“CLARENCE BEAVERS SECOND FROM THE RIGHT”

Clarence Beavers, the last surviving member of America’s first black parachute unit, a World War II “test platoon” that went on to battle fires caused by Japanese bombs and paved the way for black paratroopers in the postwar integrated military, died Dec. 4 at his home in Huntington, New York. He was 96.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said a daughter, Charris Beavers.

Beavers, who served in the Army, never came under enemy fire. But for one summer at the close of the war, he repeatedly leapt toward smoke and flames, jumping from a C-47 transport plane to steer his parachute toward remote stretches of the Pacific Northwest. 

His unit, which formed the original core of the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion or Triple Nickles, was never as well known as the Tuskegee Airmen or Buffalo Soldiers. Yet the 17-member group played a seminal role in the integration of the military and the development of smoke jumping, a novel firefighting method in which remote forest fires - sparked by Japanese bombs carried by balloons - were fought by men who protected themselves with modified football helmets and willfully landed in trees.

“Nobody in those days figured that black folks had either the courage or the intelligence to do anything white folks would do,” said Joe Murchison, a retired Triple Nickles paratrooper who now heads the 555th Parachute Infantry Association. “Our first paratrooper had one of the white trainers bet his house that he wouldn’t jump out of the airplane. Well, he jumped out of the plane. He didn’t get the house.”

In an era when segregation still reigned, black soldiers were prohibited from serving as paratroopers when the U.S. airborne took flight in 1940. Three years later, after a military advisory committee recommended the creation of a black parachute battalion, Beavers was among the first to volunteer, leaving behind his Army maintenance platoon in Pennsylvania to travel to the parachute school at Fort Benning, Georgia.

He was met with surprise from the school’s commanding officers and shock from its white soldiers, including the man who drove him from the train station to the fort. “Every time we came past one of them streetlights, he would glare over and look at me,” Beavers told the New York Daily News in 2000. “I said, ‘I’m colored. Now, will you please drive this damn Jeep before you kill us both?’ ” 

Beavers was the first volunteer of what was known as the test platoon of black paratroopers, a unit that was meant to decide the fate of African Americans in the airborne. In what he later recalled was “extremely rough and extremely personal training,” he and his fellow black soldiers slept two-to-a-bunk in a cramped, unheated hut and ate separately from their white peers in the mess hall. German prisoners of war experienced better conditions at the base, platoon members later said.

Still, 17 of the unit’s 20 original members, successfully earned their wings, becoming the founding members of the all-black 555th.

Beavers and his fellow paratroopers had assumed they would soon see combat in Europe, where their white counterparts were participating in battles that would later be memorialized in the book and television series “Band of Brothers.”

Instead, they were sent to Pendleton, Oregon, where in 1945 they worked with the U.S. Forest Service on a secret mission called Operation Firefly. Beavers and more than a hundred members of the 555th were tasked with extinguishing fires started by Japanese bombs that had floated over to the U.S. mainland, carried aloft by balloons.

“It was really a kind of terrorism operation,” said Lincoln Bramwell, chief historian for the Forest Service, who noted that six people were killed from one of the bombs in 1945, the only reported World War II combat casualties in the Lower 48 states.