25th Infantry Regiment

The Twenty-fifth United States Infantry Regiment was one of the racially segregated units of the United States Army known as Buffalo Soldiers. The 25th served from 1866 to 1946, seeing action in the American Indian Wars, Spanish-American War, Philippine-American War and World War II.

After the Civil War, the regular army was expanded to 45 infantry regiments from its wartime strength of 19. The act of Congress that authorized this included the creation of four regiments of "Colored Troops", racially segregated units with white officers and African-American enlisted men. The army had raised a number of volunteer United States Colored Troops (USCT) regiments during the war. The new regiments were the 38th, 39th, 40th and 41st Infantry Regiments, and they set about recruiting mostly from USCT veterans.

By an act of 3 March 1869, Congress reduced the 45 regiments to 25, and the four colored regiments to two. The 39th and 40th Regiments were consolidated and renumbered as the 25th Infantry Regiment. In April the 25th established its first headquarters at Jackson Barracks, Louisiana, under command of Colonel Joseph A. Mower

In World War II the 25th Infantry Regiment (Colored) was an organic component of the 93rd Infantry Division (Colored) and served in the Pacific Theater of Operations. The regiment departed San Francisco on 24 January 1944 and arrived on Guadalcanal in echelons between 7 February and 5 March 1944. From there the regiment was transferred to Bougainville and attached to the Americal Division to take part in offensive operations against Japanese forces on that island in April and May of the same year. From 26 May to 21 June the regiment was stationed on the Green Islands where it received further training and was employed for the construction of defensive fortifications and installations. From 10 November 1944 to 30 March 1945 the 25th Infantry Regiment was involved in defensive actions around Finschafen New Guinea. The regiment's final transfer during World War II was to Morotai Island where it arrived by 12 April 1945 where it once again participated in offensive operations until the end of the war. For World War II the 25th Infantry Regiment (Colored) received campaign credit for the Northern Solomons, Bismarck Archipelago and New Guinea. The regiment was inactivated at Camp Stoneman, California on 3 February 1946, and within a few years, the entire U.S. military was ordered desegregated by President Harry Truman, ending all segregation in the American armed forces.