The remarkable true-life adventures of Samuel Dreben, the fighting Jew

By Gerard Meister

FORGOTTEN HERO

Prologue: Peering from the hotel window as the spectators began to thicken along the parade route on that cold, blustery Armistice Day morning of November 11, 1921, Samuel Dreben, former First Sergeant U.S. Infantry, knew it was time to go. He walked from his hotel to the staging area and fell into formation. As he stood there silently, proudly, his mind flashed back to his boyhood in Kiev. It seemed like another life. Then the parade master gave his signal. Ahead of him, outlined against a slate-gray, rainswept sky, a living black ribbon of American history surged forward, marching slowly up Pennsylvania Avenue towards the National Cemetery at Arlington. Never before was there such a roster of pallbearers. Past Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt side by side with then President Harding and future President Calvin Coolidge.

Fixed in Sammy's gaze was his former commanding officer, General John J. "Black Jack" Pershing, who had asked Dreben, a member of the Texas delegation to the ceremony, to be an honorary pallbearer, escorting the horse-drawn catafalque of the Unknown Soldier on its solemn journey to eternity. Obeying Pershing's orders and marching in cadence to the mournful drumbeat, the former doughboy, little Sammy Dreben, had come a long way from the steppes of Russia to the plains of Texas. This is his story……

It was never easy being a Jew in Russia, but for Samuel Dreben, born in eastern 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 a host of bitter anti- Semitic restrictions flowing from the administration of the recently crowned (1894) 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 a 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.

His tearful parents understood. Sammy left home and made his way to Odessa, where in 1898 he shipped out to Liverpool, England. Working on the docks there for a few months, he saved enough money for steerage passage to America, where he was welcomed by the outstretched arms of the Statue of Liberty early in January 1899.

Quickly processed through U.S. Immigration he was routed to his sponsor, an aunt in Philadelphia, who promptly apprenticed him to yet another tailor. But the immigrant Sammy was not destined to make pants too long or too short, or even to make pants at all. The stuff of Sammy's dreams was cut from different cloth.

The 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 would be 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 the island of Luzon, and 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 Spanish colonialists with ones made in America, and they were fighting hard for their independence. Sammy's company commander ordered an attack against a fortified bridge held by native patriots. His heart pounded as he fixed his bayonet and fell in four abreast with the rest of the company, 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 Sinnot "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 wildcat? I 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 Rebellion in China heated up. 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 the foreign embassies in the capital, Peking. Eventually, 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 Jewish Pale of Settlement in Russia, 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 immigrant trooper. 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 Misamis, 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 (holy war), so much the better; they believed that a place in the Seventh Heaven was reserved for such Islamic martyrs. The fanatic (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.

Because the struggle against the Moros never seemed to end (the War Department did not close the books on the campaign until 1913), the Army was forced to rotate troops in and out in an effort to keep morale up and fresh recruits on the field. That's why Sammy had to shed his uniform in the summer of 1902, when he picked up an honorable discharge and donned civilian clothes.

For the next couple of years, Sammy tried the life of a civilian. A succession of odd jobs: streetcar conductor, lumber-camp laborer, and teamster helper all ended the same way, a square Sammy in a round world. In danger of becoming a drifter, he reluctantly fell back on tailoring, this time in Los Angeles. But Sammy's destiny always seemed to be there, marking time, waiting for him to grab the magic ring. Now it was the increasing beat of pogroms in Russia that got to Sammy. The one in Kishiniev in 1903 was a particular horror. Sammy read the reports and seethed. Innocent blood was being spilled and he ached for revenge. If he could only get to Japan, he'd show those Russkies a thing or two.

His opportunity came when the Russo-Japanese War broke out in February 1904. He found an army tanker, the USS Thomas, bound for Manila with a stop in Nagasaki, Japan. Dreben signed on as a waiter to work off his passage. His waitering proved a disaster, so he peeled potatoes for the thirty-two day voyage to Japan, where he slipped ashore. The Japanese, displaying their customary degree of paranoia with foreigners, thought he might be a Russian Trojan Horse and turned down his services. He bounced around Nagasaki, literally starving, until he landed a job in the Nagasaki Hotel, again peeling potatoes. Eventually, he shipped back to the States on a tramp steamer, paying for part of the passage with his newfound skill, peeling potatoes.

Back in the States by mid-summer of 1904, and not seeing anything in his future, he re-enlisted and was shipped to Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas. There he spent three years coming to peace with himself, making friends in El Paso and learning how to work those newfangled machine guns, which would, in the years to come, have an impact on the course of history in the Americas.

When his Army hitch ended in 1907, Dreben once again faced making a life as a civilian. The usual series of odd jobs came and went, including one disastrous day as the Municipal Rat Catcher for San Francisco. But destiny never keeps one of its fated few waiting long. This time it was the eradication of yellow fever in Panama that opened a new American frontier. With the deadly scourge conquered, work on the Canal began to make progress. Each blow of the pick-ax unearthed new opportunities and adventures. The ex-trooper shipped out on the first available freighter.

Landing in the Canal Zone, he found that his honorable discharge after six years of Army service was a powerful resume in an environment that was fast coming to resemble a wild-west theme park. Before the day was out, he was hired as a security guard. Of course the Gods of Fate were just toying with Sammy when he won fifty dollars in the Panama Lottery and, through a long, lucky roll at a crap game, parlayed his winnings into a half-ownership of The Blue Eagle Saloon. Sammy thought he was on his way, but destiny had other plans. His partner disappeared with a month's receipts and Dreben, who never could refuse a drink to a tapped-out buddy, soon found himself bankrupt.

Now thirty, the adventurous immigrant took stock; he felt he ought to try a more traditional way of life, something in keeping with his roots. One day he would have to settle down, make a living, marry and have children. All Jewish boys do. Yes, his mother would really like that. Dreben then had a capital idea: all the workers in the Canal Zone would need a clean new shirt when the Canal finally opened, and he'd be there to sell it to them. After all, selling on the run out of a pushcart or a suitcase was high on the list of those prosaic occupations that for generations shaped the Jewish immigrant experience. It was commonplace to see a black-frocked, bearded Son of Abraham wandering the hinterlands hawking everything from pots and pans to piece goods. Still, the sight of a Russian Jew traipsing through an equatorial jungle in a blue serge suit, peddling shirts from a mill in Massachusetts, must have been startling.

But the yoke of commerce hung heavy on Sam's neck. Soon, he was again beset with qualms, not that they returned, but that they had never left. Just as with every other time Sammy tried to fit himself into a conventional mold, the cast shattered. Instead of our finding Sam married and settled down somewhere, our next record of him is in the mountain uplands of central Guatemala, fighting alongside native Indians in their revolt against the repressive dictator, General Estrada Cabrera.

What was the springboard for this quantum leap? Did Sammy's yearning to breathe free echo the same voice Emma Lazarus heard when she inscribed that emotion on the base of The Statue of Liberty? Apparently so, for from this point on he marched only to freedom's drummer.

Sam was not only prolific with machine guns he also dabbled in artillery, shown here (see below) with a 3-inch field gun.