Retired Maj. Gen. Peter Gravett begins his new book, Battling While Black: General Patton’s Heroic African American WWII Battalions, with a fact most of us would rather forget: World War II was supposed to have been a white man’s war. In the decades leading up to the conflict, the U.S. military’s racial doctrine was governed by an exceedingly racist U.S. Army War College study published in 1925 and reissued annually for more than a dozen years.

According to the study, “mental inferiority and the inherent weakness of his character” made African American men only fit for sanitation, supply, gravedigging and other menial tasks. Indeed, it was only due to efforts by Black leaders that African American draftees and recruits were trained for battle at all. Even then, they were intended strictly as fighting reserves, never meant for action. The Army in particular—and the military in general—organized its structure and strategy around 15 blatantly false and demeaning principles that variously and oxymoronically painted Black men as too cowardly to fight, too savage to follow orders, too simple to lead and too dishonest to follow.

Gravett counters these slanders by highlighting the service of four battalions in Gen. George Patton Jr.’s Third U.S. Army that found their way to the front, serving and sacrificing on behalf of a massive war effort. He offers stirring stories of how, though Jim Crow laws requiring racial segregation meant that these battalion members entered the war as “mere sideshows,” their heroic service, dedication to duty and selfless sacrifice ensured that “each one ended their service as the main attraction.”

Indeed, Gravett’s focus on the service of four battalions—the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, the 761st Tank Battalion, the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion and the 6888th Postal Battalion (the only unit of Black women to deploy overseas in the entire war)—demonstrates how their actions sometimes garnered respect in the memories of their historical contemporaries. And he makes certain that the battalions will shine brightly in our memories.

A highly successful and long-serving Black officer himself, Gravett structures his stories around not just the actions at Normandy, the hedgerows and the warehouses, or the Battle of the Bulge that earned each unit acclaim, but also the slights the battalion members endured during training, the biases they faced while serving and the cruelties they suffered on returning to the United States. This start-to-finish technique, told with all the experience of a career soldier, provides the full context and history of each group of soldiers who simultaneously fought the Nazis and Jim Crow. The book also re-creates the incredible movements and moments these soldiers fought in, through both victories and defeats.

Gravett is not a traditionally trained historian, and at times this shifts the tenor of his book. Readers seeking a traditional thesis and historical structure will need to drop those expectations, and some sections of the book can be repetitive. One area that might have benefited from more historical focus is how the soldiers’ exploits impacted African Americans on the homefront, and also how the homefront impacted their service.

The tradeoff, however, is strong: Readers of Gravett’s book get to follow the experiences of several units of dedicated soldiers in every aspect of training, tragedy and triumph. He shares stories of men who floated military balloons under fire at Normandy, the tremendous terror and tenacity tankers and artillerymen faced in the Battle of the Bulge, and female soldiers’ revolutionary efforts to efficiently and effectively deliver mail and all the hope it contained. Throughout it all, readers see the extraordinary efforts of these battalions that battled while Black.

Tragically, because of Jim Crow, their efforts were not heralded nearly enough in their day. Triumphantly, with the help of Gravett’s book, we can—and should—commemorate them in ours.

Connor Williams served as lead historian for the congressional Naming Commission. He works in the departments of History and African American Studies at Yale University, Connecticut. He will receive a dual doctorate in history and African American studies from Yale in the spring.