This Black Soldier Went to Europe to Fight Nazis. He Was Killed by White Americans Before He Got the Chance.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been busy. In the past year, he’s stripped diversity training from military academies, removed videos honoring the Tuskegee Airmen and Women Airforce Service Pilots from basic training, and celebrated a recent court victory allowing the Pentagon to ban transgender service members. “No more pronouns. No more climate change obsession. No more dudes in dresses,” he declared in September. “We’re done with that s**t.”

Hegseth frames this as restoring “military lethality” after decades of “woke” decay. But here’s what he won’t tell you: the U.S. military has historically been ahead of American society on integration, not behind it. President Truman desegregated the armed forces in 1948, six years before Brown v. Board of Education. The military opened combat roles to women, ended “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and built one of the most diverse institutions in the country, not because generals were bleeding-heart liberals, but because they understood a simple truth: you can’t have a unified fighting force if your troops are fighting each other.

Hegseth’s revisionism erases that history. It also erases what happens when the military allows prejudice to fester unchecked. For that lesson, we need to go back to a small English village in 1943, where a Black soldier named William Crossland went to fight Nazis and was killed by white Americans instead.

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Jim Crow Crosses the Atlantic

In 1943, nearly two million American servicemen were stationed in or passed through Britain. About 150,000 of them were Black, serving in segregated units led by white officers. Most were relegated to non-combat roles: driving trucks, loading supplies, building infrastructure. The dangerous work with none of the glory.

The U.S. Army didn’t just bring its soldiers to England. It brought its racial hierarchy too. Military authorities pressured British pubs and restaurants to separate the races, to extend Jim Crow beyond American borders. They issued guidance suggesting that white and Black troops