Getting Your Hands on Courage Has No Color and What It Actually Covers
I bought the hardcover edition first because I wanted something that would sit on a shelf without falling apart after one read. The Junior Library Guild selection came out in paperback too, which is cheaper if you are just trying to get through the book quickly. Both versions contain the same core text by Tony Horwitz, so there is not much difference except binding quality and price. The book tracks the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion during World War II. These guys were African American soldiers who went through paratrooper training at Fort Benning despite segregation policies that made most people expect them to fail. They ended up being deployed to the Pacific Northwest to fight fire predators—Japanese balloon bombs that had been launched from Japan and were drifting across the continent on jet streams. The mission was never widely known until historians dug into it decades later.
Courage Has No Color The True Story Of The Triple Nickles Americas First Black Paratroopers Junior Library Guild Selection
Here is what I learned after reading it and then going back to check the primary sources. Horwitz does a decent job weaving together unit history with personal stories, but he sometimes glosses over the friction between the Triple Nickles and their white commanders. That friction was real and it shows up in the letters these men wrote home, which have since been archived at the National Archives. If you want the version without the usual military history gloss, dig into the National Personnel Records Center files. The Japanese fire balloon program, known as Fu-Go, ran from late 1944 into spring 1945. About 9,300 balloons were launched and somewhere between one and two thousand actually made it across the Pacific. Most of them landed in Canada or the Pacific Northwest. The Triple Nickles were activated in March 1945 specifically to search for and defuse these devices. They were the only military unit in the area with the training to handle live explosives in rough terrain. What is interesting is that the mission was so classified that the men did not know what they were looking for when they first arrived in Oregon and Washington. They were told it was some kind of secret weapon test. It was not until they actually encountered the balloon payloads that the real picture became clear. Horwitz reconstructs this confusion reasonably well from interview transcripts and after-action reports.
One thing the book does not emphasize enough is how physically demanding the work was. These were paratroopers doing reconnaissance in mountainous terrain while wearing full gear, often in bad weather, searching for objects that could explode on contact. A lot of them had prior experience with ammunition ordnance from before they volunteered for airborne duty. That background mattered more than the book lets on because it is what kept the casualty rate low even though they were handling unknown devices in remote areas. If you are trying to find a copy, the Junior Library Guild edition is widely available through school book fairs and bookshop websites. The trade paperback from Howard Books is the standard commercial version. Both are in print and easy to order. I picked mine up through a bookstore distributor because the library copy had extensive highlighting and torn pages from previous readers. It was annoying but honestly not a deal breaker. There are a few things that people tend to misunderstand about this unit. The first is that they never saw combat in the traditional sense. Their work was entirely domestic, and they never crossed the Atlantic or Pacific for battlefield deployment. The second is that the balloon threat was real, even if the number of casualties caused by Fu-Go balloons was small. One civilian death and several injuries occurred in Oregon when a balloon payload struck a family. The military response was serious precisely because the devices were live explosives drifting unpredictably.
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The men of the 555th earned the nickname Triple Nickles because of their unit designation, 555. That naming convention follows the army parachute battalions of the era, which used three repeated numbers. It was not invented by the soldiers themselves as a cool slogan. It was just the administrative label that stuck. I remember buying a used copy that had marginalia from a previous owner who was clearly a military history buff. The notes referenced specific after-action report numbers and some corrections to Horwitz's timeline. Reading those annotations changed how I viewed the book. It is not a perfect account, but it is one of the better popular histories on the subject and the best single-volume overview available for general readers. For detailed archival work, you will need to go to the original sources directly. The book is organized chronologically with short chapters that focus on individual soldiers alongside the broader unit timeline. This approach works for most readers but can feel repetitive if you already know the basic facts. The real value is in the personal stories—the letters, the interviews, the moments where these men had to prove themselves in a military that did not want them there. That part of the narrative is where the book actually earns its place.
If you are teaching this or recommending it to someone else, the Junior Library Guild edition is the more affordable route. The trade paperback runs a bit higher but has better paper quality and a more durable binding. Either way, the content inside is identical, so your choice really comes down to budget and how much you expect to handle the book before it falls apart.
