 The Story of the American Expeditionary Forces |
 36th Division |
Fighting Jew - Forgotten HeroThe remarkable true-life adventures of Samuel Dreben |
Sgt. Sam Dreben
By Gerard Meister
YOUNG SAMIt was never easy being a Jew in Russia, but for Samuel Dreben, born in Russia (now the Ukraine) on June 1,1878, life only worsened as he crossed from youth to manhood. The few opportunities open to Jews were being choked off by recent anti- Semitic restrictions flowing from the administration of the newly crowned Czar, Nicholas II. The Dreben family moved to Kiev, hoping that life in a big city would open some doors for their son. Secretly, his mother longed for him to become a rabbi, but his father apprenticed him to a tailor instead. Hunched over his work between stitches, Sammy dreamt of life without a Czar. Twice he ran off to Germany, a step ahead of the Czar's press gangs ferreting out young Jewish boys for that life-numbing twenty-year conscription term in the Russian Army. (Part of the service was active duty, the rest being in the reserves, but once a Jew entered the army he seldom returned to his family.) Young Dreben knew he would not be hard to spot: short and stocky with an important nose on a round, pudgy face - his heritage came through loud and clear - and that fleeing Russia was his only out. Russian Immigrants Arriving in the U.S.SOLDIER SAMThe curtain rose on Sammy's new life when the U.S. Army opened a recruiting campaign for the Spanish-American War. Sammy was stunned; "What a country," he thought. "When the United States needs an army, not only do they pay fifteen dollars a month and give you three square meals a day, they ask if you'd like to join. In Russia they just come and grab you away!" Now he knew why America was called "The Golden Land." Sammy wanted to enlist, but wondered whether the Army was any place for a Jewish boy. Would he have time for his daily prayers, morning and night? What would he eat when nothing was kosher? Sammy prayed hard that night, but couldn't get the lure of adventure out of his mind. The God of Abraham, young Sammy was sure, would understand and forgive. The next morning Sammy walked into the enlistment office with God in his heart but his skullcap in a back pocket. He was accepted and sworn in on June 27, 1899. By September of that year the army fulfilled its recruitment pledge, shipping Sammy to Cavite Viejo, outside Manila on Luzon, just across the bay from the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines. The new enlistee's baptism of fire came hot and quick. The Aguinaldo Insurrection against the American occupation forces was at its full fury. The Filipinos were enraged, feeling that we had only replaced the Spanish colonialists with ones made in America and were fighting hard for their independence. Sammy's company commander ordered an attack against a fortified bridge held by native patriots. Sammy's heart pounded as he fixed his bayonet and fell in four abreast, prepared to charge. "Double-quick time," the officer shouted as he led the way. After fifty yards, all the troopers were panting in the tropical sun; no time to think, just follow orders. Then, as Sammy and his comrades closed in on the enemy trench, an artillery round landed in their midst. Eleven troopers, including the captain, lay dead or wounded. The rest took cover; well, almost all the rest. But better to hear the story from an eyewitness, then trooper later writer/reporter and distinguished editor of the San Antonio Daily Light, Edward S. "Tex" O'Reilly, as he recounted the incident years later: As I lay watching this slaughter only a few yards away, I suddenly saw one soldier emerge from the smoke, still trotting forward toward the bridge. He was the loneliest figure I have ever seen, jogging along like a boy running an errand. There were several thousand insurrectos in those trenches and the bullets were snapping around him, but he didn't seem to notice. Down the road he went, over the bridge, and into the trenches as if he were taking part in a drill on the parade ground. Other troops came sweeping up to us, and the command came to charge the trench. Over we went. The natives broke and stampeded. In the trench we found the lone soldier who had tried to win the battle single-handed. He was still fighting. Who is this little wildcatI asked someone. 