In the Netherlands, a small group of biracial citizens has entered its eighth decade of lives that have been often puzzling and difficult, but which offer a unique insight into the history of race relations in America. Though their African American fathers had brought liberation from Nazi tyranny at the end of World War II, they were in a segregated American military derived from a racially divided American society. Decades later, some of their children could finally know of a father's identity and the life he had led after the war. Just one would be able to find an embrace in his arms, and just one would arrive at her father's American grave after 73 years. But they could now understand their own Dutch lives in the context of their fathers' lives in America.

The role of Americans in the two world wars is well known - with a glaring exception. By the time of the American entrance into World War I in April 1917 and World War II in December 1941, tens of thousands of Americans had already fought and died in those conflicts in the uniforms of other nations. Most had travelled to Canada to join the ground, air and naval forces of the Commonwealth nations, others to France, Poland, China and the other nations and armed forces that played a role in the continuing world conflict of the first half of the century. In preceding their own nation to war, they influenced the course of events in those years and, though threatened with loss of citizenship, were ultimately met with the acceptance of their own government. This book tells the story of who these Americans were, why they took the actions they did, their experiences in war, and the effects of their presence as Americans in foreign forces.

Normandy, Flanders Field and other cemeteries for American war dead buried outside the United States are well known. However, lesser-known burial sites exist all over the world - in Australia and across the Pacific Rim, in Canada and Mexico, Libya and Spain, even as far north as the Russian Arctic. The story of who these soldiers were and how they ended up in foreign cemeteries traces the evolution of American attitudes toward its war dead and simultaneously offers a new perspective on the nation for which they died. The text provides the names of the war dead and the location of individual burial sites.