When the world gets closer.

We help you see farther.

Sign up to our expressly international daily newsletter.

Already a subscriber? Log in .

You've reached your limit of one free article.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime .

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Exclusive International news coverage

Ad-free experience NEW

Weekly digital Magazine NEW

9 daily & weekly Newsletters

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Free trial

30-days free access, then $2.90
per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch
Sources

From Sands Of Normandy, A Long Journey Home For American GI's Lost Dog Tag

Occasionally, D-Day artifacts still wash up on the beaches of Normandy. But these days, it is rare for someone in France to be able to trace them back to America's Greatest Generation.

James Kelson and his long-lost dog tag
James Kelson and his long-lost dog tag
Benoît Hopquin

SAINTE-MERE-EGLISE - The sand on a beach is sometimes like a memory – one day, things that you thought were buried forever surface again, and you don’t know why.

Last September, Stéphane Lamache, director of the Airborne Museum of Sainte-Mère-Eglise, in Normandy, in northern France, was taking a walk on the dunes of Agon-Coutainville with friends. It was a cloudless day. A small piece of metal was sticking out from the surface of the sand.

The historian immediately recognized that it was a dog tag, the metal identification worn around the neck by American soldiers on D-day.

On it were engraved the soldier's name – James Kelson -- his blood type, religion, and next of kin: Elsie Kelson, as well as an address in Washington DC.

This kind of discovery isn’t unheard of in Normandy, where more than 160,000 Allied soldiers landed on D-Day – June 6, 1944 – to liberate Europe from the Nazis. But when locals stumble upon a World War II relic, they usually just put it on a shelf or in a drawer and forget about it.

But being a D-Day historian, Lamache decided to search for Kelson in U.S. military archives and was able to retrieve a partial biography of the soldier.

James Kelson was born in 1921. He was African-American -- a negro citizen as they were called at the time. He worked small jobs in restaurants, trains and steamboats. He was drafted on Dec 2, 1942, and sent to Fort Myer, Virginia before being sent to England and eventually landing in Omaha Beach, Normandy, in June 1944.

Like many African-American soldiers during the years of segregation, he was not in a combat unit, but in supplies – laundry.

A few words of French

The archives gave information on Kelson’s life but nothing on the circumstances of his death. When he searched death records and burial registers, Lamache found no mention of a James Kelson. He contacted a genealogist network in the U.S., who discovered a daughter, named Joan.

“And then, she told us that her father was still alive,” says Lamache. The 91-year-old veteran lives in a retirement home in Washington DC.

Antonin Dehays, a historian from the Airborne Museum who was in the U.S. for a research project, was able to meet with him in Washington. “I met a lot of French people, good people,” says Kelson. After being stationed in Normandy – in the cities of Cherbourg and Valognes – he was sent to patrol the Franco-Belgian border in late 1944, and then to Japan. He returned to the U.S. in 1946, and found work in construction.

He still remembers a few words of French, like the expression “comme ci, comme ça” (“so-so”).

What about the dog tag? Kelson has no memory of losing it, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Last Friday, the veteran was given his dog tag back in a small ceremony -- nearly 70 years after it was forgotten in the sand of a Normandy beach.

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

food / travel

When Racism Poisons Italy's Culinary Scene

This is the case of chef Mareme Cisse, a black woman, who was called a slur after a couple found out that she was the one who would be preparing their meal.

Photo of Mareme Cisse cooking

Mareme Cisse in the kitchen of Ginger People&Food

Caterina Suffici

-Essay-

TURIN — Guess who's not coming to dinner. It seems like a scene from the American Deep South during the decades of segregation. But this happened in Italy, in this summer of 2023.

Two Italians, in their sixties, got up from the restaurant table and left (without saying goodbye, as the owner points out), when they declared that they didn't want to eat in a restaurant where the chef was what they called: an 'n-word.'

Racists, poor things. And ignorant, in the sense of not knowing basic facts. They don't realize that we are all made of mixtures, come from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. And that food, of course, are blends of different ingredients and recipes.

The restaurant is called Ginger People&Food, and these visitors from out of town probably didn't understand that either.

Keep reading...Show less

The latest