On May 25, a thorough hospital examination was requested by the adjutant of the 761st “
to determine the physical qualification for overseas service of 2nd Lt. Jack R. Robinson.” But Jack’s status could not be changed without an appearance before an Army Retiring Board. Accordingly, on June 21 he reported to the Army’s McCloskey General Hospital in the nearby town of Temple for an examination to see the “
type of duty, if any, that he may be physically qualified to perform.” To doctors there, Jack reported no improvement in his condition. After every baseball game, his ankle became swollen. Every day, at odd times, the ankle joint would lock up; a few kicking motions released it. Although this examination found no swelling or cramping of motion, X-rays revealed “
a bony mass distal to the medial malleolus,” as well as “several smaller pieces of tissue of osseous origin anterior to the ankle joint”: in other words, bone chips.
Five days later, on June 26, the Disposition Board at the hospital declared Robinson still unfit for general duty but “
fit for limited military service.” It recommended “that this officer appear before an Army Retiring Board for consideration of reassignment to permanent limited military service.” The board concluded: “This officer is fit for overseas duty.”
Robinson was now ready to acquiesce to Colonel Bates’s wishes and go overseas with the 761st Battalion. But on July 6, he became entangled in a dispute that threatened to end his military service in disgrace. Around 5:30 p.m. that day, still a patient at McCloskey Hospital in Temple, Jack boarded a city bus that took him to Camp Hood, about an hour or so away. There, he took a camp bus to the colored officers’ club, located on 172nd Street in the camp. He reached the club around 7:30 p.m. About three and a half hours later, or around eleven in the evening, he boarded a Camp Hood bus to begin the return journey to the hospital in Temple. He started to move to the rear when he saw a young woman he knew, Virginia Jones, sitting in the middle of the bus. Virginia Jones, the wife of First Lieutenant Gordon H. Jones Jr. of the 761st Tank Battalion, lived in nearby Belton. Jack sat down beside Mrs. Jones. After going five or six blocks, the driver, a white man named Milton N. Renegar, turned around in his seat and ordered Robinson to move to the back of the bus. Robinson refused. The driver then threatened to make trouble for him when the bus reached the station. Robinson again refused. By this time it had probably occurred to him that the driver believed that Virginia Jones was white; she was not.
On the ride from Temple to the camp, Robinson had obeyed Texas law requiring Jim Crow seating on the bus. But he also knew that the Army now forbade segregation on its military bases. The previous month, after the killing of a black soldier by a white bus driver in Durham, North Carolina (a civilian jury soon acquitted the driver), the Army had proclaimed its new policy. Robinson also knew about the widely publicized refusals by Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson to obey Jim Crow rules at a bus depot in Alabama.
Exchanges between Robinson and Renegar grew more heated. When the bus reached the crowded central bus station at the camp, another passenger, Mrs. Elizabeth Poitevint, who worked in the camp kitchen, let Robinson know that she herself intended to press charges against him. Her intervention, as a white woman, brought the incident close to a flash point. According to Robinson’s statement, which was taken down by a white stenographer he considered hostile to him, “
I said that’s all right, too, I don’t care if she prefers charges against me. The bus driver asked me for my identification card. I refused to give it to him. He then went to the Dispatcher and told him something. What he told him I don’t know. He then comes back and tells the people that this nigger is making trouble. I told the driver to stop fuckin with me, so he gets the rest of the men around there and starts blowing his top and someone calls the MP’s.”