'It's an American story': A retired Spokane educator tells the story of the 'Triple Nickles,' Black history and World War II heroism in the Pacific Northwest

Feb. 18—Retired educator Robert L. "Bob" Bartlett watched earlier this month as the nation's focus was directed back to World War II and the Japanese bombing of America with balloons, and an omission ate at him.

As pundits discussed mysterious and potential enemy objects in the sky, Bartlett, a retired professor who holds a doctorate in leadership studies, turned to a story he's been teaching the public about for nearly a decade. While much of the American public was kept unaware of the existence of the explosives carried across the Pacific by inflatables made of mulberry paper in the early months of 1945, a unit of 300 well-trained, Black paratroopers was being dropped out of the sky in Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho and Montana to squelch any fires and defuse any bombs.

They were the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, and they were the first all-Black paratrooper unit in the United States military. They called themselves the "Triple Nickles," a nod to the 555th Battalion of the 92nd Infantry Division from which many of the parachutists were recruited. The 92nd had ties to the Buffalo Soldiers, all-Black units formed immediately following the Civil War.

"It's a Pacific Northwest story, it's a West Coast story," said Bartlett, an Army veteran who first learned of the soldiers in a 2014 article published in Parade magazine. "It's a Black story, but it's an American story."

Since his introduction to the history, Bartlett — who taught at Gonzaga and Eastern Washington universities in a career that spanned more than two decades — has traveled across the region, sharing the story of troops who jumped out of planes to fight fires up and down the coast during the summer and fall of 1945.

Bartlett's research has resulted in a short-form documentary film, called "Jumping into the Fire," that won an award at the 2022 Spokane International Film Festival, a collaboration with director Chase Ogden. In partnership with other researchers on "smokejumping," the practice of fighting wildfires using trained parachutists in remote areas of the West, Bartlett has pieced together a flight log and map of all of the jumps — totaling more than 30 — made between July 18, 1945, and Oct. 30, 1945. A control center for jumpers in Pendleton, Oregon, was established in Silver Lake, Washington, where a veteran smokejumper and historian named Mark Corbet found and transcribed the call logs. Among the fires Bartlett's documented are blazes in Whitman County and near Colville.

"It's been very hard to do this work," said Bartlett, who believes more records are out there that could tell the complete story of the Triple Nickles in the West.

Two competing forces have kept the story from being told — the desire to keep the Japanese attacks under wraps, and the decision to send the all-Black battalion to Oregon in the first place, and away from fighting in Europe and Asia in a military that would not be integrated for another three years.

Operation Firefly

New Jersey native Bradley Biggs would later say the men of the 555th had no idea what their orders would be when they rode by train to Oregon from Camp Mackall in North Carolina in May 1945.

"In any event, questions of rank and experience disappeared when a more immediate one came up: What are we going to be doing in Oregon?" Biggs, who would attain the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Army, wrote in his 1986 memoir that bears the name of the paratrooper unit. "Some thought we might actually be on our way to combat in the Pacific."

The outfit had been formed at Fort Benning, Georgia, a couple of years earlier when President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited the base and asked of the parachute school's commanding officer where his Black paratroopers were located, according to popular legend. Those Black soldiers were relegated to service companies, helping outfit and prepare the white soldiers at the base for combat missions.

The Black men who signed up to be trained to jump out of airplanes for combat were well aware of the pressures of being trailblazers, Bartlett said.

"If you're nonwhite, you know you have to go to every extreme to be better," Bartlett said. "That made them even more eager to get the best of the best."

Bartlett imagines the disappointment, then, when the soldiers arrived at Camp Pendleton, finding a base with a small engineering presence and a control tower team. They were told they'd be fighting fires, not Japanese, but their targets would still be part of the war effort. By working in secret, the 555th would keep the Japanese from learning how successful their launches of the "Fu-Go" balloon bombs had been.

"The mission was soon clear enough," Biggs, who died in 2004, wrote in his memoir. "Working in teams out of Pendleton, we would be on emergency call to rush to forest fires in any of the several Western states and join with the forest service men in suppressing the blaze. At the same time, we would be prepared to move into areas where there were suspected Japanese bombs, cordon off the area, locate the bombs, and dispose of them."

The mission was called Operation Firefly.

Bartlett doesn't know how many, or if any, bombs were defused by the crews. Referred to as "paper" in official after-action reports to obscure their existence, the balloon bombs stopped being launched from Japan in spring 1945 as American bombing raids hindered their production. But what is clear is that the mission showed off the bravery of men whose job changed in an instant, but whose resolve remained.

