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.
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