African Troops in Europe

3,545 words

Dick van Galen Last with Ralf Futselaar
Translated by Marjolijn de Jager
Black Shame: African Soldiers in Europe, 1914 – 1922
New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015

Dick van Galen Last (1952 – 2010) was a librarian and senior researcher for the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His Ph.D. dissertation was on the use of sub-Saharan African troops during World War I and the following French occupation of the Rhineland in the 1920s. The dissertation was edited and published as a book after his death.

It became clear to me when reading this book that the author had no military experience as well as no real interactions with Negroes from any country. There was also the sense that he was deeply ensconced in the self-righteous cocoon of the Dutch narrative of their experience during World War II. A narrative of “resistance” and “victimization” from which springs the alleged diary of Anne Frank and the Judeo–Christianity of the antifa-Calvinist, Correy ten Boom. This Dutch post-war narrative makes it easy to not notice black pathologies or recognize the deadly seriousness of whites who confront the danger of Africanization.

The author makes several erroneous assumptions right off the bat. The first is that anything less than front-line service in the infantry is not as valorous as service in other military specialties, and that every person in the military aspires to be in the role of an infantryman. There are also plenty of people on the front lines who aren’t in the infantry: radio operators, medics, cooks, engineers, artillery observers, chaplain’s assistants, clerks, etc. Without such people, the infantry ceases to function.

Second, the term front-line itself is relative. Two privates in the infantry manning a forward listening post are indeed on the front line, but the staff officers in their regiment’s command post might only be 300 yards to their rear, so they too are front-line but not to the same degree. The support troops digging ditches and hauling water up to the front are in contact with the enemy and therefore in considerable danger although not often in a position to shoot back in an effective way. During the First World War, support troops were often struck by artillery fire or attacked by aircraft.

Then the author weaves the idea into each chapter that uniformed blacks were a threat to the European “sexual order,” thereby implying that the main cause of any problem was that white men were threatened with an allegedly higher African sexual virility and attractiveness. This too is false. Most white women are not seeking Africans as sexual partners at all. The main “race-mixers” are white men, which is a major problem. Furthermore, the threat of rape and other forms of violent crime from blacks is very real, but again, the scale of black criminality must be seen to be believed.

The final, and most important erroneous assumption, is the implication that white officers commanding black troops took joy then (or take joy now) in abusing sub-Saharan troops. Military leadership in combat conditions is an art. One needs to keep the shirkers in line and there is no way to do this without being unpleasant. White officers also don’t go looking for Negro criminals, the crime reports quickly bubble up to the officers and they are stuck figuring out how to manage the problem. In the US Army black crime is deliberately covered up. There is also the friction from a simple lack of ability. The differing IQ levels is really a factor; again however, one must really see the IQ differences in real life to really “get it.”

Dick van Galen Last simply has no concept of how bad black pathologies are. Even if one has grown up in a politically conservative American household it is still a shock to see how bad black criminality is for the first time. Sub-Saharan Africans are fundamentally not like whites.

The French Empire’s African Military Manpower Scheme

After the Napoleonic Wars, the French set about building what has come to be called the Second French Empire. The French moved into Algeria in 1830 and made the region something of a settler-colony, although Algeria never became a true copy of France in the way that Ontario became a copy of England.

The native population of North Africa, however, is Caucasian and many of the natives are Nordics – to use an old racial classification. Nonetheless, the religious differences between the two groups kept the communities separate and fundamentally at odds. The French did, however, enlist North Africans for use in European wars. They first employed them during the Crimean War (1853 – 1856). This only caused a minor ripple of alarm, however.

The French Army also used North African regiments during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 – 1871. That war was short and ended with a decisive French defeat, so colonial troops did not become a political issue. It is a matter of controversy as to exactly how badly the defeat enraged the French establishment against the Germans. Historian Michael Neiberg makes an excellent argument that national hatreds between France and Germany didn’t exist until after the disaster of the First World War and the “shock of 1870” was not as big an even as claimed later. Nonetheless, enough of the French elite was enraged by the outcome of that conflict that they made poor choices in the long-term in their attempt to get back at the Germans.

Charles Mangin was a career officer in the French Army who wanted to use Africans as soldiers in Europe.

