Baker, Vernon Joseph
1919-2010 · Contribution: 1945-1997
Received the Medal of Honor in 1997 for valor at Castle Aghinolfi, Italy, in April 1945 — one of seven Black WWII veterans whose Distinguished Service Crosses were upgraded after a 1990s Army-commissioned study found systemic racial discrimination had denied Black soldiers fair consideration for the medal during the war
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Impact on the world
Leading his weapons platoon in a pre-dawn assault on the German stronghold of Castle Aghinolfi on April 5-6, 1945, Baker personally destroyed three machine-gun nests, an observation post, and a dugout, accounting for nine enemy dead, then volunteered to lead a battalion advance through minefields the following night despite losing two-thirds of his platoon; he received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army's second-highest honor, but not the Medal of Honor, despite his men's belief he deserved it. A 1993-96 study by Shaw University, commissioned by the Army to investigate why none of the 1.2 million Black Americans who served in WWII had received the Medal of Honor, found a climate of pervasive discrimination; of ten recommended cases, seven were approved, and on January 13, 1997, Baker — the only one of the seven still living — received the Medal of Honor personally from President Bill Clinton, who upgraded his Distinguished Service Cross fifty-two years after the battle that earned it.
Life & background
Born December 17, 1919, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and orphaned at four after his parents died in a car accident, Baker was raised by his grandparents and spent time at Father Flanagan's Boys Town in Nebraska before graduating high school in Clarinda, Iowa, in 1937 and working as a railroad porter. Rejected by an Army recruiter in April 1941 who told him “we don't have any quotas for you people,” he was accepted by a different recruiter two months later, trained at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, with the all-Black 25th Infantry, and was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1943 after officer candidate school, joining the all-Black 92nd Infantry Division's 370th Infantry Regiment in Italy in 1944. After the war he remained in the Army as a paratrooper, served in the Korean War commanding an all-white airborne company, and retired in 1968 after 27 years of service, later working two decades for the Red Cross. He died of cancer on July 13, 2010, in St. Maries, Idaho, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery; reflecting on the decades-late honor, he said, “I wish there were 19 men there sitting behind me. They are the ones who should have been there.”
Sources
- National Park Service; National WWII Museum; Congressional Medal of Honor Society
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