An African-American veteran who served in the D-Day landings will receive the French Legion of Honor at this year’s commemoration, the first time black soldiers have been officially recognized for their role in the famed 1944 operation, a US agency said.
The French government plans to award its highest decoration to William Dabney, 84, believed to be the last known survivor of the 320th Anti-Aircraft Barrage Balloon Battalion — an all-black unit that deployed in the invasion.
“I feel pretty good about it,” Dabney said. “It’s late but recognition is recognition.”
Except for a US television documentary that aired in 2007, little has been written or recorded about the black soldiers’ involvement in the D-Day landings.
“This is the first official recognition of the 320th and their sacrifice and contribution to the invasion of Normandy,” the White House Commission on Remembrance, a US government agency devoted to honoring soldiers killed on the battlefield, said in a statement.
Three soldiers from the 320th battalion were killed in the Normandy landings, the commission said.
The US armed forces remained racially segregated through the war with African-American soldiers serving in all-black units.
Dabney, who lives in Roanoke, Virginia, recalled landing at Omaha beach on a barge with his three-man crew along with about 75-100 army infantry and marines.
“Tracer bullets were firing on both ends — from the other side of the beach and from the ships in the channel,” he said.
His battalion used balloons tied down with metal cables to ward off German dive bombers and other low-flying aircraft.
On D-Day, he was assigned the job of keeping a balloon over the beach to help protect allied ground forces from strafing and bombing by Nazi warplanes.
But in the chaos of the landing, the balloon came loose, and to this day he is not sure if it was due to a German aircraft or all the heavy gunfire.
Dabney said he and his crew jumped off the barge and once they made it to Omaha beach got out their shovels and took cover as best they could.
“We dove in the sand on the beach to save ourselves,” he said. “The only thing we saw were dead bodies laying on the beach.”
He said he and his crew were “stuck on the beach there for a couple of days” before bulldozers and tanks cleared the way for the US forces to move ahead.
“We thought at one point that we might be pushed back into the English Channel,” he said.
He said he and his crew all survived D-Day.
Dabney, who will travel to France to receive his medal at the D-Day commemoration, said his wartime experience made him hope that something might change for blacks back home.
But he said he kept his expectations in check.
“We knew the law. That’s the way it was,” he said.
In 1948, the US government ended segregation in the military even as the practice continued in civilian life throughout the US South.
‘HYANGDO’: A South Korean lawmaker said there was no credible evidence to support rumors that Kim Jong-un has a son with a disability or who is studying abroad South Korea’s spy agency yesterday said that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s daughter, Kim Ju-ae, who last week accompanied him on a high-profile visit to Beijing, is understood to be his recognized successor. The teenager drew global attention when she made her first official overseas trip with her father, as he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Analysts have long seen her as Kim’s likely successor, although some have suggested she has an older brother who is being secretly groomed as the next leader. The South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS) “assesses that she [Kim Ju-ae]
In the week before his fatal shooting, right-wing US political activist Charlie Kirk cheered the boom of conservative young men in South Korea and warned about a “globalist menace” in Tokyo on his first speaking tour of Asia. Kirk, 31, who helped amplify US President Donald Trump’s agenda to young voters with often inflammatory rhetoric focused on issues such as gender and immigration, was shot in the neck on Wednesday at a speaking event at a Utah university. In Seoul on Friday last week, he spoke about how he “brought Trump to victory,” while addressing Build Up Korea 2025, a conservative conference
DEADLOCK: Putin has vowed to continue fighting unless Ukraine cedes more land, while talks have been paused with no immediate results expected, the Kremlin said Russia on Friday said that peace talks with Kyiv were on “pause” as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin still wanted to capture the whole of Ukraine. Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump said that he was running out of patience with Putin, and the NATO alliance said it would bolster its eastern front after Russian drones were shot down in Polish airspace this week. The latest blow to faltering diplomacy came as Russia’s army staged major military drills with its key ally Belarus. Despite Trump forcing the warring sides to hold direct talks and hosting Putin in Alaska, there
North Korea has executed people for watching or distributing foreign television shows, including popular South Korean dramas, as part of an intensifying crackdown on personal freedoms, a UN human rights report said on Friday. Surveillance has grown more pervasive since 2014 with the help of new technologies, while punishments have become harsher — including the introduction of the death penalty for offences such as sharing foreign TV dramas, the report said. The curbs make North Korea the most restrictive country in the world, said the 14-page UN report, which was based on interviews with more than 300 witnesses and victims who had
RSS