He helped tell the story of the 320th Battalion, gaining recognition only late in his life. “I did what I was supposed to do as an American,” he said.
The story of D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, has been told and retold through books, movies and the recollections of soldiers, sailors and airmen.
But the role played by some 2,000 African American servicemen who were among the troops in the segregated Army landing on the invasion beaches code-name Omaha and Utah on that day remained largely untold for decades.
Then came June 2009, when President Barack Obama, participating in ceremonies at Omaha Beach marking the 65th anniversary of the World War II invasion, paid tribute to D-Day’s only Black combat unit, a battalion of about 700 men who hoisted barrage balloons designed to destroy German planes on low-level strafing missions. The other Black soldiers of D-Day were assigned to support roles though they, like the balloonists, faced enemy fire.
Henry Parham, a private in the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion of D-Day, died on July 4 at a veterans hospital in Pittsburgh at 99.
Recognizing Mr. Parham’s service in remarks on the floor of the House of Representatives in June 2019, when the 75th anniversary of D-Day was commemorated, his congressman, Mike Doyle, Democrat of Pennsylvania, said, “He is believed to be the last surviving African American combat veteran from D-Day.”
There has been no official determination as to whether Mr. Parham in fact held that distinction, but he had done everything in his power to tell the story of his unit.
A White House commission that organizes services at American war memorials invited William G. Dabney, a former corporal in the balloon outfit, to meet Mr. Obama at the D-Day anniversary ceremony in 2009. The commission said he was the only still living veteran of the 320th that it had been able to locate.
It knew nothing of Henry Parham.
In the years that followed Mr. Obama’s gesture to honor the 320th, Mr. Parham began speaking about his war experiences in talks to audiences in western Pennsylvania and on national television.
His battalion hoisted large balloons to heights of up to 2,000 feet over Omaha and Utah beaches between D-Day and August 1944, carrying out the mission during the night hours so the balloons would not be spotted by incoming German planes. The balloons were tethered to the ground by cables fitted with small packets of explosive charges. German planes that became entangled in them were likely to be severely damaged or downed.
Mr. Parham’s section of the balloon battalion had reached Omaha Beach in the hours after the arrival of the first waves of infantrymen. (The other section was assigned to Utah Beach.) When the balloonists stepped off small boats, they witnessed a scene of carnage. The American forces, raked by German fire from high ground, had taken heavy casualties.
“We landed in water up to our necks,” Mr. Parham once told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Once we got there we were walking over dead Germans and Americans on the beach. Bullets were falling all around us.”
Mr. Parham told CNN in 2019: “I prayed to the Good Lord to save me. I did my duty. I did what I was supposed to do as an American.”
In his more than two months at Omaha Beach, when troops and supplies continued arriving en route to the battlefields, his battalion was sometimes the target of German snipers, and he slept in a foxhole.
“Staying in your trench was the hardest thing,” he once told The Tribune-Review of Pittsburgh. “It was two months of ducking and dodging and hiding. I was fortunate that I didn’t get hit. I managed to survive with God’s strength and help.”
Henry Parham was born in Emporia, Va., in November 1921, the son of a sharecropper. He was raised mostly by an aunt since his mother worked largely outside the home and his father was busy attending to fieldwork.
Since schooling for Black children was limited in his hometown, he moved to Richmond at 17 and worked as a porter for Trailways buses. He was drafted at 21, trained with the 320th in Tennessee and shipped out with it to England in 1943 for the buildup to D-Day.
His balloon battalion returned to the United States in November 1944, six months before Germany’s surrender, and trained in Hawaii for deployment to the Pacific. The unit was still there when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945, bringing Japan’s surrender and ending the war.
In 2013, Mr. Parham became a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, a gesture accorded by France to many American servicemen who fought the Germans on French soil.
Mr. Parham, who lived in Wilkinsburg, Pa., a few miles from Pittsburgh, worked for many years as a heavy equipment operator before retiring at 65, then joined his wife, Ethel Perry Parham, as volunteers at local Veterans Administration hospitals.
She confirmed his death.
Apart from his wife, Mr. Parham had no immediate survivors. His brother, Timothy, and his sister, Mary, died before him.
“We were just plain, simple people; we weren’t looking for awards,” Ethel Parham told The Post-Gazette upon her husband’s death. “Then all of a sudden, people got interested when they heard his story. After the 65th anniversary, people’s eyes were really opened.”
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