Army trucks arrived in droves, filled with bodies, and African American soldiers stood in the freezing mud ready to unload them. First Sergeant Jefferson Wiggins had relayed his orders to his men: Dig graves for all the corpses. Beyond the gruesomeness of the task was its irony. While burying white soldiers was allowed, serving with them alive wasn’t.

The 960th Quartermaster Service Company, a segregated unit of 260 Black G.I.s serving in World War II, was sent to Margraten, a village in the Netherlands, in the fall of 1944. As was the case for most Black divisions, the 960th QMSC was a service unit, not a combat one. But their service of digging graves—even in harsh winter conditions—for approximately 20,000 American soldiers who’d been killed in battle wasn’t officially recognized until nearly 65 years later. Initially reluctant to dredge up his painful war stories, Wiggins eventually did. “People should know about this,” Janice Wiggins recalled her late husband saying after decades without mentioning it.

More than 1.2 million Black soldiers served in World War II, primarily in divisions that provided supplies to white troops. Because the army adhered to the discriminatory policies of the United States, the military was segregated, with African American soldiers serving in separate units, living in segregated quarters and being relegated to mostly menial tasks.

The 960th Quartermaster Service Company was established as an all-Black division at Camp Phillips in Kansas in 1943. Captain William Solms, a white officer, oversaw the men but Jefferson Wiggins, the group’s First Sergeant, was Black and understood the weight of Jim Crow segregation. Originally from rural Alabama, where there were limited educational opportunities for African Americans and a looming threat of violence from the Ku Klux Klan, Wiggins decided to enlist.

“As an army volunteer you at least got enough to eat, three meals a day,” said Wiggins, in From Alabama to Margraten, the book about his life by oral historian and author Mieke Kirkels. “You could get good medical care, and with a bit of luck you’d be treated more respectfully than back home,” Wiggins said.

After completing training, the 960th QMSC sailed to Europe for two weeks aboard the SS Frederick Lykes in late February 1944. Wiggins told Kirkels that among the 2,000 soldiers onboard, the white G.I.s were on the upper deck and African Americans were kept below where there were no windows. They were allowed to get fresh air, but the recreational facilities and lounge areas were for white troops only. The segregation continued when 19-year-old Wiggins and his men arrived in England in March 1944, where they remained until the Normandy invasion in June.

From France to Belgium, the 960th QMSC supplied combat units with ammunition and food, and cleared roads amid enemy fire. But it was the next assignment that truly tested the unit’s resolve.

While Allied troops pushed eastward en route to Germany, thousands of dead soldiers were left in battlefields and by the side of the road. General William Hood Simpson, commander of the U.S. Ninth Army, who oversaw divisions primarily in Northwest Europe, needed a cemetery constructed as soon as possible.

He tasked Captain Joseph Shomon, the head of the 611th Graves Registration Company, to find a location where dead American soldiers could be properly buried. The graves division oversaw military deaths, identifying bodies left behind, collecting tags and personal effects, and burying the deceased in temporary mass graves, from soldiers to civilians to enemies—recording all the locations until the bodies could be collected and reburied elsewhere. The temporary graves also helped the army avoid demoralizing troops who otherwise would’ve seen corpses in the streets.

Shomon found about 65 acres of farmland in Margraten, a Dutch village in South Limburg, in the southernmost province of the Netherlands that had been liberated by the Allies in September 1944. Shomon told Solms that the 960th QMSC would have to dig all the graves. Wiggins and his men set up barracks at an elementary school in the nearby town of Gronsveld in November 1944.

Wiggins later said when he first arrived in the fields, there were thousands of dead bodies lying on a tarp. There were no coffins, so the bodies had to be tied up in mattress covers where the men dug graves that were 6-feet-deep, 6-feet-long and 2.5-feet-wide.

Aside from the smell of decomposing bodies, there was rain, snow, wind, mud and flooding. The ground wasn’t solid enough for machinery, so the 960th QMSC used pickaxes and shovels. Some of the fallen had been killed a few days before, while others had been dead for much longer. And some remains were mutilated from explosions. In Kirkels' book, Wiggins said the gravedigging was so traumatizing that no one talked during the day, except for the few who would pray over the graves and some who quietly cried. “So, there we were. A group of Black Americans confronted with all these dead white Americans… When they were alive, we couldn’t sit in the same room,” said Wiggins.

The men left in mid-December but returned in early spring to bury more dead soldiers who were killed in the Battle of the Bulge. Some local farmers dug graves too. At the end, the men of the 960th QMSC were credited with burying about 20,000 bodies.

In 1947, thousands of buried soldiers in the cemetery were repatriated at the request of family members who wanted their loved ones buried elsewhere. Captain Shomon commended the 960th QMSC in March 1945 for their heroic efforts but their story wasn’t told until decades later. When Mieke Kirkels started her oral history project about the cemetery, she learned about the 960^th QMSC from locals.

“There was nothing about the Blacks soldiers in the archives,” said Kirkels, who eventually tracked down Wiggins in 2009, the last surviving member of the 960th QMSC, before his passing in 2013. Today, there are 8,288 American World War II soldiers buried in Margraten, including 172 African American soldiers, who fought on the front lines when the laws of segregation were blurred out of necessity.