The Landing of Napoleon

Napoleon Edward Taylor worked in a Baltimore packing house until he was inducted into a Maryland Negro regiment. In a year or so he was off on a troopship. On June 17, months before the invasion of Morocco and Algeria, Private Taylor and an unrevealed number of his fellow soldiers found themselves off the coast of Africa. They were there to make a peaceful and secret invasion of the Negro republic of Liberia.

In landing boats, they took off through the wild surf. Private Taylor's major had advised him to have a greeting ready for the Liberians, so he had prepared a statement which he recited to himself as they rocked and roared ashore. Wet and bedraggled, he leaped out on a desolate beach on the edge of the bush, marched up to the only Liberians in sight. They were half a dozen coal-black native boatmen who had come to help the U.S. troops unload. Said Private Taylor: "Liberians! We are here to join hands and fight together until this world is free of tyrannical dictators." One of the boatmen shook hands. The rest, who had paused solemnly to listen, went back to their work.

The occupation, no secret to the Axis* and most of West Africa, was kept an official secret until last week, when the State Department revealed that Liberia had last spring signed a pact giving the U.S. jurisdiction over her airports and military installations until the war against tyrannical dictators is over. Said Liberia's 60-year-old President Edwin J. Barclay, echoing the words of Napoleon Edward Taylor: "Ours is a historical friendship."

*Rome radio reported that the Liberian-based U.S. troops last week marched across the border into France's Ivory Coast.

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