EXCLUSIVE: Pentagon (Finally) Honors Forgotten Black D-Day Hero
EXCLUSIVE: Pentagon (Finally) Honors Forgotten Black D-Day Hero
Waverly B. Woodson Jr's medal has been 80 years in the making
I'm excited to share the news today that the Pentagon is taking a major step to right an 80-year-old wrong, awarding the Distinguished Service Cross to a Black medic from Omaha Beach whose D-Day valor has been long overlooked. Here’s my article in POLITICO Magazine, which just published:
As you know from this newsletter, I've spent the last two years compiling a new oral history of D-Day that will be published tomorrow. Through my research, I went through about 5,000 individual stories — archived oral histories, memoirs, videotaped testimonies, letters, news articles, TV and radio transcripts, official reports, battlefield citations, and more. In the end, the book — WHEN THE SEA CAME ALIVE — features about 700 voices from across the conflict.
In the book, though, I included just two photos of individual soldiers from D-Day.
Cpl. Waverly B. Woodson, Jr., of the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, is one of them.
On June 6, 1944, Woodson was a medic with the lone Black combat unit to land on the D-Day beaches — wounded even before he made it to shore at Omaha Beach, he spent 30 hours treating casualties on the beach before being evacuated himself. He treated somewhere around 200 casualties, a number that would mean that he helped treat somewhere around five percent of all US casualties at the deadly Omaha Beach personally.
He was considered at the time for the Medal of Honor, but amid the racism of the era's segregated military not a single Black soldier was given a Medal of Honor in World War II. Later efforts by the Clinton administration to reconsider and honor the heroism of Black troops in the war passed over Woodson because by then the Pentagon had lost his paperwork. He died in 2005 unrecognized and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
For the last decade, as his widow entered her 90s herself, a small group of dedicated historians, archivists, and members of Congress — including author Linda Hervieux, whose 2015 book "Forgotten" brought Woodson's story to a wider audience, First Army Historian Capt. Kevin Braaflett, and Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen — have continued investigating Woodson's case and pushing the military to do the right thing. I discovered Woodson's story in Linda's book during my own research and found it fascinating, and she helped me include Woodson's rarely seen memories of D-Day in WHEN THE SEA CAME ALIVE.
Today, I'm excited to share the news that the Pentagon is honoring Woodson with the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation's second-highest combat award. It's not the Medal of Honor he deserves, but it's an important and long overdue recognition for Woodson. As Woodson's son told me when we spoke last week, "It's the definition of better late than never."
You can read my full story, just published by POLITICO Magazine, about Woodson, his bravery on Omaha Beach, and the 80-year quest to honor him here:
I hope you'll have a chance to read his amazing story this week as we honor the 80th anniversary of D-Day and the final passing of the Greatest Generation.
More to come, of course, on the roll-out of my book!
GMG