'Oh, that's little Sammie Dreben, the fighting Jew,' he said. The name stuck. By the summer of 1900, the war in the Philippines cooled down, while the Boxer Sammy's outfit, the Fourteenth Infantry was shipped to China, landing in time to play a major role in the relief of the siege of Peking. In time the city was freed and the Chinese forced to a sign a humiliating treaty, ending a dismal chapter in the history of imperialism, but opening a new one for Sammy.The American contingent, part of a multinational force, put Sammy in contact with British, French, German, Russian and Japanese troops in their joint maneuvers. This experience helped shape him, a scant two years out of the Pale of Settlement, into a seasoned veteran by his twenty-second birthday. When his outfit was finally shipped back to Manila, the fighting there was just about over and Pvt. Dreben had to settle down to the dreary monotony of garrison duty. Peacetime soldiering held little appeal to the trooper from Kiev. To Sammy, it was now the din of battle that sounded the siren song. His taste for adventure would not go unrequited. In the southern islands (Mindanao, mainly) the Moros, a tribe of Muslim converts,were on the warpath. It was a particularly nasty kind of warfare, what we today would call terrorism. Manila newspapers were full of tales of the new war. A young captain, John J. Pershing, was making a name for himself in the savage jungle encounters. Dreben longed for a new challenge. His transfer application was finally granted early in 1901, when he was shipped to Misaims, a fortified outpost on Mindanao. This time, instead of formations of ragtag troops, religious fanatics who had sworn an oath to kill infidels in the name of Allah confronted Sam. If this meant forfeiting their lives in the jihad so much the better; they believed that a place in the Seventh Heaven was reserved for such Islamic martyrs. The fanatic Moro (called a juramentado) would fast, chant his final prayers, bind his extremities (arms, legs, and genitals) to slow blood loss when wounded, don his white burial shroud and carrying a kris (a type of long, wavy dagger) in each hand, stalk forth to his morbid destiny. One night, while Sam was standing alone on sentry duty one of the holy killers charged. Sam got off a single shot, hitting the white apparition in the leg, but not stopping his rush. Sam was still trying to slam another cartridge into the breech, when a passing trooper put a round into the juramentado's head, dropping him in his tracks. Fighting the MorosBANANA SPLITIn 1911, Honduras was caught in a tug-of-war between two rival banana moguls. One of them, Sam Zemurray of Cuyamel Fruit, and like Sam, an immigrant, felt that he wasn't getting an even split of the banana business from the regime in power, which favored his rival the Vaccaro Bros. of Standard Fruit. Zemurray called on General Lee Christmas, most noted of the Central American soldiers of fortune, to overthrow the government. In turn, Christmas asked Dreben, who was in New Orleans looking for a cause, to accept the rank of Colonel in the rebel army and man the lone machine gun the General had in his arsenal. Dreben agreed. Zemurray purchased a small, decommissioned navy ship, the USS Hornet, and the invasion of Honduras was on.After being put ashore, the small band of adventurers marched up the coastal plain from Trujillo to the port city of La Ceiba. They had to pass through several villages where federal sharpshooters, barricaded high up in the local church steeple were firing freely, slowing the advance. Whenever the column got pinned the call went out for Dreben and his machine gun. Sam's pinpoint strafing would soon roust the federalistas from their perch, allowing the parish priest to come out of hiding and bless Sammy for his good deed. The regiment then resumed its march. The campaign nearly ended when General Christmas, tricked by an ambush, was captured and thrown into a local prison to await execution. His staff, instead of ordering a frontal assault with its potential for casualties, called in Dreben who quickly shot the door off the stucco jailhouse freeing his commander. But Sam's heroics were not all fire and bluster. When a fellow officer fell seriously ill with dengue fever, it was Sammy who trekked eight miles through the jungle to bring his comrade a pot of chicken soup. It was a short campaign. After barely four months of conflict, a compromise treaty was signed in Tegucigalpa. Sammy pocketed his final month's pay of $600 and was out of a job once more. But not for long. COMMUTING TO WORKIn Mexico the long reign of Porfirio Diaz, the dictator since 1877, was on its last legs, challenged by a democratic movement led by the young lawyer Francisco I. Madero. Inevitably, Madero and Dreben found each other. Before the year 1911 was out, Sam and his machine gun were on the payroll, spearheading a successful drive to Mexico City, where Madero was installed as President. But Mexico quickly became a textbook case of the corruptibility of power. No sooner was an idealist seated in the presidential palace, than he himself became a tyrant. So before Sammy had finished coating his weapon with Cosmoline and packed it away, the next revolution broke out. And the next and the next one after that. Dreben was so busy