Members from the Buffalo Soldiers Motorcycle Club of West Point pose in front of the newly unveiled Buffalo Soldier Monument Statue on Sept. 10 at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, NY. (Jorge Garcia/U.S. Military Academy)
Three months after the World War II battle at the Cinquale Canal in northwest Italy, searchers with the U.S. Army’s Graves Registration Service found the body of an American soldier buried in an isolated location.
It was actually half a body. The chest, head and arms were missing, a testament to the brutality of the fighting between the Germans and the regiments of the African American 92nd Infantry Division. Enemy artillery, mortars and machine guns cut down scores of Black soldiers.
Especially hard hit was Company L of the 366th Regiment, which lost 13 men that day, including Pfc. Lemuel Dent Jr., from Charles County, Md., whose body was lost in the aftermath of the fighting.
But this month, the Pentagon’s agency that works to account for missing service members announced that 79 years after the Feb. 8, 1945, battle, the remains in the grave have been identified as those of Dent.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) said the identification was part of an ongoing project to account for the roughly 50 men from the 92nd Division who were listed as missing in action during World War II.
The 92nd was called the Buffalo Division, after a name initially given to African American soldiers who served in the western United States in the late 1800s.
In World War II, the division was criticized by the Army for its poor performance in battle. But historians have said it was poorly trained, poorly led and largely unready when it was thrown into the fighting in Italy in 1944 and ’45. “These individuals were serving in a segregated military, in which they were not treated as the other soldiers,” said DPAA forensic anthropologist Traci Van Deest, who heads the 92nd Division project.
“They were not treated with the same type of honor and respect,” she said in a video interview. It’s important that their lives are remembered and their stories are told now, she said.
Dent, who was 30 when he was killed and hailed from rural Ironsides, Md., is only the fourth soldier from the division to be identified, and the first one in five years, the DPAA said.
When the remains in the grave were found near the battlefield on May 5, 1945, the Army believed the soldier had been a member of the 92nd Division. But there was no way at the time to make an identification.
The body was designated “unknown” and buried in what is now the Florence American Cemetery, just south of the Italian city.
In June 2022, the Department of Defense and the American Battle Monuments Commission exhumed the remains for forensic analysis, the DPAA said. Most of the 92nd Division’s missing are buried in the Florence cemetery.
The remains were taken to the DPAA’s laboratory at Offutt Air Force Base outside Omaha for anthropological study. Examination of the bones suggested they might be from a person similar to Dent in stature. He was 5 feet 5 inches tall.
The bones also showed evidence of blunt trauma and projectile trauma that can be consistent with blast incidents, Van Deest said.
DNA was extracted from one of the thigh bones, and experts in the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System matched it with DNA samples from members of Dent’s family to make the identification, the DPAA said. Members of his family could not be reached for comment. In the 1930 Census, Lemuel Dent Jr., then 16, and his father and two brothers were described as “wood cutters.” In 1940, the census listed the elder Dent as a farmer.
There were many other Dents in the community, according to the census, and in subsequent years, several - including Lemuel Jr. - appear to have moved north from rural Maryland.
When he entered the Army in 1941, he had been living in Linwood, Pa., a small industrial town south of Philadelphia, according to government records and the Chester Times newspaper.
When he was killed, the newspaper reported that he had been employed by the nearby American Viscose Corporation, a firm that made rayon in a plant on the Delaware River.
Dent’s 92nd Division was mostly made up of Black soldiers and White officers - except for the 366th Regiment, which had officers of color. Company L was commanded by Capt. Wejay S. Bundara, who was of Indian descent and a graduate of Howard University.
The Americans were fighting in Italy to drive out powerful armed forces of Nazi Germany, which was allied with fascist Italy during the war.
Dent was riding on a tank as he and his company crossed the shallow Cinquale Canal where it emptied into the Ligurian Sea on Italy’s northwest coast.
The tank hit a mine. The Germans caught the Americans in the open, and with mortars, machine guns and artillery, they killed Dent and 12 other soldiers from Company L.
Part of the battle was described by Company I’s Lt. Dennette Harrod of Washington, D.C.: The tanks had stopped on the beach, some hit by artillery, some knocked out by mines. … I don’t know how we did it, but we kept moving up, through all that shelling and mortar and machine-gun fire, losing killed and wounded every step of the way. After the battle, the Black soldiers were withdrawn from action and criticized by the Army brass.
“The infantry of this division lacks the emotional and mental stability necessary for combat,” said Lt. Gen. Lucian K. Truscott Jr., according to Hondon B. Hargrove’s 1985 book, “Buffalo Soldiers in Italy.”
Seven hundred men from the 92nd Division gave their lives in Italy, the DPAA said, and thousands more were wounded. Almost half of the men still unaccounted for are from the 366th Regiment.
Two men from the division, 1st Lts. Vernon J. Baker and John R. Fox, were given the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor, in 1997.
Fox was killed in action. He had called in an artillery strike on his own position as the enemy swarmed around him. When the gunners hesitated, he ordered: “Fire it! There’s more of them than there are of us.”
