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Dear Doug Collins

The Shaw Seven: 432 Medals, None of Them Theirs — Until 1997

They fought in a segregated Army that assumed, as a matter of policy, that they could not fight. They held a castle approach in Italy, a river bridgehead in Germany, a sinking ship in New Guinea — and when the medals were handed out, 432 of them, not one had their name on it. It took the Army itself, half a century later, paying a Black university to audit its own record, before seven of those medals were finally awarded. Six of the seven men were dead. This page is the documented record of what the seven did, and what it took to make the record whole.

The service, and the promise

More than one million African Americans served in the United States military during the Second World War, in an Army segregated by policy — an Army that, in the words its own commissioned study would later use, entered the war “with racial assumptions about the inferiority of black soldiers as combat troops,” assumptions that “relegated blacks overwhelmingly to service in noncombatant units.”

Most Black soldiers were therefore steered into quartermaster, transport, and labor work — necessary, dangerous, and kept away from the combat assignments from which valor awards are made. The men on this page were among the exceptions who reached combat: an infantry lieutenant in the all-Black 92nd Infantry Division in Italy, a tank sergeant in the 761st Tank Battalion — the “Black Panthers” — in France, a forward observer in an Italian village, a scout in the Weser River valley, a tank-destroyer officer at Climbach, a volunteer who had to surrender his sergeant’s stripes to be allowed into combat at all, and a quartermaster private in the Pacific whose combat was a sinking ship.

The promise made to men like these is the same one made to every soldier: distinguish yourself above and beyond the call of duty, and your country will say so, in its highest decoration. What follows is what that promise was worth to Black soldiers — and what it cost to collect on it fifty-two years later.

What happened

Begin with the arithmetic, because the arithmetic is the case. For World War II, the United States awarded 432 Medals of Honor. In the Army’s own 1997 account: “Out of 432 presented for World War II, none went to any of more than a million blacks who served.” Not one Black soldier, sailor, or Marine received the nation’s highest award for valor in that war — not during it, and not in the years immediately after. The Distinguished Service Crosses some of them did receive were simply never upgraded in wartime.

The seven actions below are taken from the men’s official citations. Each met the Medal of Honor standard on the day it happened. The Army’s own review board would eventually say so. It just took until 1997.

Four of the seven were killed in the actions themselves: Watson, Rivers, Fox, James. Thomas, Carter, and Baker survived the war. Every one of them was decorated — six with the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest award; Rivers, the exception, held the Silver Star. None was put in for the medal his action warranted and had it go through. In Baker’s case, Clinton would later note, his commanding officer’s recommendation contained a passage saying Baker had been willing to sacrifice his own life to win the battle — and “that passage was never forwarded.” In Rivers’s case, his commander, Captain David J. Williams, maintained that he had recommended Rivers for the medal in November 1944; it never advanced, and Clinton, reading the file fifty years on, stated what the file showed: “it was felt that the Silver Star he had already been given was reward enough for a black man.”

What the institution did afterward

For nearly fifty years, the institution did nothing — because, on paper, there was nothing to see. The Shaw study found no official proof that African Americans had even been considered for the award, and no documentary evidence in the files proving racial bias in the award policies themselves. That is precisely how the system worked: the bias was not in a memo. It was in the assumptions the study quoted, in the segregation that kept Black soldiers out of combat billets, in recommendations never written or never forwarded. The study’s conclusion, as the Army reported it: Shaw “found that there was disparity, and said the political climate and Army practices during the war guaranteed that no black soldier would receive the military’s top award.”

The men’s postwar lives ran inside that arithmetic. Carter tried to re-enlist — and in 1949 the Army barred his re-enlistment and discharged him without explanation, on suspicion arising from his years in China and Spain; the Army’s own history records it plainly. He died in Los Angeles on January 30, 1963. Thomas lived until 1980. Fox’s Distinguished Service Cross did not arrive until 1982, thirty-eight years after Sommocolonia. Baker stayed in the Army until 1968 and worked for the Red Cross for some twenty years afterward — carrying a Distinguished Service Cross for an action his fellow soldiers, the National WWII Museum notes, had not nominated him higher for, certain a Black officer would be denied by white officers.

