The Smokejumpers

Walter Morris didn’t enlist in the Army in 1941 to be a garrison soldier. Neither did the 30 other black men assigned to his service company at Fort Bragg, N.C. Morris’ men guarded the school where white soldiers were training as paratroopers, and they needed motivation.

So every evening, the 23-year-old sergeant double-timed his troops to the calisthenics training field and put them through the same PT program given the white trainees. Then he led them to the school’s mock airplanes, where they practiced paratrooper exits.

Their activities didn’t go unnoticed. School commander Lt. Gen. Ridgely Gaither summoned Morris to his office and informed him that his platoon would become an Army airborne unit, with Morris its first sergeant. 

“My men were servants prior to that,” Morris says. “Now they were going to be paratroopers. It showed in their attitudes, their uniforms, how they addressed you.”

The test platoon, as it was termed, remained segregated. “We had our own separate tables where we ate,” Morris recalls. “We had separate barracks where we slept. And we had (white) enlisted men and officers betting – actually betting – that we could not stand the rigorous four-week training program and that we would not jump out of airplanes.”

But jump they did, with gusto. And after the test platoon soldiers earned their wings, the gates opened to other volunteers. By January 1945, the unit – designated the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion – had nearly 400 battle-ready officers and men. Its soldiers referred to themselves as the “Triple Nickles.” 

But the European war was winding down, and soon the 555th was downsized to a reinforced company of eight officers and 160 men. 

In late April, the Triple Nickles received mysterious orders transferring them to an air base in Pendleton, Ore. Barracks betting favored the idea that this was the first step toward the 555th heading to the Pacific, where the war with Japan still raged. They were ready for the Japanese, but not for the next surprise.

The Japanese had begun lofting incendiary-laden balloons into the jet stream, where they were carried to the North American continent. The government feared that those balloon bombs, coupled with normal summer lightning, would ignite major fires in Northwest forests.

The Forest Service had been parachuting men to forest fires since 1940, but by 1945 most regular smokejumpers were in the military services. A small cadre of conscientious objectors had volunteered to replace them. The Triple Nickles would augment the group as air-delivered firefighters in a joint military/Forest Service project dubbed “Operation Firefly.”

The Japanese balloon campaign began in June 1944. Of some 9,300 launched, it’s estimated that 1,000 balloons made it to North America, landing from Alaska to Mexico and as far east as Michigan. 

The U.S. government kept a lid on the story, and the news media cooperated. The Japanese never learned that even a single balloon reached U.S. shores and killed the program in April 1945. But the regular fire season was starting, and the attacks might resume. The Forest Service and military geared up for a potentially dangerous summer. 

At Pendleton, the men were issued two-piece jump suits made of soft leather, gear similar to that worn by bomber crews. The jackets’ high collars were stiffened with stitched duck, and trousers were reinforced with webbing. They traded their steel pots for leather football helmets with wire face masks and were issued 50-foot ropes for let-downs from trees.

A battalion officer, Lt. Col. Bradley Briggs, recalled the mission in a unit history. “We knew how to jump from airplanes,” he wrote, “but the heavily forested areas of the Northwest presented drop zones that were more difficult and dangerous than any we had faced before. We were used to explosives, but we had little if any experience in the disarming of bombs. Firefighting was, of course, an entirely new experience.”

After three training jumps with their new gear, a group was dispatched to Chico, Calif., to provide coverage for nearby forests, and a contingent was retained at Pendleton for fires in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana.

From mid-July to early October 1945, the black smokejumpers participated in 36 missions. Individual jumps totaled more than 1,200. The first smokejumper killed in the line of duty was a Triple Nickle, Malvin Brown, a medic who died Aug. 9 while attempting a let-down from a tree. More than 30 suffered injuries.

By late autumn, Operation Firefly was ending. “But more important, a rapid demobilization of the military was underway,” Briggs wrote. “Civilians would resume many operations that had been assigned to military units, including ours.” 

Six months before President Harry Truman signed the executive order integrating all services, the Triple Nickles were merged into the 82nd Airborne Division – the first black unit to integrate the Army.

The Forest Service remembers the men’s sacrifice and contributions. In 1994, several surviving members of the unit were honored guests on the Mall in Washington as thousands celebrated Smokey Bear’s 50th birthday. In February 2013, the agency dedicated one of the meeting rooms in its Washington headquarters to the unit’s men.  

Carl Gidlund is a former smokejumper, Vietnam War veteran and member of American Legion Post 14 in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

Learn more about the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion online: www.triplenickle.com