Some years back, there was a Hollywood dustup created when Clint Eastwood released a couple of films about the World War II Battle for Iwo Jima, one from the U.S. point of view, featuring scores of Marines who took part, and another seen through the eyes of the Japanese, most of whom died defending it.

“Where are the Black” participants in the battle, rival director Spike Lee wanted to know? Eastwood dismissed Lee’s complaint, saying “there were no Black soldiers” on Iwo Jima. Actually Clint, and your fellow whitewashing conservatives,  there were.

I was thinking of that dust-up when watching “Erased: WW2’s Heroes of Color,” an eye-opening new limited series from The National Geographic Channel. Lee was ahead of the curve, referring to what Eastwood did as “erasing” Black participation from his WWII epic.

As the series details sometimes years-long efforts to cover-up, minimize and dismiss heroic deeds like those of seaman Doris Miller, Major Akbar Khan, D-Day medic Waverly D. Woodson and others, the name of it was changed from “The Color of Victory” to “Erased.”

“More than eight million people of color” — Indians, Pakistanis, Asians, Africans and African Americans — “served with the Allies,” Elba narrates in the opening to every episode of this excellent series. “My grandfather was one of these men.”

Like every other World War II documentary and doc series, the producers treat us to newsreel footage, reenactments, archival interviews with the participants, all of whom have now passed away, experts — authors and academics — and maps. But a novel touch here is that we hear from descendants of these heroes, talking about family lore, what their father, uncle or grandfather told their families, with actors reading from letters, diaries and memoirs by the men whose story is little known.

Episodes of this series focus on British Royal Indian Army participants in the Battle of France, which ended with the evacuation of “Dunkirk,” Black U.S. Navy mess attendants (cooks, servants) who saved sailors and rose to the combat occasion at “Pearl Harbor,” Black soldiers who went ashore as barrage balloon deployers or medics on “D-Day,” June 6, 1944, and the original Black Panthers, The 761st Tank Battalion, the first Black tank battalion in the U.S. Army, which fought in (racist) Gen. Patton’s Third Army in “The Battle of the Bulge.”

Elba, also a producer in the series, weighs in with opinions in his narration, noting how rare film footage was of any of these men or their combat units — a parade of Black soldiers in a British town, still photos, men in the background of other shots — and that much of what is reported in this film had to be dug out of “forgotten” archives.

But some of the historians seen here, and the filmmakers, went to the effort of digging this up. And while we might know of the heroics of seaman Miller, who took over an anti-aircraft gun on the U.S.S. West Virginia on Dec. 7, 1941 — “Dorie” Miller was portrayed by Cuba Gooding Jr. in the 2001 epic “Pearl Harbor” — few of us realize the efforts to deny him and others the commendations they deserved for their actions.

Miller was the first Black sailor to earn The Navy Cross, but many military historians feel he was denied the Medal of Honor by a racist Navy and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. Miller wasn’t alone. And the Navy wasn’t the only racist arm of the armed forces during the war. Just getting into combat was a civil rights struggle all its own.

“They didn’t want to see Black soldiers (and sailors) have the same access to heroism,” Dartmouth historian Matthew Delmont reminds us. Service members of color earning medals in combat didn’t fit the British or American official “narrative” of the struggle, then and for decades afterwards.

Many of the American soldiers trained at bases in the segregated, white supremacist South. Guys like tanker Johnnie Stevens, “our Humphrey Bogart,” one historian, referencing Bogie’s tank battle movie “Sahara,” says — “tough guy” — had to weather that racism before ever boarding ship for Europe.

Stevens’ diary noted that “We’re treated better here” (in Europe) “than back home.”

As one descendent and a few historians questioned in the series note, the men enlisting in these services — in India (and future Pakistan) and the U.S. — weren’t just looking for work away so that they could send money back home. They were seeking acceptance and advancement. “By serving, they could help change things.”

They did. The World War II generation of men of color returned to India to lobby for and help win its independence, and came back to America to integrate the armed forces, end lynching and stake their claim to equal rights.

Focusing on three or four service members in each episode, the series beautifully personalizes their experience. They and their families are quite moving as we hear old audio tapes of these “Greatest Generation” veterans recall their service.

There’s also an entire separate National Geographic documentary about the famed “Real Red Tails,” the “Tuskegee Airmen” fighter pilots of the European theater of conflict.

“Erased” doesn’t reinvent the WWII combat documentary. Family members aren’t the most reliable and objective keepers of memory and an ancestor’s place in it.

But “Erased” more than makes its case that this corner of World War II history has been downplayed, ignored or buried. After this, there’s no excuse for being as uninformed as Clint Eastwood once was about the vast cross-section of society that took up arms against fascism the last time it reared its racist head.

Rating: unrated, combat footage

Cast: Narrated by Idris Elba, with Dr. Diya Gupta, Professor Leah Wright Riguer, Dr. Ghee Bowman, Jack Gill, Professor Marcus Cox, Abdul Sulaiman, Doreen Stevens, Professor Matthew Delmont, Kyle Reese Bell, Wayne Robinson, Professor Yohoru Williams, Joshua Riley and others.

Credits: Directed by Adeyemi Michael. Premieres on the National Geographic Channel June 3.

Running time: Four episodes, @46 minutes each, plus commercials