fighting for Huerta, Orozco, Carranza, Salazar and Pancho Villa (among others) on their way to the palace and then fighting against them once they got there, that he took up residence in El Paso, Texas. The first place he called home since he left Russia, and an easy commute to whichever revolution was currently playing across the Rio Grande. His feats with the machine gun were now almost mythic. Dreben would enter a battle with a wheelbarrow or two -- a harbinger of mechanized warfare, one might say -- and a couple of helpers, then race from flank to flank, his helpers trundling along, pushing the wheelbarrow heaped with ammunition, tripod and gun, ready to set up shop wherever the maestro directed. By 1913, it was Pancho Villa's turn to head the next revolution. Sammy believed that Villa, the charismatic, illiterate peasant would finally bring democracy to the Mexican people. Dreben became Villa's purchasing agent in El Paso, smuggling arms across the Rio Grande, helping the cause however he could. The struggle dragged on for years. Defeats and victories ran into one another as Villa rode his white charger from one battle to another. Then Villa made a terrible error. Stung by a few recent defeats, his followers raided Columbus, New Mexico on March 10, 1916, killing seventeen innocent Americans and wounding a score of others. This inexplicable, unprovoked sneak attack, America's first taste of infamy, was as incomprehensible as it was unforgivable. President Woodrow Wilson did not hesitate. He summoned the cavalry and asked General John J. "Black Jack" Pershing to lead a punitive expedition against Villa. Pershing didn't hesitate either. Short of scouts for the type campaign he planned, Pershing called for volunteers. Dreben answered the call, never to serve Villa again.WITH PERSHINGOnce at Pershing's side Dreben was often the General's personal chauffeur, at other times a scout, still others a spy. When he was sent out as a squad leader to reconnoiter, his troopers were called Drebeneers. Perhaps it was around the campfire one night that a young lieutenant with the expedition, George S. Patton, heard a few tales of the legendary Dreben. Pershing and Villa in Happier TimesAND OVER THEREPresident Wilson called for volunteers on April 6, 1917, the day Congress declared war on Germany. Sam, now retired from the Army ten years, was torn between his country's needs and obligations to a wife and expected child. For the first time since 1899, Sam did not answer the call. He stayed home. Yet inexplicably, ten months later on February 12, 1918, less than a month after his daughter was born, Dreben was in the recruitment office of the Texas National Guard putting on an Army uniform for the third and last time. He turned down a commission to enlist as a First Sergeant with Company A commanded by his friend Captain William F. Burges, an attorney and member of a prominent El Paso family. Company A was eventually assigned to the 141st Infantry, also an El Paso outfit, and shipped "Over There" by mid-summer of 1917. Once in uniform, Sammy itched for action, but before he saw any, there was devastating news. A letter from his wife finally caught up with him and the first-time father learned that his baby had died while he was en route to France. Whether Dreben could have done anything about getting back to his wife in Texas, we will never know. What we do know is that there is no record of his asking for a hardship discharge. Apparently, duty to his adopted country won out over all else. Thus began Samuel Dreben's short, but remarkable tour of duty in the war to end all wars. In early October 1918 the advance of the American and French armies was stalemated at St. Etienne, north of Blanc Mont Ridge in France's Champagne region. One nest of four German machine guns was raising particular hell. Sam knew those guns had to be put out of action. According to the official citation describing Dreben's heroism, he:. . .discovered a party of German troops going to the support of a machine gun nest situated in a pocket near where the French and American lines joined. He called for volunteers and with the aid of about 30 men rushed the German positions, captured four machine guns killed 40 of the enemy, captured two and returned to our lines without the loss of a man. For this action Sgt. Dreben was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, with the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille Militaire added by the French (their highest honor). Later the Italian and Belgian governments decorated him similarly. As singular as this honor was, what happened just before the Armistice far surpasses any such decoration. The event unfolded on a rainy day when the lead column of his regiment arrived at the post that marked the boundary between France and Alsace. At last they were to set foot on German soil. The officer in command of the regiment halted the column and ordered up the band. The bandsmen drew up beside the muddy road. An order echoed down the line: "Sergeant Dreben, front and center!" Through the mud the muffled little sergeant came plodding, wondering what it was all about. "Sergeant Dreben, we are entering German territory. You've earned the right to set the first foot on enemy soil. Take the point." Then the regimental band (inexplicably) struck up, "My Old Kentucky Home" as Sam marched across the line and onto the scroll of history.  