Vernon Joseph Baker

1919—

U.S. Army soldier

On January 13, 1997, the U.S. government delivered belated recognition to some unheralded heroes of World War II. In a small ceremony at the White House, seven World War II veterans received the Congressional Medal of Honor. They were the first African-American veterans of that war to receive the nation's highest military award. More than half a century had passed since the war, and six of the seven honorees were dead. The sole survivor to receive his medal in person was Vernon Joseph Baker. In decorating Baker and his fellow veterans, President Bill Clinton said, "They were denied their nation's highest honor, but their deeds could not be denied, and they cleared the way to a better world."

Vernon Baker was born on December 17, 1919, in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Both his parents were killed in an auto accident when he was four years old. He and his sisters were raised by their grandparents, and in his stern and husky grandfather, Joseph Baker, he found a figure to idolize.

Joseph Baker gave his grandson his first gun as a Christmas present, when the boy was twelve. For every shot he fired, his grandfather insisted, he must bring home meat for the family. Baker quickly mastered marksmanship. He graduated from high school, while working summers on the Union Pacific railroad. He was twenty when his grandfather died. With limited prospects for employment, he decided to enlist in the army because he had heard he could make a decent living as a quartermaster. When he went to enlist, however, a racist recruiting officer told him, "We have no quotas for you people."

Undeterred, Baker tried again. He requested a post with the Quartermaster Corps, then watched the recruiting officer write on his enlistment form, "Infantry." Baker held his tongue, happy just to have been accepted. He married his sweetheart, Leola, on June 25, 1941, and left the next day for basic training.

Arrived at the Italian Front

After Baker went through basic training in Texas, he was sent to Officer Candidate School in Georgia. In the Deep South, Baker experienced racial animosity surpassing anything he had encountered in Wyoming. During World War II the army was segregated, and Baker endured harsh discrimination from whites both above and beneath his rank. He was abused by enlisted whites after he was promoted to sergeant; some whites refused to respect his rank or obey orders from him. Commissioned in early 1943 as a second lieutenant, Baker was assigned to the Ninety-second Infantry Division, named the Buffalo Division, after the African-American "buffalo soldiers" of the Native American wars. Serving in a black unit under white officers rankled the young lieutenant. "The army decided we needed supervision from white Southerners," Baker told Allan Mikaelian, "as if war was plantation work and fighting Germans was picking cotton." He gradually earned the respect of the men under his command.

Half a million African Americans served overseas during World War II. Baker's unit stayed out of the war until July of 1944, when he landed in Naples, Italy. For several months, he went on night patrols as a platoon leader. By October they had moved north into Tuscany. Under orders to capture a farmhouse near Seravezza, he sent three men ahead of him along the path to the house. All three were killed, and Baker was haunted by his responsibility. Baker himself was wounded in the same operation. At first, he did not feel the bullet that struck his wrist, and he carried on until his men had taken the house. He woke up in a hospital near Pisa, and was out of action for two months.

In early April of 1945, Baker and the Buffalo Division were in the foothills of the Apuan Alps. Joining them was the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, comprising Japanese Americans who had escaped the internment camps by volunteering for the armed services. The Germans were holding Castle Aghinolfi, a mountain fortress dating back to medieval times. Below the castle were three hills that the Americans called hills X, Y, and Z. The U.S. forces launched a major offensive to capture the garrison and suffered heavy casualties as the dug-in Germans repelled several assaults.

Penetrated Enemy Lines

On April 5, Baker and his men were ordered to attack the castle. Baker started uphill at the head of his platoon before dawn. He took his M-1, but declined to put on his helmet, which impaired his hearing. Soon he spotted two figures crouching in a machine-gun nest. He shot them, and his men advanced. He observed, and destroyed, another machine-gun position and an observation post, and walked on ahead of all his men. As he went, he used wire cutters to destroy the enemy's communication lines.

The castle was now one deep canyon away; Baker had come closer than anyone on his side expected. His company's new commander, Captain Runyon, caught up with him on the hill. A German soldier appeared and tossed a grenade, which failed to explode. Runyon jostled Baker's rifle in his panic, but Baker recovered and shot the fleeing German. In the meantime, Runyon had disappeared.

Baker pressed on alone. He came dangerously near one camouflaged dugout, whose crew had paused for breakfast. He killed these enemy soldiers. Mortar shells began to fall and hit his men. Over the radio, his unit called in for support, but commanders refused to believe they had penetrated so far past enemy lines. Baker found Runyon hiding in a stone house. The captain said he was going back for reinforcements, but he never returned. Later, Baker learned that Runyon had told command that Baker's men would not survive.

