Idris Elba helps discover the colored soldiers of World War II who never deserved their due

NEW YORK (AP) – One of Idris Elba his grandparents fought in World War II, but he doesn’t know what he experienced. No photos or stories survive. “That part of my family history was kind of erased,” Elba says.

This helped the actor in his pursuit of narration and executive production of the four-part installment National Geographic Documentaries “Erased: Colored Heroes of World War II” which premiered on Monday, a couple of days before the eightieth anniversary of D-Day, when the Allies landed on the coast of France on June 6. Episodes may also be available in a while Disney+ and Hulu.

More than 8 million people of color served in the Allied ranks, and the series takes an insightful take a look at how some fared on D-Day, Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor and the Battle of the Bulge.

It tells the story of the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, the only all-black combat unit fighting on the D-Day beaches, and Force K6, a little-known Indian regiment of mule traders from the British Army attempting to evacuate at Dunkirk.

The series used archival materials, interviews with descendants, soldiers’ diaries and actor portraits – a mixture that Elba said he found touching and moving.

“It really made an impact on me right there in the narrator’s booth, looking at the images, looking at the faces, and reflecting on my personal connection. Could my grandfather be one of the people depicted in one of the passages? That’s what I was thinking. So that definitely appealed to me.”

The series also features stories like this one Doris Miller, steward aboard the USS West Virginia who, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, ran as much as an unattended anti-aircraft gun and fired at planes until he was forced to desert ship.

He was never trained in the use of weapons because black sailors serving in the Navy’s segregated stewards unit didn’t receive the firearms training that white sailors receive. Miller’s bravery earned him the Navy Cross.

“It is my honor and privilege to shed some light on their stories,” says director Shianne Brown, who directed the D-Day episode.

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Her episode was featured Waverly Woodson, Jr., a medic who was wounded by shrapnel upon landing but nonetheless spent the next 30 hours treating the wounded and dying on Omaha Beach. He noted, “In practice, there is no such thing as a color barrier.”

Brown says the surveillance has been extremely effective. “If your leg has just been torn off, you would like medical attention. At this point you will not tell Waverly, “No, I don’t want you to treat me.”

Woodson is posthumously awarded the Award Cross of Merit. The announcement was made Monday by Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. Woodson died in 2005.

The series indicates that many colored soldiers who fought the Nazis in Europe returned home – Indians returned to British colonization and Black Americans to bitter racism — and started agitating for change because of what that they had witnessed and earned. After all, civil rights icon Medgar Evers was on D-Day.

“Many of these men and women never felt like people before they went to Europe, and then they were treated by the white population like normal human beings,” Brown says. “I am unable to even imagine what it will feel like for them. You fight against Hitler and the Nazis, against fascism and hatred, and also you come home and experience racist terror.”

The filmmakers found little or no footage of non-white soldiers in the archives, so that they were thrilled after they finally got here across photos of a black unit marching in central England before D-Day, or black soldiers cheering the fall of the Nazis. “It was very strange to see a black man in Nazi Germany,” Elba says.

Elba encouraged directors and editors to try to attract viewers into the motion, as was the case with the movies “Saving Private Ryan” and “Dunkirk.” This meant filming reenactments of bombings in French villages, wading into the ocean with heavy equipment, and soldiers shelling the beach.

“I really encouraged the filmmakers to really go for it,” he says. “We’re giving you a little insight into, from a fictional perspective, what it might have been like and how heroic these soldiers were.”

At the same time, the filmmakers wanted to indicate how terrible and terrifying combat could be, the randomness of victims and the painful wait for deployment.

“We don’t want to glorify what’s happening, but we really wanted to paint the heroism in a way that would relate to the way we watched these types of films,” Elba says.