Just a month before the end of World War I, Army Sgt. William Adair was in Montfaucon, France when his unit came under savage artillery attack. Assigned to Company C, 315th Field Signal Battalion, 90th Division, Adair was responsible for the unit’s fragile communication lines, simple spools of telephone line run from their position. 

As artillery rained down all around him, Adair manned the lines despite the shells and even gas. 

“After being severely gassed, Sergeant Adair stayed at his post and ran his telephone lines,” reads Adair’s Distinguished Service Cross citation. “Through a terrific artillery barrage, he remained on duty, though he was blinded and could hardly talk, until his organization was relieved.”

Though awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, Adaire is one of 25 Native American service members that a review panel believes may deserve the nation’s highest valor award, the Medal of Honor. Adair was one of 12,000 American Indian and Alaska Native servicemen who served during WWI when systemic racial discrimination was a daily reality in and out of the military.

Records for those soldiers are being reviewed by the Valor Medals Review Project and Task Force. Established in 2018 by Congress, the panel’s mission is to surface the cases of U.S. service members who fought in World War I but whose awards and recognitions at the time were either blocked or never submitted because of racial bias in military leadership. 

Dr. Tim Wescott, the Director of the George S. Robb Centre for the Study of the Great War and head of the Project and Task Force, said that racism impacted valor awards of the era. He cites the namesake of the center, 1st Lt. George Robb, as an example.

Robb was a white officer in charge of the all-Black 369th Sustainment Brigade, known as the Harlem Hellfighters who was nominated for the Medal of Honor for serving with the unit. A Black soldier, Sgt. William Butler was put up for the same award on the same sheet of paper containing Robb’s nomination. 

“On the bottom half of that same piece of paper, that same nomination form is a Medal of Honor nomination for Sgt. William Butler. Butler was an African American,” said Wescott. “Right on that piece of paper, it is downgraded to DSC on Butler’s part, almost for the same actions, same theater of Meuse–Argonne, same basic date range as Rob’s. Rob receives a Medal of Honor, and Butler’s is downgraded to a DSC. Any type of PowerPoint we present, we always bring that slide up saying, ‘You don’t think there was racism?’”

The Task Force’s job is to comb the records of service members already awarded either the Distinguished Service Cross, Navy Cross, a French Croix de Guerre with Palm, or for whom an archived Medal of Honor recommendation can be found. So far, Wescott and his team have identified 215 minority WWI service members who meet the criteria. Of those, 24 are Native Americans, with one more pending a final confirmation from the National Personnel Records Center. 

Among them are Army Pfc. Amado Garcia, who was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for a raid he led through the mud of no man’s land on Aug. 26, 1918. Garcia, along with two others, crawled 300 yards from the Allies’ front line, navigating the enemy’s barbed wire, and attacked their machine-gun nest. While getting shot at from 10 yards away, Garcia and his team killed three enemy soldiers and drove away the others with clubbed rifles before Garcia and his team worked their way back under heavy fire. 

Another soldier the Task Force has found was Pvt. Joseph Isaac. Isaac was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross northeast of Jaulgonne, near Sergy, France, on July 31, 1918. Despite being “wounded in the head” during an assault on a German line, Isaac carried a more severely wounded comrade on his back as he crawled back to the Allies’ line. 

Another was Sgt. Joseph LaJennessee, who earned a Distinguished Service Cross near Cunel, France, on Oct. 14, 1918. LaJennessee maintained command of his platoon under heavy enemy fire after sustaining a severe gunshot wound in the leg. LaJennessee led his platoon in overcoming several machine-gun positions over the course of 36 hours, before being medically evacuated.

Complicating the search is that WWI has fallen out of living memory. The last surviving WWI veteran, Frank Buckles, died on Feb. 27, 2011, at the age of 110. Witness statements, which are generally required for Medal of Honor nominations, are no longer possible.

Making the search for WWI Native American service members even more difficult is how their names were forcibly changed to white-sounding names. A team led by Erin Fehr, the assistant director and archivist with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Sequoyah National Research Center, has worked since 2017 to identify Native American service members. Her efforts traced the identities of 6,000 out of the 12,000 the Task Force has found.

“It can be quite difficult when you’re looking for these men because, a lot of times, their native names were stripped, and they were given just random names, like Andrew Jackson,” Fehr said. “So when you’re looking at a list of names, you can’t really tell just by looking at their names. You have to dig pretty deep sometimes to figure out if this person is white or native.” 

Another aspect is the document search to bolster the nomination packets submitted to the Army and Navy for approval. While finding the early 1900’s documents presents an issue, many WWI military records burned up during the National Personnel Records Center fire in 1973. Once found, another hurdle includes interpreting letters sent home in their respective native language. 

“When we talk about the Native Americans and Hispanic American service members, if they’re writing home, more than likely, they’re writing either in Spanish or in the Native American perspective, their native tongue,” Wescott said. “Not necessarily English, and those documents were not always maintained by family members, or family members don’t know where they’re at anymore. So that makes it somewhat of a challenge to find primary documents [for the Medal of Honor nomination packets].” 

It’s a lot of work to track down everything needed to get the Native American service members’ valor awards upgraded. The combined efforts of both Fehr and Wescott’s teams have sent in 56 nomination packets, 49 to the Army and seven to the Navy. Wescott said they do not say what race is associated with any one packet to avoid giving descendants of the service members false hope.

They have until 2028 to conclude their research and submit proposed nominations to the Army and Navy for submission to the Department of Defense for final approval. Wescott and Fehr called out to the public, asking for any information that could help them identify more WWI service members for upgrades, even if it’s a story passed through generations that would help point them in the right direction. 

“It is time for this country to come back to looking at things, particularly in my case, from a social justice perspective,” Wescott said. “These 215 men, and in some cases, gave the ultimate sacrifice to our country.”

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