Brothers in Valor by Jefferson Jr

Author:Jefferson Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493031757
Publisher: Lyons Press

Wyoming native Vernon Baker was born in 1919. He hardly knew his parents, having lost both of them when he was just four years old. Years later he would learn that he was the child of an interracial couple; his father Manuel Caldera came from New Mexico and worked as a carpenter, and his mother Beulah’s family had labored as black farmers in the cornfields of Clarinda, Iowa, prior to his birth. After his parents died in a tragic car accident, Baker and his two older sisters moved to Cheyenne, where they were raised by their grandparents in a blacks-only boardinghouse.

Although Fort D. A. Russell in Cheyenne served as a principal training site for African-American GIs, members of the black community greeted them with ambivalence. Baker never heard anyone mention the Buffalo Soldiers of the Indian Fighting Army, and when he saw soldiers from the base “walking down the streets of Cheyenne as a child,” he received a stern warning from his grandfather, Joseph Samuel Baker: “Those are ruffians . . . stay away from them.” According to Baker, “Nobody talked of their heroics.”

But in June of 1941, past, present, and destiny intervened in Baker’s life in the form of love, and Uncle Sam. Eager to wed his hometown sweetheart, Leola Sassler, and start a family of his own, he joined the army. After basic training in Camp Wolters, Texas, he reported to the 92nd Infantry Division at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. His stellar performance as a service and supply sergeant earned him a recommendation from his company commander to attend Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia. After completing the training program, he earned his lieutenant’s bars on January 11, 1943.20

A small man at five-foot-five, Baker responded to the call of honor during the Spring Offensive of 1945. The Allies had decided to use the 92nd Infantry Division to launch a diversionary attack aimed at containing the German forces along the Ligurian Coast, clearing the 5th Army to stage an offensive toward Bologna and force the German Army to relinquish its stranglehold on the areas south of the Po River. If accomplished, the event might trigger the end of Germany’s control of northern Italy, an area that Hitler hoped to retain at all costs. Code-named “Second Wind,” the division’s components no longer fought as a single all-black unit. After reorganization, it now included the white 473rd Infantry and the Japanese-American 442nd Infantry Regiments. Only the 370th, along with its complementary assortment of artillery, combat engineering, medical, cannon, and air observation units, remained with the all-black division. By the time the division launched its initial attack on April 5, most of the black soldiers were led by white commanders, whose ambivalent views regarding black soldiers’ fighting abilities led to numerous moments of uneasiness, distrust, and uncertainty.21

Such was the case with Company C of the 370th on Hill X in the spring of 1945. Before dawn on April 5, Capt. John F. Runyon led his infantrymen west of the hill in hopes of surprising enemy forces in the area.

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