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Special Units · Battle of the Bulge, 1945
The 761st Tank Battalion
The first African American tank battalion committed to combat fought across Lorraine in November 1944 and through the snow around Tillet in January 1945, in an Army that kept it segregated.
- U.S. Army · Third Army
- Lorraine, the Ardennes, Germany, Austria
- November 1944–May 1945
A battalion in a segregated Army
The 761st Tank Battalion was activated at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, on 1 April 1942. Its enlisted men were African American; most of its officers were white at first, with Black officers joining as the battalion trained. The Army of 1942 kept Black and white soldiers in separate units, and many senior officers doubted that Black soldiers could master armor. The battalion spent more than two years training in Louisiana and at Camp Hood, Texas, before it was sent overseas.
Its commander through training and into combat was Lt. Col. Paul L. Bates. One of its lieutenants at Camp Hood was Jackie Robinson. In July 1944 Robinson refused an order to move to the back of an Army bus, was court-martialed and was acquitted. He did not go overseas with the battalion; three years later he broke the color line in major league baseball.
The men called themselves the Black Panthers, and the battalion took as its motto “Come Out Fighting.” It fought, in the words of the collection’s Bulge story, in a segregated Army whose racial assumptions its service exposed (Battle of the Bulge collection).
A separate tank battalion
The 761st was a separate tank battalion, not part of an armored division. Under the 1944 organization such a battalion had a headquarters company, a service company, three medium tank companies equipped with M4 Shermans, lettered A through C, and a light tank company, Company D, with M5 Stuarts. Separate battalions were attached to infantry divisions as the fighting required, and their companies and platoons were often parceled out to support the infantry regiments. Tank crews and riflemen who had never trained together had to learn to fight together in the field.
The arrangement meant that the battalion rarely fought as a single body and that its story is scattered through the records of the divisions it supported. It also meant that it was moved from one sector to another as the Army’s needs changed, often with little rest between assignments. That pattern runs through everything that follows.
Lorraine, November 1944
The battalion landed at Omaha Beach on 10 October 1944 and joined Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr.’s Third Army in Lorraine. Patton spoke to the men before they went into action. It was the first African American tank battalion committed to combat, and on 8 November 1944 it attacked with the 26th Infantry Division in the Third Army’s offensive east of Nancy.
The November fighting was hard and costly. The battalion fought through a chain of fortified villages in rain and mud, against German antitank guns and mines, and lost tanks and men from the first day. Bates himself was wounded early in the campaign. Staff Sgt. Ruben Rivers of Company A was badly wounded in the leg near Guébling on 16 November but refused evacuation and kept fighting with his tank until he was killed on 19 November. More than fifty years later, in January 1997, President Bill Clinton presented the Medal of Honor for Rivers to his family, one of seven awarded that day to Black soldiers of the war whose service had been passed over.
By early December the battalion had been in action for weeks with few replacements for its losses in tanks and crews. Then the German offensive in the Ardennes opened on 16 December, and the Third Army turned north.
Tillet, January 1945
The Battle of the Bulge did not end when the first American relief force reached Bastogne on 26 December (Chapter 7). In January 1945 Allied units still had to fight through German positions around the salient, in deep snow and bitter cold. Already worn by its fighting in November and December, the 761st went back into action alongside the 87th Infantry Division west of Bastogne. Its objective was Tillet, a village between Bastogne and St. Hubert.
The official history describes the 87th Division at Tillet meeting counterattack after counterattack from the Führer Begleit Brigade (MacDonald, p. 39; Chapter 9). Staff Sgt. Curtis F. Shoup of the 87th’s 346th Infantry earned a posthumous Medal of Honor near Tillet on 7 January. On 9 January Capt. Charles A. Gates led Company C’s Sherman tanks into a hard fight against German armor, antitank weapons and infantry.
The weather fought both sides. Armor in the Ardennes that January moved over icy roads through forest and across open fields where a dark Sherman stood out against the snow. Crews whitewashed their tanks where they could, engines and weapons had to be kept from freezing, and the short winter daylight limited every attack. Infantry and tankers alike suffered from cold injuries as well as enemy fire.