One such Frenchman was a soldier named Charles Mangin. In 1898, he served in the French expedition across the Sahara Desert to Fashoda. The expedition was an imperialist venture in which the French ultimately drew a large portion Africa into their empire. This part of the French Empire came to be called Afrique-Occidentale française, (French West Africa), and Afrique équatoriale française, (French Equatorial Africa).

Mangin was serving in the French Army at a time when the French birthrate was lower than the German. French military planners believed this gave Germany a great advantage since more young men were coming of age every year in Germany. Mangin spearheaded the idea that the French should recruit Africans into their army to achieve parity. This policy is best summed up by Lothrop Stoddard who wrote in 1933:

The disaster of 1870 transformed French colonial policy. In the hour of defeat and humiliation there came the idea of building up a great overseas empire which should furnish the reservoir of man-power needed to accomplish France’s European aims. Then began that intensive drive for African territory which brought almost the entire north-western quarter of the Dark Continent under the Tricolour, This, added to her previous acquisitions, gave France a colonial empire second only to Britain’s in size, and with a population exceeding 60,000,000 souls. The basic purpose of this hectic expansion was naturally not publicly avowed and for a long time was not generally recognized abroad.

Why France should spend so much blood and treasure conquering the barren wastes of the Sahara and the economically less desirable parts of West Africa mystified most foreign observers, who usually laid it to a mere desire for prestige. Lord Salisbury typified British opinion of the time when he is said to have jocularly remarked: “They tell me that the soil there is rather on the light side. Surely we can let the Gallic cock scratch in it.” A few keen-sighted foreign observers seem to have glimpsed what was in the wind. Henry M. Stanley, the famous African explorer, judged that France was acquiring the best part of Africa because she had got “the lands of the soldiers.” French officials occasionally dropped a hint as when General Faidherbe urged the speedy conquest of Senegal because “other colonies give us products; this colony will give us men.” [1]

Mangin’s colonial African army didn’t materialize after he first suggested it. Before the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, the French achieved parity against Germany by extending the enlistment terms of their draftees, so drafting Africans was unnecessary.

Africans in the Trenches of France and Flanders

When war broke out in Europe, the fighting spread to Africa immediately. The British and French captured German Togoland by the end of August 1914. The British and South Africans would go on to capture the rest of the German colonies in Africa except for German East Africa by 1916. Negro troops in Africa served under white officers. In the colonies in Africa where there were few white settlers, armies manned by black regiments were not controversial or problematic.

The South Africans did use blacks, but in small numbers. South African blacks deployed to Europe were kept in tightly controlled cantonment areas. As for the rest of the British Empire, colonial officials deliberately chose to not deploy many black African soldiers to Europe during the First World War, and only with great reluctance they did use the British West Indies Regiment. It was claimed, however, that the regiment’s recruiters selected white West Indians or light-skinned blacks as enlistees.

The Germans couldn’t deploy sub-Saharan colonial troops to Europe on a large scale, but the French did enact Mangin’s plans. Pulling manpower from Africa into the French Army was not, however a simple matter. The Africans needed to be convinced. The main African recruiter was Blaise Diagne. He was a full-blooded sub-Saharan African from the part of Senegal called “the four communities” where the residents had French citizenship. Diagne saw military service as a way for colonial Africans to raise their status in the French Empire. Diagne saw himself as a black Frenchman, not a colonized person.

Blaise Diagne was a Senegalese French citizen who saw military service as a way to raise the status of sub-Saharan Africans in the French Empire.

Some Africans also saw Digne’s vision and joined out of that sense of idealism. Many however, were pressed into service in a process that was suspiciously similar to the slave catching methods which the French had so recently ended. Many Africans in the French colonies also absconded to the British colonies where they wouldn’t be drafted. Once in the French military, the Africans were typically called Tirailleurs Sénégalais – which simply means Senegalese riflemen.

The Senegalese performance in Europe was uneven. They were unable to manage complex tasks, such as operating a crew-served gun, or navigating overland with a compass, but they were able to be employed as shock troops. Over time this become controversial. The purpose of shock troops in a battle on the Western Front was to carry out risky attacks where casualties were expected to be high. Despite the friction, the French public came to see their Tirailleurs Sénégalais as a vital part of the war effort.

