Event in Pendleton honors the Triple Nickles, the nation’s first all-Black paratrooper battalion

An event in Pendleton this weekend will honor the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, also known as the Triple Nickles. Formed during WWII, the unit was the first all-Black paratrooper battalion in the U.S. military. The Nickles were stationed in Pendleton as part of Operation Firefly, a top-secret effort to intercept and disarm Japanese balloon bombs that were floated over the Pacific. The unit fought the wildfires caused by the balloons as some of the nation’s earliest smokejumpers, all while facing discrimination as service members and civilians.

Jordan Bednarz is the event coordinator and recruiting and retention director for the veterans support nonprofit All Airborne Battalion. Robert Bartlett is a retired educator from Eastern Washington who produced a documentary on the Triple Nickles. They join us to share more about the battalion’s history and its legacy.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end today with a conversation about the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, also known as the Triple Nickles. They formed during World War II as the first all-Black paratrooper battalion in the US military. They were stationed in Pendleton as part of Operation Firefly, a top-secret effort to intercept and disarm Japanese balloon bombs that were floated across the Pacific. They fought dozens of fires in the Northwest as some of the nation’s earliest smokejumpers, all while facing racial discrimination as both service members and as civilians.

The Triple Nickles are going to be honored at an event at the Pendleton Airport this Saturday. Jordan Bednarz is the event coordinator. He is a recruiting and retention director for All Airborne Battalion, a nonprofit that supports veterans. Robert Bartlett is a retired educator from Eastern Washington. He has spent the last decade researching the Triple Nickles. He is a life member of the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion Association. Welcome to Think Out Loud, to both of you.

Robert Bartlett: Thanks, David.

Jordan Bednarz: Thank you so much, Dave.

Miller: Robert Bartlett, how did you first hear about the Triple Nickles?

Bartlett: I first heard about them through our local newspaper here in Spokane, Washington. It was during Black History Month. They featured a story on the 555th, with a full spread picture of the unit in front of an aircraft. That’s how I heard about it, totally by surprise, given the fact that my family is prior military and combat veterans and I know a bit about military history.

Miller: What went through your mind when you first heard just some of the details about this battalion?

Bartlett: It was a bit of a culture shock. As I mentioned, I’m prior army. My war was Vietnam. My brother’s war was Vietnam. My father and his brother were combat medics in World War II, served in all-Black units. And my family goes back to the Civil War, with a great, great grandfather who fought in the Civil War. And so I grew up around Black men who were, (except for that one,) military veterans. And although they told war stories, they never mentioned this one. It was quite a shock, quite a surprise.

Miller: Jordan Bednarz, what about you? When did you first hear about the Triple Nickles?

Bednarz: Well, I had the opportunity to attend paratrooper school relatively early in my military career. And along the way, you start to learn the nomenclature, the flags, the heraldry of these units. We keep books of some of these units going forward. And so even the ones that are no longer currently in service, you can still see the unit insignia, the crests and whatnot. And you can’t help but look at that iconic image of the black panther against such a brilliant background, and you look at it, I don’t care what people you’re looking at, what other units’ patches are on there, that’s the one that catches your eye.

There’s a leadership award, later when I became a non-commissioned officer, called the Walter Morris Leadership Award, certainly one that I would never win, [I’m not] in the top 0.0001 percentile. But the thing that we strive for is to be the type of leader that Walter Morris was. And it’s no surprise that his origins came from the Triple Nickles.

Miller: Robert Bartlett, how and why was the 555th formed?

Bartlett: The 555th was formed, actually, under pressure. Roosevelt, being president, was being pressured by his Negro advisory committee to get more Black men involved in combat units serving overseas. He was getting a lot of political pressure to open up combat units to Black troops. So that was one of the major ones.

The second was there were no Black airborne troops in the army at that point, in 1944. So Roosevelt paid a visit to Fort Benning, which was the airborne school, still is. He’s quoted as asking, “where are your Black paratroopers?” And they said, “we don’t have any.” There was a Black service company that served across the street, and they were all Black troops that were serving white troops, doing laundry, patching holes in the street, guarding the gate, hauling ammunition. And they were strictly a service company. And once Roosevelt pressured the commander at Fort Benning to do something about this, because he was being pressured, they approached the senior non-commissioned officer at the time in the Black unit, which was Walter Morris that Jordan just spoke of. And said “We want to try this out. We want you to be the first, and we’re gonna call you a test platoon.”

And so Sergeant Walter Morris was allowed to take 19 other volunteers to become a test platoon, and see if they could cut it as airborne troops…

Miler: That was the racist question or assumption, “can these Black men do what these white men have been doing?” Was that a question within the US military?

