A pair of black soldiers who served in World War II were killed by a white superior officer for defying segregation and speaking to white female Red Cross workers at a camp in France, newly unearthed documents revealed.
The slain soldiers – Allen Leftridge and Frank Glenn – were challenged by the sergeant for the breach of norms in September 1945, archived documents show.
They were then killed by another white officer for speaking to the female Red Cross workers at an Allied encampment in France, the documents revealed.
The settlement was also heavily segregated – and described as both a ‘seventh heaven’ and a center of chaos due to brewing tensions between weary troops.
That ruling came from a US judge who ruled in a court martial called after the 1945 incident that her husband’s death came after he failed to heed to his superiors.
The incident transpired towards the end of the long-running conflict at an allied encampment known as The Lucky Strike, accounts offered by witnesses and since unsealed Army documents confirm.
The camp was a bustling tent city of roughly 58,000 American troops who at the time were awaiting transportation back to the United States after victory in Europe.
Now, nearly a century later, the pair’s descendants are seeking justice – as for reasons that aren’t clear, Leftridge’s widow was denied military benefits.
The two white soldiers involved in the murders, which took place on the war-torn Western front in 1945, were absolved of their actions.
Despite the deed’s inherent illegaily – and several witnesses seeing the murders firsthand, the killer, an unnamed American soldier, was cleared and one of the men’s widows denied a survivor’s pension.
The duo’s story is now being told thanks in part to the victim’s widow, the late Sarah Leftridge, who shared the harrowing account with a black journalist who would eventually marry her.
The encounter in question transpired at the height of these tensions, roughly two weeks after the end of the war in September 1945.
Documents and witness accounts detail how Leftridge and Glenn – whose death, unlike his companion, was described as in the line of duty and his widow awarded compensation – entered a Red Cross tent where women were serving soldiers doughnuts and coffee.
The soldiers at some point went inside to get some – disobeying Army-laid laws that prohibited Black soldiers from socializing with French women.
‘[The] white MP ordered him not to stand there talking to this woman, Allen turned his back on him,’ Duckett said in an interview published in Studs Terkel’s 1984 oral history ‘The Good War.’Duckett, who died in 1984, was a journalist whose reporting until now served as the primary account of the encounter.
Duckett described how a subsequent scuffle left Leftridge ‘shot in the back and killed’ by an armed guard called over to quell the encounter.
Glenn was also killed at some point during the previously shrouded incident.