In French-ruled Africa however, new problems arose. The main issue was that the colonies were stripped of their best men; white settlers went off as officers and black laborers as privates. This cut down on the acquisition of raw materials from the colonies. As the war continued, raw materials became as important as manpower for the army. Additionally, the social order in the colonies was beginning to break down. The traditional chiefs were losing their prestige, and the returning veterans were becoming hostile towards French rule. Many returned to live in the cities of Africa rather than the rural parts from which they came. They also expected the best jobs and became angry when such jobs failed to materialize.

The United States stayed neutral until 1917. When the Americans foolishly succumbed to the manipulative propaganda of the Allies and entered the conflict, US President Woodrow Wilson also employed an African army, although his troops were African Americans rather than colonials pulled in from the Sahel and Maghreb. Dick van Galen Last gives a simplistic, Euro-centric view of American race relations. He describes American “Negrophobia” as confined to the South, and mentions, but downplays, a rampage carried out by black soldiers in Houston in 1917. In the book, he claims the soldiers were “lynched” after their massacre of random Texas whites. They were not. Some were hanged after being found guilty of murder during a court martial. He also ignores the history of problematic black troops during Reconstruction and the 1898 rampage of Negro soldiers in Tampa, Florida as well as the 1906 Brownsville Affair, where black troops fired wildly into the downtown buildings of the Texas border town which they were supposed to be defending.

Most of the blacks from America during the conflict were support troops working in safer zones away from the fighting. The four regular “colored” US Army regiments were deployed to the US Southwest or the Philippine Islands during the conflict. The two segregated sub-Saharan infantry regiments, the 24th and 25th, had histories of rampages and mutiny and were too unreliable to be sent to Europe. Black soldiers who did serve on the front were in two divisions, the 92nd and 93rd Divisions. The 93rd Division primarily served under French command. Their service with the French was part of a diplomatic and compromise. The French got American troops immediately and the Americans kept a segregated, more efficient, army.

The Americans deployed approximately 10,000 blacks to France of whom possibly 800 were killed or died there. The French deployed 134,000 black African soldiers to Europe where approximately 30,000 were killed or died. French public were the most supportive of the Africans from the various allied armies, while public opinion of the other allied nations regarding black soldiers was more guarded.

The French Empire’s Normalization of Deviance

The numbers of black troops in Europe were negligible compared to the millions of whites in the service, and the negative impact of Africans in Europe greatly exceeded any benefit derived from their presence. Africans are wildly different from the whites of Western Eurasia. The social strain their nature causes when they are present in white society is enormous, although this strain is something that must be seen to be truly understood. Ultimately, the French Army created a normalization of deviance situation when they used African soldiers in Europe. The normalization of deviance is when there is an unnoticed flaw in the system which can collapse the entire system under the right conditions.

The presence of blacks in any white institution eventually causes the institution to break in some way, although not in the way one might expect. The Senegalese didn’t shoot white Frenchmen in the back; however, a breakage did occur in different places elsewhere. The problems with long-term significance appeared during demobilization.

As soon as the war ended, the various militaries needed to redeploy millions of armed young men who were suddenly made idle by the armistice. This meant that West Indian blacks, for example, were in camps in Italy awaiting transport with nothing to do. Meanwhile anti-white literature, from people like W.E.B. Dubois, was starting to circulate. The mentors of the decolonial leaders of the 1960s were the non-commissioned officers in the black regiments of the various imperial armies who read that literature.

Decolonization was still a long way off in 1918, but in the immediate aftermath of the war, the sub-Saharan black veterans created an artistic, literary, and political movement called the Black Atlantic. This movement set the conditions for the spread of Afrocentrism. It also provided a base from which radical writers such as Frantz Fanon, later arose. Jazz music became politicized at this time as it started to be associated with black issues.

It was during the immediate aftermath of World War I where another breakage from putting Africans in white institutions occurred. France employed several regiments of colonial troops when the French Army was deployed into the German Rhineland in the early 1920s. The behavior of the African troops was bad enough that France lost international support for their occupation.

Three figures were most influential in describing the problems of colonial troops in Europe after World War I. The first was a British writer and civic leader named E. D. Morel. Morel was involved in the shipping industry early in his career, and he came to champion the rights of Africans after he caught wind of the abuses going on in the Congo Free State. After the First World War, he recognized the problems of colonial troops in Europe, and he campaigned against the French Army’s use of Africans in the occupied Rhineland. Morel was one would call today an extreme progressive liberal who was initially for “civil rights” but became a white racial advocate later. This intellectual journey is not unusual.