Bartlett: Absolutely. As historians of World War II, especially Black ones, often point to, when bombs rained down on Pearl Harbor, not only was the nation partially racially divided, but so was the military. And as I mentioned, my father and uncle served in an all-Black army. So there was a lot of pressure to make this happen. Racism was rampant in the military, as well as in society.

Miller: I want to hear more about what happened eventually when they were formed and ended up in Pendleton. But I’m curious about, given that background, what kind of thought went into figuring out who the first members of the battalion were? And what was the training like?

Bartlett: The selection was left to Walter Morris, to go into the Black troops and hand pick 19 others to do this. There was betting among the white troops that the Black troops couldn’t cut it. Actual bets were made that these men would not jump out of aircraft, would not be able to cut the training to become airborne troops. These men, the 20, knew that what they were about to embark on was going to reflect on the ability of Black troops ever to become airborne, or ever serve in combat units. And so they felt the weight of all Black people in the country at that point to perform, and to succeed.

Miller: To zoom forward a little bit, my understanding is that they proved that they were absolutely up to the task of being paratroopers, but they never were sent to Europe or to the Pacific Theater. Why not?

Bartlett: Well, they not only passed and were awarded their silver wings at Benning, they were then told – the Black troops at that time, Walter Morris and the others, plus 16 Black officers that were also commissioned through airborne school and received their silver wings – to build this test platoon into a combat unit. That was on them. The soldiers then, the 555th men that were in this early stage, went down to Arizona to the 92nd, which was, and stayed for many years, an all-Black unit of combat veterans, one of the rare ones in the country at that time. Army. And they recruited men down there. They pushed them through a very rigorous set of criteria just to be able to volunteer. Because airborne, they’re the only volunteer unit in the military. You have to volunteer, and then you have to pass. And so they went down and recruited their numbers. And then they were sent to Camp Mackall, North Carolina. And that was going to be where they would do all of their advanced training, build their numbers into combat strength.

There were a couple of things happening at once. One, there was still a lot of racists among the military leadership at that time. I ran across a quote once, one of the white officers in charge of the theater in Europe, that “we don’t want to add more Black troops to this effort because we don’t want to deal with racism and fight a war at the same time.”

Miller: So Jordan, let’s zoom forward once again to Pendleton. How is it that the Triple Nickles were sent to Pendleton?

Bednarz: Well, as the Doc pointed out a second ago, and in answer to your question, how come these guys weren’t sent to Europe or how come they weren’t sent to the Pacific Theater, because the average American, if you ask them, “what is your concept of a paratrooper?”, they’re immediately gonna think Band of Brothers, the invasion of Normandy, they’re gonna think the invasion of Italy and the invasion of the Netherlands, Operation Market Garden. They always think Europe. But what they don’t realize is that there was a number of airborne operations that were conducted in the Pacific as well. And some of those operations were extremely low-level jumps, and very dangerous jumps. So, the Triple Nickles, for it to [inaudible]...

But the task that they are given is to ramp up what we call “rough aerial terrain” jumping, which means jumping in the mountains, jumping the trees, the exact entities that your training tells you to avoid. And now all of a sudden we’re gonna teach a school, and we’re gonna tell these guys how to actually jump into that with some degree of proficiency. And this was absolutely completely new technology. The first civilian-side smokejump didn’t even occur until 1939. In 1940, the United States of America spun up the United States Army Airborne School at Fort Benning. So we’re less than one year out from where in the entire world a smokejump ever took place. And only then was the United States spinning up regular infantry paratroopers, let alone specialized. [Inaudible]...to not only learn a very, very new technology in certain situations.

Once they arrived in Pendleton, and they have this new task ahead of them, they actually had to procure some of their own equipment. Because in the military, we have what’s called an MTOE, Modified Table of Organization Equipment, everything you need to get the job done. Well with this extremely new field, no one really had written a book on what do we need to do it?

Miller: So how much did these men know about their mission when they were sent to Eastern Oregon?

Bartlett: Smokejumping actually started in the United States in 1939. And there was a smokejumper program underway when the Triple Nickles came into being. However, during the war years, many of the men that were in the smokejumper program went into the military. And so Roosevelt brokered a deal with the peace churches – the Quakers, the Mennonites and so forth – that were pacifist, to open up an opportunity for them to serve their country by serving as smokejumpers. And this is important, because the smokejumper program was going on, it was run by conscientious objectors in a program called the Civilian Public Service (CPS).

