Army Bases That Honor Confederate Traitors Could Soon Be Renamed for These Heroes

WASHINGTON — During the Jim Crow period, 9 Southern Army bases had been named for treasonous Confederate generals who fought to protect slavery and white supremacy. Now a fee established by Congress has instructed new names for the bases that “embody the best of the United States Army and America.”

Fort Bragg in North Carolina could be renamed Fort Liberty, if the suggestions are authorized by Congress. The different bases would honor among the Army’s most distinguished heroes. These are their tales:

Fort Johnson (Fort Polk, La.)

Sgt. Henry Johnson

Pvt. Henry Johnson deployed to Europe throughout World War I in a storied Black regiment known as the Harlem Hellfighters. The U.S. armed forces had been segregated, and the Hellfighters had been not allowed to fight on the front lines with different American troops. Instead, the Black troopers fought below the command of their French allies.

That put Private Johnson and his unit on the entrance traces, “against all odds — Black Americans wearing French uniforms,” within the predawn hours of May 15, 1918, as German troops swarmed his sentry publish on the fringe of the Argonne Forest, based on a biography offered by the naming fee.

Private Johnson threw grenades till he had no extra left to throw. Then he fired his rifle till it jammed. Then he clubbed enemy troopers with the butt of his rifle till it break up aside. Then he hacked away on the enemy with his bolo knife.

After the Germans retreated, daylight revealed that Private Johnson had killed four enemy soldiers and wounded an estimated 10 to twenty. He suffered 21 wounds in fight.

For their actions, Private Johnson and his sentry-mate on responsibility that evening had been the primary Americans to be awarded the Croix du Guerre, certainly one of France’s highest army honors. Almost a century later, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Sergeant Johnson the Medal of Honor.

She served close to the entrance traces at Fredericksburg and Chattanooga, and routinely crossed battle traces to deal with civilians. She was arrested by Confederate forces in 1864 and exchanged for a Confederate surgeon 4 months later. After she was denied an honorary army rank on the finish of the warfare, Union generals successfully petitioned for her to obtain the Medal of Honor for “patriotic zeal to the sick and wounded.”

Throughout her life, Dr. Walker proudly offered herself as a feminist who didn’t conform to gender norms. She refused to comply with “obey” her husband in her marriage ceremony vows and stored her final title, based on the National Park Service. She wore males’s clothes throughout the warfare, arguing that doing so made her job simpler. After the warfare, she posed for photographs in fits and a signature top hat, usually together with her Medal of Honor pinned to her lapel.

Fort Barfoot (Fort Pickett, Va.)

Col. Van Barfoot

On May 23, 1944, within the foothills of the Italian Alps, Sgt. Van Barfoot single-handedly silenced three machine-gun nests, disabled a German tank with a bazooka, blew up an artillery cannon with a demolition cost and took 17 enemy troopers prisoner.

In addition to the whole lot else that day, he rescued two grievously wounded American troopers, main them a few mile to security.

“Any single one of these actions could merit a high award for valor,” the naming commission wrote of Colonel Barfoot, a Choctaw soldier who was awarded the Medal of Honor and extolled in the news media as a “one-man army” for his actions that day.

He served 34 years within the Army, together with excursions in Korea and Vietnam. Later in life he again drew national attention for efficiently preventing his householders affiliation to maintain an American flag flying in his entrance yard.

Fort Gregg-Adams (Fort Lee, Va.)

Lt. Gen. Arthur J. Gregg & Lt. Col. Charity Adams Earley

Fort Gregg-Adams would honor two trailblazing African-American assist officers, Lt. Gen. Arthur J. Gregg and Lt. Col. Charity Adams Earley. The naming fee famous the “too-often-unheralded excellence” of logistics and assist items, lots of that are to today staffed primarily with Black troops.

Colonel Adams commanded the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, a segregated Women’s Army Corps unit accountable for delivering mail to American soldiers throughout World War II. In 1945, the 6888th was despatched to England after which France — turning into the primary giant unit of Black servicewomen to be deployed abroad — the place it processed nearly two million pieces of mail each month.

At the top of the warfare, Colonel Adams was the highest-ranking Black woman within the Army, based on a National Park Service biography.

