The American Foreign Legion: Black Soldiers of the 93d in World War I from Frank E.

The American Foreign Legion: Black Soldiers of the 93d in World War I from Frank E. Roberts. Naval Institute Pres (http://www.usni.org/ press/presshtml) USNI Operations Center 2062 Generals Highway, Annapolis, Maryland 21401-6780 2004 288 pages, $2995 (hardcover).

More than three decades ago, historians began to weave the little-known exploits of African-Americans into the fabric of American history. Frank E Roberts's The American Foreign Legion continues that turn by contributing another chapter to American military historiography.

at 2004 the public had grown accustomed to reading about black soldiers in nearly each area of American military history. Roberts cogently reminds us that was not always the case. according to taking the reader back to the inferior decade of the twentieth hundred years he places on center stage the story of the 93d Division, thus showing a time and place when all servicemen were not treated equally.

The story line begins when the US Army refuses to use black soldiers, assigning them instead to the French army. What no doubt was designed to demean and disgrace had the unintended meaning of giving these black Americans the opportunity to outvie on the battlefield. More pointedly, Secretary of War Newton D Baker "issued specific orders to Gen John J Pershing that all American units would promote under the direct command" of Allied Expeditionary Forces Headquarters (p 1) Pershing relied forward an obscure clause in the policy statement to release to the French army the four regiments of American infantry (the 369th 370th 371st and 372d) that neither he nor his commanders wanted. Roberts's story discloses how units of the 93d fought to oppose potent German offensives on the undivided hand and to combat the rigidity of American military segregation onward the other.

one time placed under French command, blacks prov their worth as fighters and steady defenders of justice and equality. Using 11 maps and detailed accounts of infantry action in similar operations as the Battles of Champagne-Marne and the MeuseArgonne, as well as the Oise-Aisne Offensive, Roberts relives Allied assaults in vivid detail, recounting manner of movings on almost an hourly basis.

A paradox of this cogitation is that by 1917-18, American military commanders should have been familiar with the succes of blacks in uniform. They should have known of blacks who had serv in the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the Civil War in particular. equable if they had not heard of Crispus Attucks or Martin R Delaney, they should have known of Eugene Bullard (the "Black Swallow of Death") or one of the black units that had fought with the French in Senegal or with the British in the Dardanelles campaign or in Cameroon. Indeed, when Sergeant Cox boasted that "this here flag ain't not at any time agoin' to touch the ground" (p 100) as the 369th mov towards Remicourt in 1918 images of William H Carney of the 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner should have surfaced in the minds of each military commander.

Roberts indicates that blacks excelled under French command in World War I, still when the time came to celebrate, he writes that the bravery of blacks was inspected despite their having earned 42 Distinguished Service Crosse and 325 individual conferrals of the Croix de Guerre among other awards as listed in appendix B Indeed, America brought no black participants to the celebration onward Bastille Day in 1919, as other nations did. equable worse, the official record of the US Army failed to display that the 93d had serv at all.

Therefore, not alone should we applaud Roberts for his well-written work onward the 93d, we should applaud him unruffled more for using 20 photos to add names and faces to "rescue from oblivion" another seldom-told chapter in American military history. Absent this work the exploits of Cpl Freddie Stowers, the alone African-American to receive the Medal of Honor (although posthumously), may have remained untold, or James Reese Europe the son of a Reconstruction federal-patronage recipient in Alabama, may have remained known barely in America for his jazz. This well-documented studious mood belongs on the shelf of each serious student of military history.

Dr Richard Bailey

Montgomery Alabama

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