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Modern day black tank military9/9/2023 ![]() The 761 st linked up with Patton’s Third Army near Nancy, France, on October 28. The front lines lay only a few miles ahead. Suddenly, a bunch of quarter-ton Jeeps loaded with MPs and. “Who the **** asked for color?” Patton shot back in typical salty style. “I asked for tankers.” In October 1944, General George Patton, who had initially disparaged black soldiers, sent a message to the War Department requesting more tankers, the best available. The only tank unit left was Negro-the 761 st. The Black Panthers. Ruben Rivers and the Negroes of the 761 st Tank Battalion, the first to go to war in armor, were to change those assumptions as they engaged the enemy for 183 straight days in six European nations. No other unit fought for so long and so hard without respite. had little confidence in black soldiers. In a letter to his wife, he wrote, “A colored soldier cannot think fast enough to fight in armor.” ![]() Miles, “the main use of the Negro should be in labor organizations.”Įven then-Colonel George S. Prior to WWII, assumptions about the inferiority of black soldiers as combat troops dominated military thinking and supported a policy of segregating blacks into support and service units to provide cooks, stevedores, truck drivers, orderlies and other noncombat personnel. Only five black commissioned officers served in the army in 1940, three of whom were chaplains. ![]() Ruben didn’t see it that way. This was his country too. The only reason Negroes were invited was so they could cook for the white man and clean up after him while he did the fighting. ( Negro was the correct term during WWII). A cold January rain drizzled onto the rolling red-dust hills of central Oklahoma the day Ruben Rivers walked to war. There were those in the little Negro community of Holtaka who insisted this was a white man’s war and that Negroes didn’t belong in it.
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