The smell joined Jefferson Wiggins and members of his all-Black service unit as they tramped through the French countryside.
The telltale foulness grew in the weeks following the Normandy invasion in June 1944. It became more constant as American soldiers pushed the Germans back through Belgium and into the Netherlands.
This October morning, Wiggins stood on the edge of a freshly tilled field outside the Dutch village of Margraten.
The stench of death was suffocating. In the pre-dawn darkness, Wiggins could make out the strange harvest: rows and rows of dead American soldiers.
Wiggins would be among the 260 African American men who would dig graves and bury the fallen.
The field would become the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten.
Wiggins died in 2013 and his widow, Janice, said recently that he spent most of his life trying to forget that grim work detail. History seemed to forget, too.
Mieke Kirkels, a public historian in the Netherlands, didn’t know about the gravediggers until a little over a decade ago. Only in 2014 did she learn that 172 African American soldiers are buried in Margraten.
Now a team of Dutch historians, and an author in Portsmouth, have embarked on several projects to spotlight these men. They are looking specifically for any relatives of the 172, some of whom hailed from Hampton Roads. They want to include photos and histories of the men in The Faces of Margraten program.
Chris Dickon, in particular, said people should know about the soldiers’ sacrifices, especially when the military of World War II didn’t trust them to fight but only to help. Military policies then created painful consequences that linger in America and the Netherlands as well, Dickon said.
Tuesday was the National Day of Commemoration in the Netherlands and graves of soldiers were decorated, including those of the African American troops. But more needs to be done, Dickon said.
“Of course, the question is ‘why’? If they’re treated equally in death, why make them exceptional,” Dickon said recently. “We have to make them exceptional. We have to. We have to tell their stories.”