St. EtienneHOME AT LASTWhen Dreben finally got back to El Paso he hoped his wife would forgive him, that they would share in the grief of losing a child. But she seemed strangely aloof, almost disconnected from him. Perhaps, he thought, a woman once scorned, as she must have felt when he left her with a three week-old infant, would never be the same. Then he began to hear whispers that she had been unfaithful while he was overseas. When Sam confronted Helen with the rumors, her silence confirmed his suspicions. He filed for and was granted a divorce on June 19, 1919. Sam had been home in Texas just sixty days. Faced with the age-old dilemma of the cuckold: whether to stay put and suffer the knowing smirks or to start fresh in some other place, brought the curse of sleepless nights to Sam for the first time in his life. Once he realized it was not in him to run, that he had to stay, had to hang tough, his self-esteem returned on the same wings as his sleep. He knew things would work out. As 1919 drew to a close, Sam, no longer forlorn, met life more than halfway. He dabbled in oil and insurance and joined the Kiwanis Club and all the veteran's organizations. It seemed that El Paso couldn't get enough of its hometown hero. Seizing the moment the citizen-soldier opened an insurance office and success came quickly. In a couple of years he was making a comfortable living. In May, 1921 yet another honor arrived: an invitation from General Pershing to serve as honorary pallbearer for the Unknown Soldier being entombed in Arlington National Cemetery that November. Glowing with pride, the veteran trooper checked his boots first -- it was a long march down Pennsylvania Avenue to Arlington -- then took out all his medals, arranged and rearranged the way he would wear them a dozen times before he tried on his old uniform. He'd go on a diet, lose a few pounds and spit-shine his boots. He was going to look spiffy for the trip to Washington, ready for anything. But instead of a cause or a battle, the anything this time came in the form of Louis D. Oaks, Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and the most improbable posse ever assembled, even for Texas. Indeed, the old newspaper accounts of this incident read as if the fate of Dreben and the L.A.P.D. were in the hands of an accomplished novelist as the protagonists are drawn together by some immutable force, linking up at the critical juncture, thickening the plot, making it work. This is what happened: while Sam was checking his medals and uniform in Texas, California's cast of characters came to center stage. Walking Scot-free out of California's high security prison was three-time loser "Little Phil" Alguin, discharged for time served, one time too many. Little Phil, a violence prone thug, had a rap sheet as thick as a phone book: dope pusher, addict, fence, burglar, armed robber and now about to become a cop-killer. Alguin was not out of jail a month when he shot and killed L.A.P.D. Detective John J. Fitzgerald in the course of a blown stake-out on June 18, 1921. Now wanted as a cold-blooded cop-killer, the American born, Hispanic looking, fluent-in-Spanish gangster fled to his ancestral home in Mexico, which at that time, was feuding with the United States, and refused to extradite Little Phil or anyone else. Emboldened by this stroke of luck Alguin left the dry hills of Chihuahua for the comforts of Ciudad Juarez, where he managed to stay hidden for several months. It wasn't long before Little Phil learned that his hideout was a poor choice. Juarez lies just across the river from El Paso. Dreben territory. By mid-September, word reached Chief Oaks at the L.A.P.D. that Little Phil was holed up in Juarez, thumbing his nose with impunity at the police in El Paso. Oaks called his counterpart there, Chief Peyton Edwards, to ask for help. Oaks was told that El Paso stood ready to do its part to nab a cop killer, come on down. The Los Angeles Chief spent the rest of the week tying up loose ends at the office, took the Pullman sleeper out of Union Station on Sunday night, September 24th, and got to El Paso early the next afternoon. He went directly from the train station to police headquarters to meet with his counterpart. The