After 11 months of service, he returned to the United States and received an honorable discharge at Camp Dix, N.J. Furrowh’s skilled vocation in the Army was as a pipefitter.
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2, 1918 at the American ordnance repair shop in Mehun-sur-Yèvre, located in central France. On special occasions and birthdays, he also mailed beautiful, silk-embroidered greeting cards of a type sold to soldiers. He traveled to several other towns before starting his new military duty on Nov. While serving in France, Furrowh dealt with his feelings of homesickness by writing and sending postcards to his mother, relatives and friends. He noted that one of his first duties with the Depot Labor Company #23 was to unload flour at the Navy yard. 20, 1918 from the military port in Hoboken, N.J., and arrived in Brest, France on Oct. To record his military experiences, Furrowh wrote brief notations in his diary. Like so many African Americans who served during World War I, he was assigned to a segregated labor unit in the American Expeditionary Forces that had joined the British and French troops along the Western Front in France. William Henry Furrowh of Wilmington was drafted into the U.S. They fought in the trenches for 191 days and the entire regiment received the Croix de Guerre medal for their actions at Maison-en-Champagne. Earning the reputation from the Germans as “Hell Fighters,” the 369th was nicknamed the “Harlem Hell Fighters” because the regiment “never lost a man through capture, lost a trench or a foot of ground to the enemy.” The 369th was also the first to reach the Rhine River and provided the longest service of any regiment in a foreign army. Those in black units who served as laborers, stevedores and in engineer service battalions were the first to arrive in France in 1917, and in early 1918, the 369th United States Infantry, a regiment of African-American combat troops, arrived to help the French Army. Despite the outcry, Fort Des Moines in Iowa became one of the segregated camps and in October 1917 over 600 blacks were commissioned at the camp as captains and lieutenants.Īfrican-American soldiers provided much support overseas to the European Allies.
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Disheartened, blacks protested against this discriminatory practice. The government made no provision for military training of black officers and soon created segregated training camps for that purpose. Blacks were able to serve in all branches of the Army except for the aviation units. However, they were barred from the Marines and served only in menial roles in the Navy. It was documented on Jthat over 700,000 African Americans had registered for military service.
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After the declaration of war, more than 20,000 blacks enlisted in the military, and the numbers increased when the Selective Service Act was enacted in May 1917.
Making history the second world war unit list full#
in 1619, blacks had suffered oppression in the United States first under the American slavery system, and then under the rigid practices of segregation and discrimination that were codified under the “Jim Crow Laws.” With the entry of the United States into the Great War in 1917, African Americans were eager to show their patriotism in hopes of being recognized as full citizens. Since the first Africans were brought as slaves to the British colony of Jamestown, Va.
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