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However, a 1973 fire destroyed the military personnel records needed to document the actions.Īnother member of the African-American unit, William Dabney, told The AP in 2009, “The firing was furious on the beach. senator is now leading an effort to award the Medal of Honor to Woodson for his actions on D-Day.
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Woodson himself was wounded, but he spent 30 hours on the Normandy coast helping other wounded men before eventually collapsing. Then they started with the mortar shells.” They raked the whole top of the ship and killed all the crew. Of our 26 Navy personnel there was only one left. “The tide brought us in, and that’s when the 88s hit us,” he said of the German 88 millimeter guns. Before his death in 2005, he told The Associated Press in 1994 about how his landing ship hit a mine on the way to Omaha Beach. Waverly Woodson, Junior, was a medical worker with the battalion. Its job was to set up explosive- rigged balloons to prevent German airplanes from attacking the Allies. The only African American force in battle that day was the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion. But on Normandy, everyone faced the same dangers. The African Americans served in a United States military that separated people by race. Among them, about 2,000 African Americans are believed to have landed at the time. Their goal was to gain control of Normandy for the final military campaign against Nazi Germany.īooks and films about D-Day often show an all-white group of soldiers arriving in Normandy on June 6, 1944. Tens of thousands of Allied troops spread out across the air and sea along northern France. D-Day was the largest invasion the world has ever seen.