Today, a secret WW-II battle. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
Ask anyone about black
Americans in WW-II, and you hear about the Tuskegee Airmen, those courageous
fighter pilots who guarded American bombers so
well, late in the war. The story of another unit of
black soldiers is far less well known because they
functioned in secrecy. Their story began in 1944,
when the Army agreed to form the 555th Airborne
Battalion, a unit of black paratroopers.
Like the Tuskegee Airmen, the 555th (or Triple
Nickel) had to fight prejudice and foot-dragging
from all sides. They took only the best, and other
units wouldn't let their best transfer into it.
Passive resistance by the Army kept it below full
strength. The Battle of the Bulge came and went
that winter in Europe while black soldiers chafed
to get into the 555th. Only as the war wound down
in the spring did the unit finally reach battalion
strength.
But now the Japanese had unleashed their secret
weapon. Balloon bombs
rode the jet stream all the way from Japan and
landed randomly across western America. The
military couldn't hide that completely, but they
shrouded most of it in secrecy. The bombs actually
killed only six people. A woman and five children
were fishing near Bly, Oregon, and they chanced to
find one of the bombs. It exploded as they tried to
figure out what it was.
The one place the bombs were effective was in
starting forest fires. The Forest Service had just
introduced smoke-jumping in 1939 and was still
working out its techniques. In May, orders reached
the 555th. The battalion was to be trimmed to a
company of 160 men. Only the best of the best were
chosen. They were sent, not to Europe, but secretly
to Pendleton, Oregon. There they were to be
retrained as smoke-jumpers.
Much was different. The military train to come down
in open terrain. Smoke-jumpers expect to land in
trees, and they train to lower themselves to the
ground when they do. The Triple Nickel began
jumping into fires in the Summer of '45. The Jim
Crow mentality was still alive in Oregon, but the
community of pilots and firefighters was
color-blind. They were all in it together.
So the men of the 555th made twelve hundred
individual jumps into fires. As they honed this
embryonic firefighting technique, they suffered
burns, broken bones, asphyxiation, and the first
smoke-jumping fatality. Malvin Brown landed in a
tree near Roseburg, Oregon
(where I finished high school two years later), and
he fell to his death. I worked on a road survey
crew in the virgin Douglas fir that he'd died to
protect. I remember those noble 200-foot trees, and
I shudder at the idea of trying to descend on a
rope from a parachute tangled in the top branches.
The Triple Nickel saga makes a powerful story of
swords to plowshares. These were some of the
least-known WW-II heroes, serving their country,
unrecognized, under truly battlefield conditions,
and doing it without firing a shot.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
