Camp Hood opened on September 18, 1942, on land that some 300 farming and ranching families had been given very little time to leave. At times as many as 100,000 soldiers trained there. The Army named it for the Confederate general John Bell Hood and built it to train tank destroyer crews. A year later, on September 15, 1943, a different kind of armored unit arrived. The 761st Tank Battalion had been activated in Louisiana in April 1942 with Black enlisted men, and at Camp Hood it traded its light Stuart tanks for medium Shermans.
Two years of waiting
The men trained for almost two years, while white units, the Fort Hood Sentinel notes, were sent overseas after two or three months. Gen. Lesley McNair, who commanded Army Ground Forces, argued that the Army could not afford to leave such manpower out of combat, and pressure from the Black press, the NAACP and CORE helped open armor to Black soldiers. A 2015 Texas House resolution honoring Capt. Philip Latimer, one of six white officers who joined in 1943, says the battalion often outmaneuvered white units in exercises, and that off duty its soldiers met prejudice.
The bus
One of its few Black officers was Second Lt. Jackie Robinson, commissioned at Fort Riley, Kansas, on January 28, 1943, and later assigned to the 761st at Camp Hood. By July 1944 he was having an ankle treated at McCloskey General Hospital in Temple. The Military Officers Association says that on the evening of July 6 he boarded an Army shuttle bus, sat beside a fellow officer's wife, and ignored the driver's order to move to the back, believing Jim Crow did not apply on Army vehicles. Military police took him into custody and he was charged, among other counts, with insubordination.
Col. Paul Bates, the battalion's commander, refused to sign the charges. Robinson was transferred to the 758th Tank Battalion, whose commander did. His court-martial opened on August 2, 1944, and after about four and a half hours of testimony he was acquitted on every charge. The 761st had been ordered overseas on June 9, and Robinson did not go with it. He was honorably discharged that November.
What the Panthers did
The battalion landed at Omaha Beach on October 10, 1944, and joined Patton's Third Army. It fought 183 straight days, where other tank battalions typically rotated out after ten to fifteen, according to the Killeen Daily Herald, and was sent to help the 101st Airborne at Bastogne in December. Patton pinned a Silver Star on Pvt. Ernest A. Jenkins of New York. Staff Sgt. Ruben Rivers received the Medal of Honor posthumously on January 13, 1997. President Carter presented the battalion a Presidential Unit Citation on January 24, 1978, and a monument to it was dedicated at Fort Hood in 2005.
That monument stands on the post, where visitors need base access. In Temple, where the hospital stood, the Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum keeps the town's story, and in Killeen the marker for Lt. Gen. Andrew Davis Bruce honors the officer who first commanded Camp Hood.