Cpl. Waverly B. Woodson Jr. arrived on Omaha Beach sometime around 10 a.m. on June 6, 1944, about three hours after U.S. troops launched their D-Day landing. The Black soldier was wounded even before he hit the shore — his landing craft hit a mine in the choppy green water as it neared the beach. Woodson, all of 21 years old and part of the only Black combat unit to land on D-Day, found himself amid almost unspeakable carnage. The first waves of the Omaha Beach landing had floundered, devastated by German fire from 14 “resistance nests” protecting the beach.
By 10 a.m., small pockets of shell-shocked U.S. troops had rallied and fought their way to the cliffs overlooking Omaha Beach, but the beach behind was a chaotic scene of wounded men and discarded equipment; bodies of the dead and the nearly dead rolled in the surf. As Woodson recounted, “There was a lot of debris and men were drowning all around me. I swam to the shore and crawled on the beach to a cliff out of the range of the machine guns and snipers. I was far from where I was supposed to be, but there wasn’t any other medic around here on Omaha Beach. … I had pulled a tent roll out of the water and so I set up a first-aid station. It was the only one on the beach.”
All told, the U.S. suffered around 3,700 casualties at Omaha Beach, including about 800 dead, meaning that if that estimate is approximately accurate, Woodson personally helped treat somewhere around five to seven percent of all U.S. casualties on the bloodiest beach of D-Day.
He’d stay there on the sandy and rocky beach, treating the wounded, for the next 30 hours, working through the day, the night and nearly all of the next day — all while trying to treat his own shrapnel injuries to his groin and back — before he was evacuated himself. Woodson comforted and collected the injured, administered sulfa powder, bandaged wounds, tightened tourniquets, dispensed plasma, removed bullets and even amputated one soldier’s foot. As a historical commission that examined his record later summarized, “For 30 continuous hours while under enemy fire, Woodson cared for more than 200 casualties. Even after being relieved at 4:00 p.m. on 7 June, Woodson gave artificial respiration to three men who had gone underwater during a [landing craft’s] landing attempt. Only then did Woodson seek further treatment.” Over the course of his time on the beach, Woodson almost certainly saved dozens or even scores of lives.
Staff Sergeant Waverly Woodson passed away at the at the age of 83. Altogether it took 80 years from the D-Day invasion, for the then Corporal’s acknowledged heroic record to be awarded, by President Biden, with the Distinguished Service Cross, not the Medal of Honor that many believe his family should receive posthumously. That neglect, a result of entrenched racism, wartime bureaucracy and Pentagon record-keeping.