While waiting for reinforcements, Baker decided to set up a perimeter and attempt to hold their position. This was a fatal error, he admitted in retrospect. After a fierce German counterattack, the unit was down to eight men. Baker collected the dog tags from his dead comrades, and watched for the reinforcements until he realized they were not coming. Then he led a retreat back down hill X, taking out two machine gunners and a tank along the way.

That was Baker's final day in combat. He had lost nineteen of his men, but the attack was a decisive victory. The Germans pulled out that night. One month later, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler were both dead, and the war in Europe was over.

The experience left Baker bitter and angry. He had experienced the futility of warfare. He would never stop regretting the deaths he might have prevented, among the Germans as well as his own men. What rankled him most of all was that he had gotten no thanks, no recognition that his men had surpassed all expectations, and no apology for the failure to send reinforcements.

On July 4, 1945, Baker received the Distinguished Service Cross for his bravery, the nation's second-highest military award. He had been recommended for the Medal of Honor, it turned out, but the paperwork was never forwarded to Washington, and Baker was never told.

At a Glance …

Born on December 17, 1919, in Cheyenne, WY; son of Manuel Caldera and Beulah Baker; raised by grandparents, Joseph Samuel Baker and Dora Baker; married Leola, 1941 (divorced); married Fern Brown, 1953-86 (deceased); married Heidy Pawlik, 1993; children: two.

Career: Enlisted in U.S. Army, 1941; commissioned January 11, 1943; fought in Italian campaign during World War II, 1945; reached rank of First Lieutenant; retired 1965; American Red Cross, counselor to military families, 1968-87.

Awards: Bronze Star, Purple Heart, Distinguished Service Cross, 1945; Congressional Medal of Honor, 1997.

Addresses: Home—St. Maries, ID.

Facing uncertain job prospects back home and divorced from his wife, Baker elected to remain in the military after the war. He remained in Italy for two years, and reenlisted when his commission expired in 1947. He volunteered for combat duty at the start of the Korean War in 1950, but he was not assigned to a battle unit. The army was preparing for desegregation and needed decorated minority officers such as Baker to assume command positions. When desegregation became effective in 1951, Baker became a company commander in charge of white troops at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

In 1953 Baker married Fern Brown, a divorcee with two daughters. They moved to California when Baker was transferred to Fort Ord, and there they had another daughter. The final addition to their family was an orphan, half-Korean and half-black, whom Baker adopted while serving in postwar Korea.

After his retirement from the military in 1968, Baker worked for the Red Cross for nearly twenty years counseling military families. Among the places this work took him was Vietnam, during the height of that country's long war. His wife died in 1986, and Baker retired to a small property in a part of rural Idaho that reminded him of his childhood years in Wyoming. He married Heidy Pawlik, a native of Germany, in 1993.

Recognized for War Service

In the winter of 1996 Baker received a phone call from historian Daniel Gibran, who had been awarded a grant to investigate why no African Americans had received the Medal of Honor for service during World War II. Gibran's study found clear evidence of a racial disparity in the selection of Medal of Honor winners. On Gibran's recommendation, a panel of generals reviewed the records of ten Distinguished Service Cross recipients; that review led to the White House ceremony belatedly honoring Baker and the six deceased veterans. That month Baker was swamped with attention from the news media. One journalist, Ken Olsen of the Spokane Spokesman-Review, wrote a series of profiles of Baker, and later collaborated with him on the memoir Lasting Valor.

As President Clinton spoke of Baker's heroic actions on the Italian front, Baker's mind returned to Hill X, and to the nineteen men he lost that day. While Baker continued to brood over how he could have prevented their deaths, he told the Public Broadcasting System that, to him, receiving the belated Medal of Honor meant "that every black solider that fought in the Second World War has been vindicated, every one."

Selected writings

(With Ken Olsen) Lasting Valor, Bantam, 1999.

Sources

Books

Mikaelian, Allen, Medal of Honor, Hyperion, 2002.

Smith, Larry, Beyond Glory, Norton, 2003.

Periodicals

New York Times, January 14, 1997.

Online

"Idaho: A Portrait—Vernon Baker,"Public Broadcasting System,http://idahoptv.org/productions/idahoportrait/about/baker.html (accessed December 27, 2007).

Kelly, S. H., "Seven WWII Vets to Receive Medals of Honor," Army News Service,http://www4.army.mil/ocpa/read.php?story_id_key=2187 (accessed December 27, 2007).

—Roger K. Smith