6888th Legacy Tour

In February 1945, Maj. Charity Adams reported to Birmingham, England, where she was shown six aircraft hangars and warehouses stuffed floor-to-ceiling with 17 million pieces of undelivered American mail. Some of it had been there for two years. Some of the addressees were dead. The Army’s solution had been to put the backlog under the command of the only all-Black, all-female battalion of the war, the 855 women of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, and give them six months to clear it. They did it in three.

By the time they were finished, 7 million American troops and government workers in Europe were receiving mail again. The unit was disbanded after V-J Day. None of its members was decorated for it at the time.

The 6888th was the largest contingent of Black women to serve overseas in the U.S. Army during the war. Its commander, Maj. Charity Adams, by V-E Day, Lt. Col. Charity Adams, was the highest-ranking Black woman in the wartime Army. After Birmingham, they cleared similar backlogs in Rouen and Paris. Three of their own — Pfc. Mary Barlow, Pfc. Mary Bankston, and Pvt. Dolores Browne — were killed in a jeep accident outside Rouen in July 1945, and are the only Black women buried in the Normandy American Cemetery.

The unit returned to a country that did not greet them, was disbanded without ceremony in March 1946, and remained largely unknown for seven decades. The Congressional Gold Medal was awarded in 2022. The historian leading this tour, Col. Edna Cummings (U.S. Army, ret.), helped lead the campaign that finally won it.

This tour is 10 days long, from England to France, from Birmingham, where the 6888th cleared its first backlog, to Rouen, where they were stationed in the summer of 1945, to Paris, where they finished their work. Along the way, you will:

• Visit King Edward’s School in Birmingham, where the women of the 6888th were quartered when they arrived in February 1945. A Blue Plaque on the building today commemorates them. Walk through Victoria Square nearby, where newsreel cameras filmed the unit marching at attention through the city center.
• Stand at the warehouses and aircraft hangars where the 6888th processed the 17-million-piece backlog of mail — some of it stacked floor to ceiling, some of it more than two years old. The unit ran three eight-hour shifts around the clock at roughly 65,000 pieces per shift. They cleared the backlog in three months, half the time the Army had given them.
• Stop at Stratford-upon-Avon, the Warwickshire market town that is Shakespeare’s birthplace, where on a sightseeing pass the 6888th took the famous photograph of themselves around his statue. You will find the same statue and the same Tudor streets they did.
• Tour Bletchley Park, the Buckinghamshire country house where about 8,000 women operated the Bombe and Colossus machines that broke the German Enigma cipher. By 1945 the British and American codebreakers were largely women; so was the unit reading their results in Birmingham. The wartime workforce, on both sides of the Atlantic, looked very different from the postwar image of it.
• Visit Grosvenor Square in London, where, in January 1945, Maj. Charity Adams reported to the U.S. Army headquarters in advance of the 6888th’s deployment. The square was wartime “Little America”, home to Eisenhower’s ETOUSA headquarters and to the U.S. Embassy. The building Adams reported to is still there.
• Walk the principal American sites of D-Day: Sainte-Mère-Église, where the 82nd and 101st Airborne descended in the dark; Utah Beach, where the 4th Infantry Division landed; Pointe du Hoc, where Lt. Col. James Rudder’s Rangers scaled the cliffs to silence German guns; and Omaha Beach, where American troops faced the worst German resistance of the day.
• Pay your respects at the Normandy American Cemetery on the bluff above Omaha Beach, where 9,387 American war dead are buried, and 1,557 names of the missing are inscribed on the Wall of the Missing. Among the burials are Pfc. Mary Barlow, Pfc. Mary Bankston, and Pvt. Dolores Browne of the 6888th, killed in a jeep accident outside Rouen in July 1945 — the only Black women buried here. Attend a graveside commemoration at their stones.
• Visit the Place du Vieux-Marché in Rouen, where on May 27, 1945, the 6888th marched in a parade in honor of Joan of Arc, on the spot where she was burned at the stake in 1431. American newsreels filmed Black American women in U.S. Army uniform marching in honor of a 15th-century French saint, on V-E Day plus 19.
• Visit the Caserne Tallandier in Rouen, the French military barracks where the 6888th was housed in 1945. After the women’s arrival drew unusually heavy attention from American servicemen “who suddenly found that they had business in Rouen,” the unit’s WAC Military Police were denied firearms. They trained in jujitsu instead, which the Army Center of Military History reports proved effective at keeping unauthorized visitors out.
• End in Paris, where in October 1945, the 6888th took on a third mail backlog. Officers were quartered at the Hôtel États-Unis; enlisted women at the Hôtel Bohy-Lafayette. Visit Lt. Gen. C. H. Lee’s wartime headquarters at the Hôtel George V, where Adams met with the European Communications Zone commander. The unit was disbanded at Fort Dix in March 1946. None of its members were decorated.

The 6888th was the only all-Black, all-female unit the U.S. Army deployed overseas in the war. Its members were 855 women in a segregated army in a segregated country. They cleared a backlog that the Army had given them six months to clear in three. They lost three of their own in a road accident in Rouen and are the only Black women buried in the Normandy American Cemetery. They came home to no parade and were disbanded in March 1946 without ceremony.

Their first historical monument was dedicated in 2018. Their Congressional Gold Medal was awarded in 2022 — 77 years after the work that earned it. Tyler Perry’s The Six Triple Eight arrived in 2024. The recognition has come slowly. This tour walks the road they walked.

By the end of these 10 days, you will know the 6888th by name, by individual names you did not know before. You will have seen the warehouses in Birmingham. You will have stood at the graves of Mary Barlow, Mary Bankston, and Dolores Browne in the Normandy American Cemetery.

You will have walked the Place du Vieux-Marché in Rouen, where the women of the 6888th marched in honor of Joan of Arc on the same square where she was killed. And the next time you see a mailbox or an army post office in a war movie, you will think of the 17 million pieces of mail that, by the summer of 1945, had finally found the soldiers they were addressed to.