word "kidnap" was never spoken, but Oaks and Edwards knew that's where they were heading. A strategy meeting was set for the next morning, leaving it to Edwards to invite some "good old boys," boys with the right kind of stuff. Edwards called Dreben that night. (The El Paso police chief, sensing the extent of the problem when he first spoke to Los Angeles, had briefed Sam the week before.) It was an informal council of war; a round of introductions, then everyone grabbed a chair. Besides Dreben, Edwards invited his First Deputy, Captain W.A Simpson, and Chief of Detectives, Claude Smith. When Chief Oaks began to clear his throat, Dreben shifted in his seat, "I have a plan," he said. All eyes turned to Sam. The ex-sergeant explained that after Chief Edwards first briefed him, he slipped into Juarez for a few days to get the lay of the land. He learned that Little Phil was extremely sensitive about a dead give-a-way tattoo on his right forearm, a flower superimposed with another of his sobriquets Arizona Phil," and had asked a few local doctors if it could be removed, which in pre-laser days was next to impossible. All we have to do Sam reasoned, is open a doctor's office in Juarez, advertise that a new American specialist has arrived and his specialty was removing tattoos. Sam reasoned that Little Phil couldn't resist checking out a new doctor. Then, when the killer drops into the office, we'll knock him out with a Mickey or something put him in a waiting car and scoot across the International Bridge back to El Paso. Sam, cocksure of himself, already had enlisted another Texan, San Antonio detective J. H. Kelly, who had fought alongside Sam a couple of Mexican revolutions ago, to act as the American doctor and had gotten a real M.D., Dr. R.H. Ellis, an El Paso physician, to agree to be a technical advisor. (Sam had an easy time recruiting his posse, because Chief Oaks had posted a $5,000.00 reward when he came to El Paso.) Dr. Ellis, a stickler for details, gave detective Kelly a short course on hypodermics, supplied a couple of syringes, the anesthetic chloroform), some medical accouterments to throw around the office and a phony diploma to hang on the wall. The power of Dreben's persona was such that six grown men, including a physician and two police chiefs, all nodded in approval. Sam left for Juarez to rent something appropriate. Sam Dreben, standing center,leader of the Adventurer's Club of El Paso, Texas, ca 1920That night the posse met and decided they would need two cars for the stakeout and getaway. Chief Oaks would drive one (no chance of his getting recognized), the others would pile into a cab, which, they reasoned, would make them invisible; after all, who takes a cab to a kidnapping? Everything was in motion: Detective/Dr. Kelly walked into Little Phil's house carrying a telltale doctor's bag, ordered his patient to lie down and administered the chloroform while the stakeout cars (one hailed from the El Paso Public Livery stand!) got into position. All that had to happen now was for Kelly to spit through an open window, the agreed signal that the felon was out cold. As with all the best-laid plans, this one didn't work either. Little Phil was groggy, but not completely out. Dreben decided to make a run for it anyway, he would stuff the fugitive on the floor of the car and race across the bridge to El Paso. By the time Little Phil was dragged from the house to the car, he was wide awake, kicking and screaming in Spanish that he was being kidnapped by gringos. A mob quickly gathered, blocking the car. Police were called. Sam, Detective Claude Smith and the hapless cab driver were arrested, and Alguin set free. Kelly, who had melted into the crowd, made it back to El Paso, as did Chief Oaks who drove off when the trouble started. The situation grew uglier by the hour. A lynch mob surrounded the jail. Only the timely intervention of one of Sam's legion of friends in Mexico, General J.J. Mendez, commandant of the local garrison, who ordered troops into the melee with fixed bayonets, saved the Americans. The Juarez press screamed for the prisoners' execution. When El Paso learned of Dreben's predicament the city came running. El Paso Mayor Charlie Davis led the charge. He appealed to Congress, the governor's office, the State Department and Army Chief of Staff, General John J. Hines (who, in a great piece of luck for Sam, was passing through El Paso at the time). Pressure mounted on Mexico to release the prisoners. American troops massed at the border. Mexico blinked. Sam and his cohorts were released after three days in jail. (Little Phil Alguin was eventually extradited and tried for the murder of the Los Angeles detective. Convicted in 1923 and given a life sentence, Little Phil was paroled in 1953. He disappeared into Mexico and was never heard from