BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY
All-black battalion that landed in Normandy, France on D-Day to be honored on anniversary of siege
William Garfield Dabney, a 20-year-old enlistee, landed on the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago Saturday. Tethered to his waist was a bomb-armed helium balloon, meant to bring down a German dive bomber.
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ALICE MILLS/U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVESJune, 1944. The all-black 320th Battalion prepares to launch anti-aircraft balloons armed with bombs to deter German planes above the beaches of Normandy, France. A German plane that crossed a balloon's fine steel tether cables risked being blown to bits.
CAEN, France - William Garfield Dabney, a 20-year-old enlistee, landed on the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago Saturday. Tethered to his waist was a bomb-armed helium balloon, meant to bring down a German dive bomber.
George Davison, then 22, ferried messages between American commanders under the cover of night, dodging enemy fire with nothing but his wits to guide him.
Both men, members of the same all-black unit, survived the bloody D-Day landings that launched the Allied liberation of France. But because they were black, they disappeared into oblivion - a historic wrong that at last is being rectified.
Dabney on Friday will be among 50 U.S. veterans awarded the Legion of Honor, France's highest decoration, in Paris. The vets will return to Normandy tomorrow for the official D-Day ceremony with President Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
"The whole group should have been decorated," Bill Davison, of Waynesburg, Pa., said of his father, who died in 2002. "The contribution of blacks has never been acknowledged."
Few of the 900,000 African-American vets who fought in World War II received medals. Photos of black soldiers were long conspicuously missing from exhibits commemorating major World War II battlefields.
To Dabney, who grew up in small-town Altavista, Va., the exclusion was no surprise - but it still hurt.
"It makes you feel bad, when you don't get the recognition like the white soldiers, that they threw your name in the garbage," he said.
Carmella LaSpada, executive director of the White House Commission on Remembrance, was searching for living D-Day veterans and found Dabney only last week. She gave up her own plane ticket so he could attend the ceremony.
"Even though it's 65 years later, it's never too late," LaSpada said.
For Dabney and his buddies, the journey back from obscurity began with a single grainy photo spied by a curious Frenchwoman, a professor of English literature at the University of Caen named Alice Mills. She made it her mission to learn the soldiers' story and share it with the world.
During the 60th anniversary D-Day ceremonies in 2004, "There were no photos of black soldiers in Normandy," Mills said. "This was an injustice. It became clear I had to find the truth."
Mills, 59, who is married to an American, chanced upon a photo of black soldiers in the 320th Anti-aircraft Artillery Balloon Barrage Battalion beneath a giant bomb-armed balloon, one of many raised aloft in an aerial curtain to protect Allied troops.
A German plane that crossed a balloon's fine steel tether cables risked being blown to bits.
Mills knew that the African-American soldiers were well-liked, so she crisscrossed Normandy, collecting the memories of aging Normans who were children during the war, particularly in Cherbourg, the strategic port where nearly all of the 30,000 American soldiers were black.
She traveled to the U.S., eventually finding records and a treasure trove of photos of the all-black units, including photos of George Davison. She was thrilled to learn Davison kept a detailed diary of his months in Normandy in 1944.
The photos she uncovered drew wide attention when they were published in the French press, and they are on display for this weekend's commemoration ceremonies in Normandy. "They have been rewritten back into history," Mills said, smiling.
"All my life I've felt that because I'm not speaking German, because I'm free, it's because of the Americans," she said. "So I had to get the stories of the black soldiers."
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