War hero's sacrifices bring tears, gratitude

Greenville man fought Germans, segregation

DeWitt Jackson was wounded fighting Germans in World War II (GEORGE GARDNER/Staff

Dewitt Jackson now has the medals to prove he is a hero. He also has a living witness by the name of Renato Moncini.

Jackson, who fought for a country that placed him, as a black man, beneath German prisoners of war during World War II, was more than a hero to Moncini. He was a savior.

Moncini was a 10-year-old boy when the Nazis pillaged his hometown of Lucca, Italy. Jackson, now 89, was among the soldiers who gave food from their meager supplies to the starving people of that village, left destitute by Hitler's war machine.

Moncini came to Greenville in 1960 to work for Fluor Daniel. He had no idea, until he saw a newspaper story about Jackson, that one of the soldiers who had helped his family so many years ago also lived in Greenville, only two miles away.

“I was so happy,” Moncini said of his reunion with Jackson after the two had been separated by 5,000 miles and 64 years. “I can't talk. I have to cry.”

Monday, after Jackson received a replacement Purple Heart, Bronze Star and other medals he had misplaced, he told a group gathered at the Upcountry History Museum that he regrets that he wasn't able to attend Officer Candidate School.

“I don't regret the fact that I served my country. I served it well,” he said. “But I regret the fact that I didn't get to reach my potential because of, well, bottom line, segregation.”

Jackson, a member of the all-black Buffalo Soldiers unit, carried a wounded buddy to the medics, and was injured himself by a land mine, according to his account given for the museum's World War II oral history project.

“And his blood stayed on my shoulder from the time, that was the 3rd of November, ‘til I went back the 24th of December and got a bath and clean clothes,” he told Dr. Courtney Tollison, museum historian and assistant professor of history at Furman University.

“That dried blood stayed on my shoulder and my arm the whole time. And, boy, I was getting mad every time I look at that.”

His fear was replaced by anger, which drove him to face the enemy in hand-to-hand combat.

While in the field hospital recovering from his injuries sustained in a land mine explosion, Jackson was determined to get back to the front lines. But his condition worsened, and he was sent to a hospital in Rome, where he stayed for 90 days before being discharged.

Jackson, great-grandson of a slave and son of a sharecropper, was reminded of the sting of segregation as soon as he returned to Fort Bragg, N.C., when a bus driver told him that he had to sit in the back of the bus.

“And that bothered me,” he said. “It bothered me quite a bit. It bothers me now.”

U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis, who secured the replacement medals for Jackson, said the changing attitudes about race in the past half century are evidence of the nation's “self-correcting constitutional government.”

“And so we thank you for making it possible for us to see that correction, for being one of our heroes, as evidenced by all these medals,” Inglis said.

As to Jackson's regrets about not having been given a shot at becoming an officer — of becoming, as he said, “the first Colin Powell,” the Greenville Republican said: “I am certain that I can speak for Gen. Colin Powell, who would say that the only reason he could be a general was because of you and people like you who served and who broke the barrier.”

After the war, Jackson went to Indiana University and worked in animal research before returning to Greenville upon retirement.

Bern Mebane, former publisher of The Greenville News and a supporter of the museum's World War II history project, said Jackson saved Moncini and others in Italy from starvation, but his service accomplished much more than that.

“Dewitt, we, the little-bit-younger generation, owe you our freedom and our lives, and we thank you and thank your family,” he said. “God bless you.”

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