The danger of that job became apparent months later.

A death in the field

A bomb had been responsible for the deaths of a woman and five children near Bly, Oregon, in May 1945, though headlines across the country (and in Spokane) identified the incident as a "mystery blast." Later that summer, the Triple Nickles lost one of their own to an injury sustained while trying to get down from a tree.

Pfc. Malvin Brown, a combat medic who was in smokejumper training, volunteered to take the place of an ill colleague on a jump near Lemon Butte in what is now the Umpqua National Forest in Oregon. It was Aug. 6, 1945.

"He died the same day we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima," Bartlett pointed out.

Injuries were common among the jumpers. One of two after-action reports Bartlett has been able to find lists casualties for a drop in Chelan National Forest near Twisp on Aug. 23. The smokejumping mission continued even after the Japanese surrender. Six injuries were reported — mostly bruises to the arms and other extremities.

The report details the confusion between Forest Service personnel, who were used to jumping in small groups to fight fires, and the efforts of the paratroopers, trained to jump from larger C-47 aircraft and in formation. The equipment that the men would need, including food, was dropped at an eight-hour march from where they camped, wrote 2nd Lt. William F. Buford, the group leader, in his after-action report.

"For two nights the men were forced to sleep in the driving rain without cover," Buford wrote.

Another way in which smokejumping was distinct from paratrooper landing is that the jumpers wanted to land in the trees, Bartlett said. They were visible from the air, while clearings could be full of rocks and other unstable debris that would make a landing tricky or dangerous. The 555th had to learn this quickly from the Forest Service at Pendleton.

"These guys got rushed through in two weeks," Bartlett said. "It's amazing more people didn't die."

Corbet, another smokejumper historian with whom Bartlett has worked, wrote the definitive account of Brown's death in the July 2006 edition of Smokejumper Magazine, published by the National Smokejumper Association. Corbet surmises from reports and interviews with other members of the squad that Brown must have landed at "the top of a very tall, leaning fir tree" that prevented him from climbing down on a 50-foot length of rope the jumpers carried in their packs.

"Having not yet completed his training, he may not have learned how to tie a knot in his rope so he could hang there until help arrived," Corbet, who was a smokejumper on more than 300 fires while based in Oregon during a 30-year career, wrote. Corbet died in 2021.

Bartlett received word just last month that the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, a federal body tasked with standardizing the titles of geographic features for the U.S. Geological Survey, had approved a request to rename a mountain near where Brown died. Previously known as Negro Ridge, the mountain at elevation 4,652 feet in the Umpqua Forest was changed to Malvin Brown Ridge on Jan. 12.

It took decades to determine where Brown's body was buried, in a cemetery in Baltimore, and for the Army veteran to get recognition and a proper military burial. It's that remembrance, and a desire to tell the stories of the other men in the 555th, that pushes Bartlett to continue repeating his story.

War stories

The stitched-on patch of the parachute indicates it's a Type 7 camouflage chute, made by the Hayes Manufacturing Corp. in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

"This parachute was in a box. It was deployed," Bartlett said. "The guy didn't know what it was."

A smokejumping friend from Missoula, Bruce Ford, was able to repack the chute, including replacing the panel on its back that had been torn off when the parachute was deployed. The parachute came with an official log tucked inside a pocket that indicated it was first packed at Pendleton in 1945 in service of the 555th.

It's now part of a set that includes jump boots, a duty pack, a reserve chute and more.

Bartlett, an Army veteran who served in Vietnam, also has relatives and a dad who served in the military. His father was trained as a combat medic, just like Brown, during World War II.

"They never told war stories," Bartlett said, "but the stories they told were about the treatment."

That included being loaded on a bus with other white soldiers, and German prisoners of war, and being told to find a place at the back.

One of the Triple Nickles, a Connecticut native named Ted "Tiger" Lowry, told a similar story to an interviewer about his training in North Carolina before being sent to Pendleton. He spoke of German and Italian prisoners of war, white men, laughing at him as he was relegated to the back of a bus.

"There, in the South, I found out I was Black," Lowry told the interviewer of the experience, an exchange recounted in Tanya Lee Stone's 2013 book, "Courage Has No Color: The True Story of the Triple Nickles, America's First Black Paratroopers."

Now, Bartlett said, he's trying to find support to turn his short-length documentary into a feature film.

Something that's befitting of the 555th, and its men, who would later go on to integrate and serve with paratrooper units in subsequent wars.

Bartlett recalls being a young man, and asking his dad why he decided to serve for a country that had treated their people poorly: "He said, 'Son, it's the only country we have.' "