again.) Sam's stint in jail made him a hero all over again. He couldn't walk a block in any direction without someone stopping to applaud or salute him. Then during the march in Washington, where a million bystanders stood silently in the rain to honor their nation's heroes, a new feeling stirred in Sam. He felt vindicated, that finally everyone understood that duty and honor came before all else, and that he was, at least in his mind, forgiven for abandoning his wife, for not being there when their baby lay dying. For the first time Sam knew he had nothing thing more to prove in El Paso, that there was more to life than business and parades. Once he made his mind up, Sam charged ahead as if he was attacking an enemy trench: stepping up visits to old Army buddies, speaking out for Veteran's causes and, for the first time in years, dating. In 1923, he met and married Meada Andrews a beautiful young widow from Dallas. His new wife, sensing the baggage that came along with life in El Paso, urged Sam to forget Texas and get a fresh start in California. Sam agreed. By year's end he closed his main street office in El Paso, packed his bags, shook everyone's hand, kissed no one good-bye and was on a train heading west, eager to start a new life in California. CALIFORNIA AGAIN, BUT FOR THE LAST TIME.Sam hit the ground running when he got to the coast. Somehow he sensed that L.A. was his last chance to lead a 'normal' life. In double-quick time the affable war hero became a special agent for the West Coast Life Insurance Company, joined the usual assortment of Veterans' groups and made a score of new friends. By 1925, he was so totally immersed in the here and now lifestyle of California that the memory of past battles and roads not taken soon dimmed. Samuel Dreben was finally just a regular, every day kind of guy. On March 14, when the sweet scent of spring was already in the air, Sammy had an appointment for a routine visit to his doctor, who was a personal friend. Doctor, nurse and patient were all making small talk, when the nurse, possibly distracted by the banter, accidentally filled a hypodermic with a toxic substance in place of the prescribed medicine and gently eased the needle into Sammy's vein. Mortally stricken, he was rushed to the Good Samaritan Hospital, where he expired quietly the next morning when his brave heart finally stopped beating.The Last BattleThe Coroner's Office decreed that an autopsy must be performed and took charge of Dreben's remains. The war veterans argued that their hero should be interred in The National Cemetery at Arlington under a full panoply of military honors. Captain Burges, Sam's comrade-in-arms, asked for permission to bury his former First Sergeant in the Burges family plot in El Paso. Sam's widow, Meada, along with the rest of his family, felt besieged. The sacrilege of an autopsy on an observant Jew was bad enough, but not to be buried in consecrated ground was unthinkable.By the next afternoon, the Coroner ruled the accident in the doctor's office to be the cause of death. The American Legion sprung into action, whisking Sam's remains to the Grand View Memorial Park in Glendale, where they kept a number of grave sites, and which, they felt, was a livable compromise to Arlington or El Paso. Final services and the still contested interment were scheduled for 3:30 P.M. the following day, even though the family, still confused by Sam's status as military hero, Texan and observant Jew, had not agreed to the Legionnaires' terms. Nevertheless, the casket was wheeled into the cemetery chapel at the appointed hour. The assemblage parted along the lines of its opposing burial rites, stoking the acrimony that had flared up between the American Legion chaplain and the family's rabbi, who began to rail at one another across the aisle. Being pushed to the wall seemed to stiffen the family's resolve: in these circumstances you cannot serve God and country at the same time. The impasse filled the room, choking off any hope of a compromise, until the rabbi, Meyer Winkler of Temple Sinai, proposed a Solomon-like solution: Carl De Mott, the Legion's chaplain, would preside over full military honors in the chapel, then lead the Legionnaires' cortege to the graveside where a bugler's taps would sound its plaintive farewell. At this point, with the Corps standing at parade rest, the family would come forward to chant the mourner's prayer as the rabbi leads them through the final service, consecrating the burial in accordance with the laws of Moses and of Zion.  Sam Dreben Kneeling on Lower Right |
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Sources and Thanks: All the text and material for this article was contributed by Gerry Meister. MH |
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revised 24 Tevet 5774 - 27 Dec 2013