The 1511th Quartermaster Truck Regiment was based at Air Force Station 569, nicknamed Adam Hall, on Mounsey Road just outside the village of Bamber Bridge. They were part of the Eighth Air Force, the bomber wing that ran the strategic air war against Germany from East Anglia and Lancashire. The 1511th's job was logistics: hauling materiel between the bases. The regiment was Black, in the segregated tradition of the US Army of 1943. White American military police of the 234th Company were billeted on the north side of the same village. A week before the night of the battle, the Detroit race riot had killed 34 people in Michigan, 25 of them Black. The news reached Bamber Bridge. The air at Adam Hall was already tense before anyone walked into Ye Olde Hob Inn that Thursday evening.

Around closing time on 24 June 1943, soldiers of the 1511th were drinking in the Hob Inn with English villagers when two military policemen, Corporal Roy Windsor and Private First Class Ralph Ridgeway, arrived. They had orders to arrest soldiers out of uniform. They picked Private Eugene Nunn, who was wearing a field jacket rather than the required Class A dress, and asked him to step outside. The pub objected. So did the British soldiers drinking there. One asked: Why do you want to arrest them? They're not doing anything or bothering anybody. The argument moved into the street. It escalated. Bottles were thrown, the MPs called for backup, and in the confrontation that followed a white MP shot and killed Private William Crossland.

Some of the wounded Black soldiers went back to Adam Hall. The news that an MP had shot a member of the 1511th spread fast, and the rumour spread with it that the MPs intended to come for the rest. Acting commander Major George Heris, with the colonel absent, tried to defuse the panic. Lieutenant Edwin Jones, the only Black officer in the unit, walked through the barracks and persuaded the soldiers that justice would be done. It was not enough. Soldiers broke into the armoury, took rifles, and prepared to defend themselves. When more MPs arrived from outside the village, this time with machine guns and grenades, the two sides exchanged fire across the dark Lancashire fields for several hours. Maintenance workers at a Bamber Bridge bank found the bullet holes in the walls in the late 1980s, half a century later.

Thirty-two African American soldiers were eventually convicted at court-martial of mutiny and related offences, with sentences ranging from three months to fifteen years. The verdict went up the chain of command for review, and the review reduced almost everything. One man was released outright. Every other sentence was cut. The last of the convicted men walked out after serving thirteen months. The truth of what had happened, even within the army's own machinery, could not be sustained at the original severity. The 1511th continued to do its job. The Eighth Air Force kept flying missions over Germany. Bamber Bridge, the village, kept its pubs as the soldiers had found them.

The story was published in the New York Times in 1973 by Anthony Burgess, who used the village's wartime experience as material in his autobiography Little Wilson and Big God. The novelist Nevil Shute used it earlier, in his 1947 novel The Chequer Board, as a fictionalised study of wartime American racism. The 70th anniversary in 2013 brought a symposium at the University of Central Lancashire, a screening of the documentary Choc'late Soldiers from the USA, and a performance of Natalie Penn's play Lie Back and Think of America. A historian writing for The Conversation described the night as Britain welcoming Black troops but rejecting Jim Crow. The American military issued a formal apology to the village in 2012, nearly seven decades late. The bullet holes in the bank wall are now part of the local heritage trail.