NEW YORK (AP) — One of Idris Elba’s grandfathers fought in World War II, but he doesn’t know what he suffered. There are no photos or stories. “That part of my family history has been somewhat erased,” Elba says.
That led to the actor narrating and executive producing the four-part series. National Geographic documentary series “A World Erased: Heroes of Color from World War II” The series will premiere on Monday, just days before the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings on the French coast on June 6. Episodes will also be available on Disney+ and Hulu at a later date.
More than eight million people of color served in the Allied forces, and the series focuses on how they fought at D-Day, Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor and the Battle of the Bulge.
The film tells the story of the 320th Ballistic Missile Battalion, the only black fighting unit to fight on the beaches of Normandy, and Force K6, a little-known Indian mule-driving regiment of the British Army that attempted the evacuation at Dunkirk.
The series uses archival footage, interviews with descendants, soldiers’ journals and performances from actors, a combination that Elba said he found visceral and moving.
“It really hit me just being in the voiceover booth and watching the footage and seeing the faces and thinking about my own personal connection. Is my grandfather one of the characters in the film? That’s what I thought. So it definitely resonated with me.”
Other stories featured in this series include: Doris Miller A mess hall attendant aboard the USS West Virginia, who rushed to an unmanned anti-aircraft gun after the attack on Pearl Harbor and fired at planes until the US Navy was forced to abandon ship.
Miller never received training in the use of a firearm because black sailors in the Navy’s segregated waitstaff did not receive the gunnery training that white sailors received. For his bravery, he was awarded the Navy Cross.
“We’re incredibly honored to be able to bring their story to light,” said director Sian Brown, who directed the D-Day episode.
Her episode featured Waverly Woodson Jr., a medic who was wounded by shrapnel during the landing but spent the next 30 hours treating the wounded and dying on Omaha Beach. “There are no color barriers,” he said.
Brown says that observation was extremely powerful: “If your leg has just been blown off, you need the help of paramedics. In that moment, you’re not going to say to Waverly, ‘No, I don’t want you to treat me.'”
Woodson will be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross posthumously. The announcement was made Monday by Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. Woodson died in 2005.
The series points out that many soldiers of color who fought the Nazis in Europe returned home, Native Americans to British colonies, and black Americans to brutal racism, and began campaigning for change because of what they had witnessed and gained — after all, civil rights icon Medgar Evers was on D-Day.
“Many of these men and women had never felt like they were human until they went to Europe and were treated like normal human beings by white people,” Brown said. “I can’t imagine what it must have been like for them, fighting Hitler, the Nazis, fascism and hatred, and then coming home to the horror of racism.”
The filmmakers had little footage of non-white soldiers in the archives, so they were thrilled when they finally found footage of black troops marching in central England before D-Day, and black soldiers celebrating the fall of the Nazis. “It was very strange to see a black man in Nazi Germany,” Elba says.
Elba urged the director and editors to put the audience right in the action, as in films like Saving Private Ryan and Dunkirk, which meant filming re-enactments of the bombing of a French village, heavy armored vehicles wading into the ocean and soldiers surviving machine-gun fire on a beach.
“I really encouraged the filmmakers to go all out,” he says, “to try and give a fictional glimpse into what it was like and how heroic the soldiers were.”
At the same time, the filmmakers wanted to convey the horrific and gruesome nature of the battle, the randomness of casualties, and the agonizing waiting period before deployment.
“I wasn’t trying to glamorize what was going on, but I wanted to portray heroism in the way that we’re used to seeing these kinds of movies,” Elba says.
