Link to another story “Send Food or Send Coffins”
Mutiny, the Army’s most serious crime, visited the 97th at Big Gerstle, Alaska in March 1943.
Or did it? The answer depends on your perspective and how you define mutiny.
In March at Big Gerstle, Headquarters Company commander Lt. Dewitt Howell received a routine order to establish a regimental supply office 130 miles up the road in Fairbanks. To do that he needed soldiers and he arranged to borrow Sgt. James Heard’s ten-man squad from Company F.
He turned the men over to his assistant, Lt. Lyons, who put them to work hauling and stacking supplies. And Lyons managed to scrounge up four beat up Studebaker trucks.
On the morning of March 29 Sgt. Heard and his squad reluctantly emerged from the barracks into a temperature of 36 below. Neither Lyons nor anyone else had found it necessary to share the details of the planned move with Sergeant Heard and his men. In Colonel Mitchim’s regiment, white officers planned; black enlisted men followed instructions. But Heard and his men knew the ropes; understood that the young lieutenant planned to move them and the piles of supplies somewhere.
Through the morning the squad loaded supplies into the three uncovered trucks. And they nervously eyeballed the fourth truck, the one with the ragged canvas cover. They knew from experience that moving that unheated truck down the road would create a wind chill far colder than 36 below.
If young Lt. Lyon didn’t know the danger, they sure did. They didn’t think about mutiny, they’d never heard of it. But they nervously wondered how far the young lieutenant planned to haul them.
With the three trucks loaded and ready to go, they broke for lunch, and Sgt. Heard finally learned their destination. The damned Lt, he informed his squad, intended to haul them 130 miles to Fairbanks. Riding that far in that frigid truck would certainly cost them fingers and toes and God knew what else.
In the United States Army in 1943, black soldiers knew not to argue with a white officer. But the Army had also trained Heard to take responsibility for the welfare of his me. He had to do something.
So what was the result?
Sally I really had to do this in two parts. This afternoon I wrote tomorrow’s story and it will answer your question. Short version the soldiers were court martial Ed and convicted of mutiny.