The correction came because the institution finally ordered an audit of itself. In 1992, Acting Secretary of the Army John Shannon ordered a research study. In 1993, the Army contracted Shaw University of Raleigh, North Carolina — a historically Black university — to determine whether there was racial disparity in the way recipients had been selected. Five historians — Elliot V. Converse, Robert K. Griffith, Daniel K. Gibran, Richard H. Kohn, and John A. Cash — did the work. Their report, “The Medal of Honor and African Americans in the United States Army During World War II,” was delivered in January 1995, and published in book form in 1997 as The Exclusion of Black Soldiers from the Medal of Honor in World War II.

The Shaw team used the Distinguished Service Cross as its screen and forwarded ten recommendations to a board of generals at the Pentagon. The board selected seven. In October 1996, Congress waived the statutory time limit on the awards. And on January 13, 1997, in the East Room, President Bill Clinton presented the medal to the seven — standing, as he pointed out, where Harry Truman had stood fifty-two years earlier to award 28 Medals of Honor to a group Truman had called a great cross-section of the United States. “But that day,” Clinton said, “something was missing from his cross section of America. No African American who deserved the Medal of Honor for his service in World War II received it. Today we fill the gap in that picture… Now and forever, the truth will be known about these African Americans who gave so much that the rest of us might be free.”

Vernon Baker, 77, was the only one of the seven alive. Tears streamed down his face as Clinton hung the medal around his neck; he said afterward he had been crying because he was “remembering what happened on that hill.” For the other six, families received the medals — Rivers’s sister Grace Woodfolk among them, with Captain Williams in attendance. George Watson had no known next of kin; the Sergeant Major of the Army, Gene C. McKinney, accepted his medal on his behalf.

Where it stands now

The seven remain, today, the only Black Americans ever awarded the Medal of Honor for service in World War II — the complete list, closed in a single ceremony fifty-two years after the war ended.

The record since 1997 is one of keeping. Baker died on July 13, 2010, at 90, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery; the National WWII Museum holds his oral history. Carter was reburied at Arlington at his family’s request at the time of the ceremony. Watson’s medal is held by the U.S. Army Quartermaster Museum, and the Navy named the lead ship of a class of transport ships, USNS Watson, for him. The seven men’s citations stand in the official record, indistinguishable now — as they always should have been — from the other 432.

But notice the shape of the accounting, because it is the pattern this site exists to document. The actions took days. The correction took an acting secretary’s order, a university’s study, a board of generals, and an act of Congress to waive the clock — and it still arrived too late for six of the seven men, and too late for every family that had kept the story without the medal. And the audit’s own list was longer than the ceremony: of the ten names Shaw forwarded, three were not selected, and no further upgrade for them has ever been made. Even the correction, when it finally came, stopped three names short.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

No camera was rolling at Castle Aghinolfi, at Guebling, or in the water off Porlock Harbor — the seven survive in citations, in one man’s own voice, and in the films that came after. Five films: Baker in his own words, twice; Rivers’s battalion, in full; Fox, honored; and the battalion’s story as HISTORY tells it now.

The only one alive, in his own words. The National WWII Museum's oral history: Baker discusses the Viareggio action that earned him the medal. (The National WWII Museum video.)

Rivers's battalion, in full. Fern Levitt's 2002 documentary "Come Out Fighting: The 761st," made for HISTORY's Turning Points of History: the first Black armored battalion in combat, from segregation at home to the Bulge and Germany.

Fox. The Go For Broke National Education Center's "Heroes Among Us" portrait of Lt. John R. Fox, who called the artillery down on his own position at Sommocolonia.

Baker, the portrait. The Medal of Honor Book's film of Baker and the April 5, 1945 assault — the most-watched telling of his story.

The battalion, today. HISTORY's trailer for its 2023 documentary "761st Tank Battalion: The Original Black Panthers," executive produced by Morgan Freeman.

Sources

Further record

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.