Edward A. Carter Jr.

November 11, 1999
Web posted at: 2:19 p.m. EDT (1819 GMT)

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WASHINGTON (AP) -- A half-century ago, Sgt. Edward A. Carter Jr. proved himself an American hero on the battlefields of Nazi Germany, and yet the Army drummed him out of uniform without explanation.

After years of pressure from a family devoted to clearing his name, the Army formally apologized Wednesday for banishing the decorated warrior as a suspected communist and denying him the life of soldiering he dearly loved.

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"He was destroyed. Now he has been restored," Allene Carter, the wife of Carter's eldest son, said at an emotional ceremony in the Pentagon's Hall of Heroes, where Carter's picture now hangs with other Medal of Honor winners. Carter died in 1963 at age 47, months after being diagnosed with lung cancer.

"Today, Sgt. Carter has been vindicated," Mrs. Carter said.

Gen. John Keane, the Army's vice chief of staff, presented the Carter family with a set of corrected military records to remove the stain of suspicion that declassified Army intelligence records show had no basis in fact. Keane said he regretted this sad chapter in Army history.

"We are here to apologize to his family for the pain he suffered so many years ago at the hands of his Army and his government," Keane said, looking out to an audience that included Carter family members and friends as well as World War II veterans.

"We are here to say we are sorry."

"He spent the last years of his life trying in vain to clear his name and to return to the life he loved so well," he said.

"We must acknowledge the mistake, apologize to his family and continue to honor the memory of this great soldier."

Keane, with Carter's widow, Mildred Carter, seated at his side, also presented the family with three military awards that a review of his personnel file showed he qualified for but never received.

They are the Army Good Conduct Medal, the Army of Occupation Medal, and the American Campaign Medal.

The injustices to Carter were brought to light last spring by U.S. News & World Report, which chronicled a long struggle by Allene Carter to uncover the truth and force the Army to admit its mistake.

"It's an end to that dark cloud that has been hanging over the family for about 50 years now," she said in an interview. She and other family members visited Carter's grave Wednesday at Arlington National Cemetery.

President Clinton presents Edward Carter III, son of the late Staff Sgt. Edward Carter, with the senior Carter's Medal of Honor during a ceremony in 1997

In 1997, Carter and six other World War II veterans became the first black soldiers of that conflict to receive the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest honor for combat heroism. That followed an Army study of why no black soldiers had received the honor. It was not until the U.S. News & World Report story on Carter in May, however, that the other wrongs came to light.

Last August, President Clinton wrote to Mildred Carter to apologize for the Army's actions.

"Had I known this when I presented his Medal of Honor two years ago, I would have personally apologized to you and your family," Clinton wrote, referring to the White House ceremony in January 1997. "It was truly our loss that he was denied the opportunity to continue to serve in uniform the nation he so dearly loved."

Last spring, Allene Carter received 57 pages of Army documents declassified in response to her Freedom of Information Act requests. The counterintelligence records showed the Army opened a file on Carter in 1942, just months after he had enlisted.

A declassified War Department memo, dated May 8, 1943, said an unnamed intelligence officer at Fort Benning, Georgia, where Carter attended infantry school, "deemed it advisable" to put him under surveillance and start an investigation. The reason? The officer had learned he was a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, an American volunteer unit that fought against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. The memo said members of the brigade, while "not necessarily communist," had been "exposed to communism."

Also noted in this memo were items deemed "adverse information." One such item said, "Subject is seemingly potentially capable of having connections with subversive activities due to the fact that he spent his early years (until* 1938) in the Orient" and had a speaking knowledge of Chinese.

The declassified intelligence reports show the Army could not find a shred of evidence of disloyalty by Carter.

The son of a traveling missionary who had settled his family in Shanghai, Carter ran away from home and eventually found his way to Europe where he joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

In 1940, Carter came to America and enlisted in the Army a year later.

On March 23, 1945, shortly after arriving on the European front, he found himself on the march with a 12th Armored Division tank battalion near Speyer, Germany, when the tank he was riding sustained heavy fire.

Carter led a three-man patrol 150 yards across an open field toward the Germans' firing position in a warehouse. Two of his men were killed. Carter was wounded five times. He lay still for two hours until an eight-man German patrol approached him, thinking the blood-soaked American soldier was dead.

Suddenly Carter, though nearly mortally wounded, opened fire with a .45-caliber submachine gun and killed six of the Germans. He captured the two others and used them as human shields to make his way back to his company. His prisoners provided valuable information on German troop movements.

"He was an American hero who was denied the recognition he deserved," Keane said.