When tanks were knocked out, the action went on, on foot and over the radio. The National WWII Museum’s account follows Gates, Sgts. Theodore Windsor and William McBurney and other tankers as they kept trying to move the attack forward. It is a story of crews, of cooperation with the infantry and of persistence, not of an invulnerable machine cutting through the snow. Placing the January fighting on the campaign’s real timeline honors the Black Panthers more accurately than saying, as some popular accounts do, that they alone rescued Bastogne.
Through the Siegfried Line to Austria
After the Bulge the battalion served with one infantry division after another, the usual lot of a separate tank battalion. In March 1945 it fought through the Siegfried Line, and in April it crossed Germany; the Signal Corps photographed light-tank crews generally identified as the 761st in Coburg on 25 April. The war ended for the battalion in Austria, where its tankers met Soviet troops on the Enns River at Steyr in early May. A figure often given for its time in action is 183 days.
Recognition came late. In 1978 President Jimmy Carter awarded the battalion the Presidential Unit Citation, more than thirty years after its last fight. Its record has also attracted claims it does not need: a 1992 television documentary said the battalion had liberated Buchenwald and Dachau, and the claims were disputed by veterans and historians and the film was withdrawn. What is documented is enough: six months of combat across four countries, a Medal of Honor and a unit citation, earned by men their own Army had doubted.
The battalion’s record survives in two kinds of sources. One is contemporary: the after-action reports, unit journals and award citations, and Come Out Fighting, a battalion history published in 1945 by Trezzvant W. Anderson, a Black war correspondent who had followed the unit. The other is recollection: veterans’ interviews gathered decades later, including those in Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anthony Walton’s Brothers in Arms (2004). Both are valuable, and they do not always agree on dates, places or numbers; where they differ, the contemporary record is the safer guide.
The insignia, rendered
Illustration Original insignia-style artwork made for the Lake Norman Brief. It is not the unit’s official emblem. The battalion’s own emblem was a black panther’s head with the motto “Come Out Fighting.”
Timeline
- The 761st Tank Battalion is activated at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana.
- Lt. Jackie Robinson is court-martialed at Camp Hood after refusing to move to the back of an Army bus, and acquitted.
- The battalion lands at Omaha Beach.
- It goes into combat with the 26th Infantry Division in Lorraine.
- S/Sgt. Ruben Rivers, wounded near Guébling, refuses evacuation and is killed on 19 November.
- The 4th Armored Division reaches Bastogne’s perimeter.
- Capt. Charles A. Gates leads Company C into the fight at Tillet beside the 87th Infantry Division.
- The battalion fights through the Siegfried Line.
- Its tankers meet Soviet troops on the Enns River at Steyr, Austria.
- Presidential Unit Citation; Medal of Honor for Ruben Rivers.
People of the unit
Read the full story
- The Black Panthers at Tillet: a winter battle after the relief of Bastogne (Battle of the Bulge collection)
- Chapter 9: The January counteroffensive
- Chapter 7: The road to Assenois
- The Battle of the Bulge collection and atlas
By the numbers
The 761st Tank Battalion by the numbers
Decorations for the Black Panthers
Individual awards to men of the battalion, as given by the USO and Army accounts; the Purple Heart count is approximate
Source: USO, “Patton’s Panthers Broke New Ground During WWII”; U.S. Army Center of Military History, Medal of Honor citation for S/Sgt. Ruben Rivers
Men killed in action
The battalion’s dead, 1944–45; the later figure is the remainder of the two published numbers
Source: USO, “Patton’s Panthers Broke New Ground During WWII”
In pictures
More photographs
In the art of World War II
Insignia, posters and art
Sources
- The National WWII Museum, “Black Panthers in the Snow: The 761st at the Battle of the Bulge.”
- U.S. Army, “The 761st Tank Battalion: Fighting the Enemy, Beating Stereotypes” (army.mil).
- Charles B. MacDonald, The Last Offensive, United States Army in World War II (CMH, 1973), chapter II.
- Ulysses Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, United States Army in World War II (CMH, 1966).
- Medal of Honor citation, Staff Sgt. Ruben Rivers (U.S. Army Center of Military History).
- Trezzvant W. Anderson, Come Out Fighting: The Epic Tale of the 761st Tank Battalion (1945); Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anthony Walton, Brothers in Arms (2004).