Old Fort, North Carolina. Thad Bryson grew up there, but in the run up to WWII, the Army reached out for him. He wound up with the 97th Engineering Regiment at Eglin Field in Florida where he met the Tuskegee Airmen. Black men had more choices than he had dreamed. Thad Bryson meets the Tuskegee …
Category Archives: Black Soldier
Thad Bryson Winter
Thad Bryson, a young black man from Old Fort, North Carolina met the Tuskegee Airmen. Shortly after that his regiment, the 97th Engineering Regiment quite suddenly left Florida—for Alaska! Thad Bryson meets the Tuskegee Airmen Thad’s son Fred shared with us his dad’s stories. Like a lot of veterans, Thad didn’t talk about it much; …
They lose Private Banks Remains
How do you lose the remains of an honorably buried soldier? It’s not easy. Last night I posted about Private Major Banks who, along with thousands of other soldiers, received a contaminated yellow fever vaccine in March 1942. In June Private Banks contracted serum hepatitis and at the end of June he passed away in …
The fate of Private Major Banks.
Private Major Banks, a young black soldier in the 97th Engineering regiment reported for sick call on May 20, 1942. The medics sent him to the little hospital in Valdez, Alaska. Port of Valdez in 1942 Banks grew up in New Canton, Virginia. He didn’t enter the Army until January 1942, so he came late …
Malevolent Mentasta
A vaguely malevolent sounding name, “Mentasta”. It describes a precisely malevolent stretch of road through the mountains of the Alaska Range. Through late June and early July, the black soldiers of the 97th Engineers had finally begun to build road. The men of Company B forged out front clearing a rough right of way. The …
Troopship
The troopship USS David Branch met the young black soldiers of the 97th at the Port of Seattle. They got off their trains at Ft. Lewis and one company moved directly to the port to deliver their few small trucks for loading on the ship. More on Getting to Seattle Through the day on April …
Teslin Post
Teslin Post never saw it coming. In July the 93rd Engineers came out of the woods, and the sleepy frontier village with about 130 inhabitants, mostly Tlingit First Nations, found itself dead center in the action. They didn’t know quite what to make of it. Excited by the sudden appearance of a hundreds of …