Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation 1940–44. Charles Glass
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FOUR
WHILE CLARA AND ALDEBERT WERE HEADING south to avoid the Germans, another American left Paris to find them. Eugene Bullard walked towards the front lines, lugging a knapsack of sausages, crackers, canned food and a two-volume history of the American contingent of the French air corps during the First World War, the Lafayette Escadrille. ‘I said good-bye and set out to join the 170th Regiment in holding back the enemy – at least that was what I thought,’ Bullard wrote. His march took him to Châlons, about halfway along the 100mile trek to Épinal in the Moselle Valley, where Bullard believed the French infantry regiment was holding the Germans back. Refugees at Châlons told him the Germans had already captured Épinal. So, he walked back to Paris. At the gates of Paris, Bullard learned that another infantry regiment, the 51st, had engaged the Germans near Orleans. He trudged south to join them.
Bullard, with the heavy pack still on his back, marched 50 miles in twenty-eight hours. He stopped at Chartres, where, as he wrote, ‘I had a stroke of luck. I ran into Bob Scanlon, the black boxer and comrade from the Foreign Legion. There were two of us now, together, two friends sharing everything. I did not feel lonely anymore.’
German Stukas dive-bombed Chartres as the two Americans were leaving. ‘During the bombardments I threw myself on the ground, and I saw Bob Scanlon do the same thing about twenty feet away,’ wrote Bullard. ‘A huge shell burst about where he was, leaving a crater with the dead and wounded and bits of human bodies strewn around it. I thought Bob’s must be one of them, for he was nowhere in sight.’ Bullard, unable to find even a shred of Scanlon’s clothing, abandoned the search for his friend. Near the bomb crater, a boy with a paralysed arm screamed for his mother. The woman, Bullard wrote,
lay cut in half as if by a guillotine, her hand still clutching a piece of chicken. The crippled lad jumped up and down shrieking. He went into a convulsion as I tried to comfort him. I put my hand on his shoulder to take him with me – where, I don’t know – but the poor little thing jerked away in terror and his eyes actually crossed and uncrossed … Still crying, I pushed on in the hope of fighting the enemy that causes such horrors.
An unusual route had brought Eugene Jacques Bullard from his birthplace, Columbus, Georgia, in 1895 to the Battle of France in 1940. His parents were of mixed African-Creek Indian heritage, and his father had been born a slave at the beginning of the Civil War. When Eugene was 6 years old, his mother died. His father supported his six children working as a labourer. When a foreman struck him with an iron grappling hook, William Bullard made the mistake of fighting back. A white mob rode out to the family cabin that night to lynch him, but the terrified children convinced the men their father was away. The drunken racists swore to return. ‘This near lynching of his father,’ wrote one of Bullard’s biographers, Craig Lloyd, ‘was the traumatic event that led young Bullard to leave home sometime later.’
Bullard was ten years old when he ran away. At first, he travelled with a gypsy family and worked with horses. A year later, he stowed away on a tramp steamer to Hamburg. When the captain discovered the youngster on board, he gave him £5 and dropped him in Glasgow. Bullard found odd jobs and, in Manchester, became a professional boxer. A twenty-round match with Georges Forrest in 1913 brought him to Paris. After winning the decision, he stayed in Paris as a boxer and sparring partner. He loved the city. ‘There never was any name-calling like “Nigger”,’ he wrote in his unpublished memoirs. ‘It seemed to me that the French democracy influenced the minds of both white and black Americans there and helped us all to act like brothers as nearly as possible.’ Two months after France went to war with Germany in 1914, on Bullard’s nineteenth birthday, he repaid the people who had treated him as an equal by joining the French Foreign Legion. Among the Americans in his unit was Bob Scanlon. They were posted to the Somme, where Bullard fought as a machine gunner. He was wounded and commended for bravery. So many Legionnaires were killed in 1914 and 1915 that the survivors were transferred to the 170th Infantry Regiment. For many months from late February 1916, the 170th resisted the German mass offensive that became the Battle of Verdun. In one engagement, Bullard sustained shrapnel wounds to his head. In another, a shell ripped open his leg. He won the Croix de Guerre and was invalided from the army. After six months’ recovery in Lyons, he returned to Paris and applied to the French Army’s air corps.
Bullard qualified as a pilot in May 1917, winning a bet with a Southern white friend that he could do it. He took advanced combat flight training along with other American volunteers at Avord. The Americans formed what became the Lafayette Escadrille. As each pilot qualified, he was sent into action. But some trainees who started school after Bullard left before he did. A friend confided to Bullard that an American in Paris was pressuring the French to prevent American blacks from flying in the war. Dr Edmund Gros, the director of the American Hospital of Paris, was responsible for the welfare of Americans in the Lafayette Escadrille and the American Ambulance Corps. Bullard had already noticed how Dr Gros distributed the cheques from a fund that wealthy Americans in Paris had established for the American pilots: ‘I was always the first in Dr. Gros’ office. But the dear doctor would never give me my check until after the whole crowd received theirs and the banks were closed for the day, so I could not cash mine.’ When Bullard threatened to write to the Inspector General of the Schools of Aviation about being passed over for a combat assignment, he was finally sent to the front. His comrades in the Escadrille gave him a party to celebrate, and someone confided that ‘a certain person in Paris in the Ambulance Corps … had done everything he could to keep me from becoming the first Negro military flyer for no reason except that he didn’t like my color’. The ‘certain person’, Dr Gros, had failed.
Bullard flew his first combat mission in September 1917 with the motto ‘All Blood Runs Red’ painted on his plane. He flew more than twenty missions, most over the Verdun front, and had one confirmed downing of a German plane. The squadrons in which he served, the N-93 and N-85, acknowledged his bravery. His plane took bullets from German ground fire and fighter planes, but he always made it back to base. When the American Army Air Corps arrived in France that autumn, the other 266 American pilots in French service became the US 103rd Pursuit Squadron. Bullard was the only pilot excluded. He was also the only black.
Dr Gros took matters further when, using a dispute that Bullard had with a white colonial officer who refused to return his salute, he influenced the French to dismiss him from their air corps. Bullard was reassigned to his old regiment, the 170th Infantry, as a non-combatant for the last ten months of the war. In May 1918, the French government issued scrolls of gratitude to all American pilots who had flown for France. Dr Gros, delegated to make the presentation, gave scrolls to every flyer except Bullard.
Dr Gros was not alone in his opinion that African-Americans should not be sent into battle against white soldiers. US Army commanders prevented troops of the all-black 15th Infantry Regiment from serving at the front with the American Army. The Harlem Hellfighters, as they were called, were put under the command of General Henri Gouraud in the French Fourth Army. The French did not believe in segregated units and were grateful to combatants of any colour. The Hellfighters became the 369th Regiment and spent more time under continuous fire, 191 days, than any other unit of American soldiers. They ceded no ground, and none surrendered. They were the first regiment to reach the River Rhine, and they collectively earned the Croix de Guerre for valour. At war’s end, however, General Pershing did not permit them, or their popular regimental band under James Reese Europe, to participate in the Allies’ victory march through Paris. Many of the demobilized African-American doughboys, unsurprisingly, stayed in Paris rather than return to the land of Jim Crow and lynching.
The army discharged Bullard in October 1919 at the end of a distinguished tour of duty that included the rare achievement of service in the Foreign Legion, the regular army and the air corps. He had also been awarded the Légion d’Honneur, the Médaille Militaire, Croix de Guerre, Croix du Combattant Volontaire de la Guerre and many other medals for bravery and for his wounds. There was no decoration for being the first black combat pilot and the only African-American to fly for any army in the Great War.