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Fascinating and Lesser Known People Who Changed American History

Khalid Elhassan May 5, 2020 33 min

Normandy landings - Operation Overlord — Men of the 320th in Normandy. YouTube

9. “Every Time You Go to Town, Somebody Gets Beat Up”

Some members of the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion. Voice of America

The black soldiers of the 320^th lived in segregated barracks and ate in segregated mess halls. Off base, things were often hazardous. They were routinely harassed by white civilian police, white MPs, and white soldiers – including one who shot a black trainee in the back, killed him and escaped punishment.

One black soldier recalled years later that he stopped going off base because “every time you go to town, somebody gets beat up“. On one of the few times he headed into nearby Paris, he was viciously beaten up by two white civilian cops and a pair of MPs. What galled the men of the 320^th the most, however, was seeing German and Italian POWs eating in restaurants where black American soldiers were not welcome.

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.