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D-Day’s Black Barrage Balloon Operators and Other Lesser Known WWII Facts

Khalid Elhassan November 11, 2019 27 min

18. The Black Barrage Balloon Operators Overseas

Arthur Guest of the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion. Daily Beast

Despite the daily indignities, the racist pejoratives routinely hurled their way, and the general mistreatment meted out to them on a regular basis, the black soldiers of the 320^th Barrage Balloon Battalion were still ready to die for their country, and so that others, thousands of miles away, could live free. As one of the unit’s members, private Wilson Monk put it decades later: “There was never any doubt about the loyalty of black soldiers … Even considering the fact that we weren’t treated equally“. The 320^th was shipped to Britain, where it underwent further training in amphibious operations, in preparation for D-Day.

In the days leading up to the invasion of France, hydrogen was pumped into thousands of big balloons, that were then tethered to ships for the journey to Normandy. On the morning of June 6^th, 1944, the 691-man 320^th battalion had its baptism of fire when it landed on Utah and Omaha beaches, its members plunging off of landing craft into waist-deep water and wading ashore, with bullets whizzing about them. Attached to the belts of many of them were car-sized or larger balloons, filled with highly flammable hydrogen.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.