At the peak of his profession, an article in The Washington Post stated, General Gregg was the highest-ranking Black officer within the army, serving as logistics director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as deputy chief of employees for logistics for the Army within the late Nineteen Seventies and early ’80s. He additionally participated within the desegregation of the army set up that will partially bear his title and was one of many first Black officers to hitch its officers’ membership.

In February 1953 throughout the Korean War, Lieutenant Cavazos charged via enemy mortar and gunfire, with “complete disregard for his personal safety,” to retrieve a wounded enemy soldier, incomes the younger officer a Silver Star. Three months later, Lieutenant Cavazos led three separate charges on enemy positions and returned to the sector 5 instances to rescue his wounded males — incomes him his first Distinguished Service Cross.

In Vietnam in 1967, Colonel Cavazos once more “completely disregarded his own safety” and led a cost “with such force and aggressiveness” that the enemy fighters fled their positions, incomes his second Distinguished Service Cross. Throughout his profession, General Cavazos additionally earned different awards and citations, together with two Legions of Merit, 5 Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart.

Fort Eisenhower (Fort Gordon, Ga.)

Dwight D. Eisenhower, basic of the Army

Dwight D. Eisenhower served because the supreme commander of allied forces in Africa and Europe throughout World War II — main the liberation of North Africa, the invasion of Italy and the D-Day landings. After the warfare, he was elected the 34th president of the United States, serving from 1953 to 1961.

Eisenhower soared via the Army ranks throughout the warfare, going from lieutenant colonel originally of 1941 to a four-star basic by February 1943. A yr later, he grew to become certainly one of solely 5 officers ever appointed as a five-star “general of the Army.”

Fort Novosel (Fort Rucker, Ala.)

Chief Warrant Officer Michael Novosel Sr.

In two excursions of responsibility in Vietnam, Michael Novosel Sr. rescued greater than 5,500 wounded troopers as a medevac pilot, incomes the Medal of Honor for one particularly heroic episode. One of these rescued troopers was his personal son, Michael Novosel Jr., an Army aviator whose helicopter was shot down in 1970. (Per week later, Michael Jr. returned the favor, rescuing his father from a disabled helicopter.)

Mr. Novosel, the son of Croatian immigrants, joined the Army Air Corps in 1941 and rose to the rank of captain by 1945, flying B-29 strategic bombers. He then transferred to the newly created Air Force and remained within the reserves till the Nineteen Sixties. When Mr. Novosel was denied an active-duty project to serve in Vietnam, he gave up his rank as a lieutenant colonel and joined the Army as a warrant officer and helicopter pilot.

In one rescue mission in 1969, Mr. Novosel rescued 29 South Vietnamese troopers below heavy enemy hearth. He and his crew had been compelled out of the touchdown zone six instances and needed to “circle and return from another direction to land and extract additional troops,” based on his Medal of Honor citation.

By the top of the day, his helicopter had been riddled with bullets. In his personal retelling of the episode throughout an interview with the Library of Congress, Mr. Novosel stated he was shot in his proper hand and leg throughout his final rescue of the day — momentarily inflicting him to lose management of the helicopter — however escaped alongside together with his crew and the final of his evacuees.

Fort Moore (Fort Benning, Ga.)

Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore and Julia Moore

Many Americans know Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore as the strict and resolute Colonel Moore performed by Mel Gibson in “We Were Soldiers,” the gritty and somber warfare movie that dramatized the 1965 Battle of Ia Drang in Vietnam. The basic’s spouse, Julia, performed by Madeleine Stowe within the film, had a major function on the house entrance throughout that battle.

On Nov. 14, 1965, Colonel Moore led his 450 troops to the notorious Landing Zone X-Ray, the place they had been ambushed by North Vietnamese troopers who outnumbered the Americans 12 to 1. Bloody hand-to-hand fight ensued, however Colonel Moore and his males held their positions for three days. Colonel Moore had vowed that he would go away nobody behind. He stored his promise, and his actions earned him the Distinguished Service Cross.

At the identical time, Ms. Moore supplied emotional assist to the households of the lifeless and wounded at Fort Benning. Death and damage notices had been despatched by telegram on the time, delivered by taxi drivers. Ms. Moore started accompanying the drivers and providing her condolences to the households. Her complaints and considerations led to the creation of the Army’s casualty notification teams, and uniformed soldiers now deliver the information of dying or damage to households.