Honors for Waverly Woodson at Arlington National Cemetery

Joann Woodson receives the Bronze Star and Combat Medic Badge at Arlington National Cemetery on Oct. 11, 2023. Photo: Department of Defense

In an extraordinary ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery on Oct. 11, the First Army honored the late Sgt. Waverly Woodson for heroics on Omaha Beach that have long gone unrecognized.

Two retired First Army generals presented Joann Woodson with the Medic Combat Badge and a Bronze Star, tributes her late husband earned for his service on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Despite his own serious injuries, Woodson treated hundreds of wounded, saving countless lives, until he collapsed 30 hours after landing. Click here to read more about the event.

Joann Woodson and her family are hoping this another step toward the Medal of Honor, our nation’s top award for valor. Woodson was nominated for the award in 1944 but he did not receive it. No African American soldiers did during World War II. “I hope I live long enough to see this Medal of Honor,” Joann Woodson said. “It’s been a long time.”

Click here to read more about the battle to award Woodson the Medal of Honor.

Click here to read more about Waverly Woodson’s battalion, D-Day’s only Black combat unit.

Remembering Theolus "B" Wells

Theolus "B" Wells, one of the men featured in FORGOTTEN, passed away July 16. He was 96. Mr. Wells, 96, of Orangeburg, South Carolina, shared a foxhole on Utah Beach on D-Day. "I didn't have enough sense to be scared," he said, explaining that he was just a kid. During his time in Britain training for the invasion, he was often mistaken for the boxing champ Joe Louis. He didn't always correct the mistake, he said with a smile, especially if the person asking him happened to be a lady. You can read more about him here.

Today is the 73rd anniversary of D-Day

Today is the 73rd anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, the beginning of the end of World War II. Few of the men of I interviewed for my book "Forgotten" are still with us, but Henry Parham of Pittsburgh, 96, of Pittsburgh, is one of them. On May 7, 2013, the French Embassy in Washington, DC, awarded him the Legion of Honor for his service on that very long day. His war story begins in Dec. 1942, when the draft letter came in the mail. “They got me,” he said. Parham's reluctance to serve wasn’t rooted in the extreme difficulties of serving in a racist Jim Crow army where he knew he would be treated as less than a man. He didn't lack patriotism. His reasons were more practical. He had left a sleepy corner of rural Virginia where mostly everyone he knew worked as a sharecropper. He wanted something better, and was happy to land a steady job as a porter at a bus station in Richmond, Va., where he was earning a sum that provided, for the first time in his 21 years, a dose of security. Yet he boarded a train bound for a new Army training camp in Tennessee, and trained to fly giant balloons. That secret mission would take him across the sea to a 5-mile-long patch of sand called Omaha Beach. There, Parham would be tested as never before. You can read more about him and the men of D-Day's only African-American combat unit in my book and here. 

WWII hero Carl Clark, 100, to be buried at Arlington

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Good news! WWII Navy hero Carl Clark, 100, will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Mr. Clark helped saved his ship and many shipmates after a Japanese kamikaze attack but was denied proper recognition. Like Waverly Woodson, the Army Medal of Honor nominee I have written about extensively on this page, Mr. Clark was a victim of the US military's policy of denying top honors to African Americans. He finally got a Commendation Medal-- and a thank you -- in 2012. I'll always be thankful to Ricki Stevenson, Robin Bates and Constance Bryan for bringing us together last March for a talk at UC Berkeley. Dapper in his Navy uniform -- it still fit him perfectly -- he was still going strong and was a compelling speaker. He also wrote a memoir. Click here to read more about Mr. Clark.

Launch party in Wales!

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Photo call with VIPs and friends of Forgotten at the Pontypool Museum. From left, Cheryl Morgan, Robert Prior, David Prior, Ken Clark, Peter Garwood, Linda Hervieux, Torfaen Mayor Veronica Crick, Dot Jones.

The 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion spent a brief, but blissful, time in the villages ringing Pontypool in southern Wales. Here, the men were welcomed as friends. Jessie and Godfrey Prior family took in homesick GI WIlson Monk, who became a surrogate son. Members of the Prior family helped in the research for Forgotten and several attended Linda's talk at the Pontypool Museum on Dec. 10, 2016. It was a great day! 

72 years after D-Day, African-Americans are still fighting for the Medal of Honor

Among the thousands of soldiers who landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day, there were two young men whose stories were remarkably similar. They both raced along the shooting gallery at the water's edge pulling the wounded to safety. One was injured during the landing. The other was not. One received the Medal of Honor. The other did not. Read about their stories HERE in The Daily Beast.

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Waverly Woodson was nominated for the Medal of Honor. He never received it. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Photo: Linda Hervieux

NPR's Here & Now features FORGOTTEN

The men of the HQ battery of the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion pose in France, July 1944.

Thanks to NPR's Here & Now, recorded at WBUR in Boston, for inviting Linda Hervieux on the show to talk about FORGOTTEN: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, At Home and At War. They also published an excerpt from the book. Read it here.