And so when the men were at Camp Mackall training to go overseas, they had no idea that there even was a smokejumper program. But as I started to say before, the military was not really anxious to include these men in combat at that point. And so there were some major defeats that the US army was facing, a lot of casualties, thousands of casualties, most of them airborne. These men were ready to go, they thought for sure they would get their ticket punched and be sent overseas. But the Russians invaded, and things started turning the other way.

At the time that this was all happening, the military was keeping it quiet that we were literally bombed by the Japanese using these balloon bombs, Fu-Gos And so they kept that quiet. Well, here they had at Camp Mackall 300+ Black airborne troops, and no overseas mission for them. The men received classified orders in the spring of 1945 to report to Pendleton. Classified orders, they had no idea that there was a bomb threat going on by the Japanese, nor did they know for sure where they were going. They were just told to load a troop train, and “your destination is Pendleton.” And some of the men talked about “Hey, maybe we’re going to Japan, fight with MacArthur. We’re heading in the right direction.”

So they were surprised once they arrived in Pendleton to learn that, no, their duty station was going to be Pendleton, and that they were going to be cross trained by a few smokejumpers to do wildland firefighting duty. They were not equipped to do this job; they were equipped to be airborne infantry. So it was a total new thing for them to learn the mission, and then to figure out how they were going to do the mission given that they were being supplied normal military gear to fight as infantry. And wildland firefighting smokejumpers require a whole different, not only set of skills, but equipment, all the way down to the uniform and the letdown ropes. They were given a crash course in how to be wildland firefighters. Then they were told about these balloon bombs, and they were taught by the army to disarm the bombs or dispose of them once they came across them.

So that’s how they ended up in Pendleton, unaware of what was going to happen. They were rapidly cross trained. They were given the opportunity to create their own uniforms, their own jump gear, and everything. So they just made due with what they could get their hands on to do this different job of smokejumping.

Miller: What have you heard about what their lives were like, either within the military structure in Pendleton, or, say, on off duty days when they were just maybe in the city itself?

Bartlett: When I give presentations on the Triple Nickles, which I had been doing since about 2015, I always title them the same: “Jumping Into Fire.” Because these men literally jumped into the fires of racism. Not only racism in the military, they were treated horribly. But also in civilian life, among civilians, wherever they traveled. My father told the story of getting on a bus in uniform in the States with his buddies, and having to go to the back of the bus because that was the colored section. But as they were going to the back of the bus, there were empty seats in the front, and a few white men in the front of the bus. Well when they sat down in the back of the bus, they looked forward and noticed that some of the men in the front of the bus were German prisoners of war. Some of these Triple Nickles also told similar stories, that prisoners of war were treated with much more respect and had more rights than even the men of the Triple Nickles.

In Pendleton, this was again in 1945, no shame on them, but there were places they could not eat, there were hotels they could not stay in, there were bars that they could not frequent. There’s a story I captured of a USO event in town, and they were invited to come because there were very few white military folks there at the time. And so they were invited to use the USO club. They were there early. White troops came in the front door, and immediately turned around and went out the back door. They didn’t want to associate with them.

So, wherever they went, unfortunately, because it was the time that it was, they had to fight the fires of racism as well as wildland fires. And unfortunately, as you alluded to, I have many stories of things that happened to them in that regard.

Miller: Jordan Bednarz, what can folks expect in terms of the event this Saturday at the Pendleton Airport?

Bednarz: Well, we were going to come in and just do a mere legacy jump, as tribute to the Triple Nickles. But an opportunity presented itself by having Dr. Bartlett come online. The US Forest Service came online, with a number of smokejumpers coming down, plus their modern aircraft. And then the Oregon National Guard came down with a Chinook and a firefighting bucket and the personnel to explain it. So we now not only have the fusion of telling the story of the Triple Nickles and their origins, but also the evolution into modern smokejumping. And so many people have put great efforts into this. Dr. Bartlett, I can’t thank you enough for literally being the compass that’s given us the path to follow here.

It’s a family friendly event and we hope that folks come out with their entire family units. We have food trucks up there. It’s gonna be a great affair.

Miller: Jordan Bednarz and Robert Bartlett, thanks very much.

Bednarz: Thank you.

Bartlett: You’re welcome.

Miller: Jordan Bednarz and Robert Bartlett joined us. Jordan Bednarz is the event coordinator for the event this Saturday at the Pendleton Airport to celebrate the Triple Nickles. They were the Pendleton-based, very first all-Black paratrooper battalion in the U.S. military. Robert Bartlett is a retired educator. He has spent a decade now as a historian and champion of this battalion.

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