Another activist was Ray Beveridge. She was the granddaughter of Illinois Governor, John L. Beveridge, who’d commanded an Illinois cavalry regiment at the Battle of Gettysburg. Ray was an actress and a conservative Germanophile, like so many in the Midwest. Her most famous and effective act was posing for a photo which showed half-starved German child next to a black child to warn against race-mixing as well as highlighting the economic problems in Germany brought about by French military policy.

Ray Beveridge was an American actress from a prominent family. She spoke out against interracial relationships and the French Army’s use of African soldiers during their Occupation of the Rhineland.

Another important white advocate during this time was something of a scoundrel. Heinrich Distler was a German who’d been to America and developed sympathy for blacks after claiming to witness a lynching in Springfield, Illinois sometime around 1902. After he returned to Germany he got involved in filmmaking and leaned towards the softcore pornography end of the business. When the French deployed troops to the Rhineland in the early 1920s, he disavowed his previous sentimentalism regarding blacks and started to document the behavior of the French colonial soldiers. He formed a group called the Notbund, which protested the presence of African troops. The group only had 1,696 members in Germany and another 790 abroad, but it punched above its weight in influence. The group faded away by 1927, after the occupation ended. Distler’s films also made an impact.

Lessons

All the Western European belligerents used Africans as troops in some way. None, however embraced the practice as thoroughly as the French. The French did gain some benefit in the form of shock troops. They could also make some propaganda in-roads in what today is called “The Global South” during the conflict, but in the end the policy created problems in the form of decolonial agitation within their empire, and hostility and isolation from the white nations. The presence of Africans on the Rhine in the early 1920s made France’s occupation seem illegitimate to the international community. In Germany the reaction created a second war a generation later in which France was severely damaged.

Although the United States didn’t field a large number of blacks, they did recruit enough that problems developed. Race relations declined during the war and rioting swept across the industrial cities of the North starting as early as 1917. In 1919, there was large-scale rioting across the country which was politically very similar to the BLM/Antifa riots of 2020. Radical White leftists rioted for their cause while blacks rioted in a way that has become tragically familiar. The agitation finally came to an end when Warren G. Harding was elected president on a platform that promised a “return to normalcy” and whites reacted to several unprovoked black murders in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 by burning down a so-called “black business district.”

Recruitment policies are a dual-edged sword for every nation. Should a war be bad enough, every man is needed regardless of background. However, people aren’t interchangeable, and military service has a way of radicalizing racial and ethnic attitudes. Consider the story of Keanu Sai, a US Army veteran working to restore the Kingdom of Hawaii. The Atlantic says that,

Keanu Sai is, today, one of the more extreme thinkers about Hawaiian sovereignty. growing up in Kuli‘ou‘ou, on the east end of O‘ahu, Sai was a self-described slacker who only wanted to play football. He graduated from high school in 1982 and went straight to a military college, then the Army.

In 1990, he was at Fort Sill, in Oklahoma, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, annexing it as Iraq’s 19th province. International condemnation was swift; the United Nations Security Council declared the annexation illegal. An American-led coalition quickly beat back Saddam, liberating Kuwait. “And that’s when I went, Wait a minute. That’s exactly what happened” in Hawai‘i.

Looking back at this history nearly 100 years later, Keanu Sai had an epiphany. “I was in the wrong army,” he said. Sai left the military and dove into the state archives, researching Hawai‘i’s history and his own family’s lineage prior to the arrival of haole (white) Europeans and Americans. He says he traced his family’s roots to ali‘i, members of Hawai‘i’s noble class. “I started to realize that the Hawaiian Kingdom that I was led to believe was all haole-controlled, missionary-controlled, was all – pardon the French – bullshit.”

Native Hawaiians are not the only people radicalized in the US military – or any other military. There is always a risk when using alien troops in a nation’s army. The story of the “black shame” of Africans deployed to Europe during World War I and the ugly occupation of the Rhineland afterwards still resonates today, although its lessons seem to be lost on America’s leaders.

Notes

[1] Stoddard, T. Lothrop, Clashing Tides of Colour, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935)