The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (2 page)

N
ONE OF THE
B
EDFORD
BOYS
had intended to see combat, let alone spearhead arguably the most critical American assault in history. The boys had not volunteered for military service. Back in the thirties, they had joined their local National Guard outfit, more akin to a social club than a military unit, for a “dollar a day” and to play soldier with their brothers, cousins, and buddies. “We were one big family,” recalled Roy Stevens. “We’d dated each other’s sisters, gone to the same schools, played baseball together. . . . And we were so young!”
¹

Roy and his twin brother, Ray, had joined the National Guard a week apart in 1938 at the age of eighteen. “There had been one opening [in Company A] and we’d matched for it and he’d won,” recalled Roy. “I joined a week later. We thought we were something else. We wore these [World War I] brown uniforms and leggings that we never did manage to get wrapped up just right.”
²

Bedford’s prettiest girls, sipping sweet lemonade on the porches of whitewashed antebellum homes, watched the Stevens brothers and their fellow National Guardsmen march through Bedford every Fourth of July and could not help but be impressed. The Depression was still felt acutely in Bedford and other rural communities throughout the South in the late thirties: Smart uniforms were a bright contrast to the cast-offs and hand-me-downs that were all most young men in Bedford could afford.

The Stevens brothers and their buddies enjoyed the attention their uniforms brought and the sense of civic pride the National Guard engen- dered. Then there were the two weeks of paid training each summer, at Manassas or in New York and sometimes on Virginia Beach, close to the swank hotels where city girls wore revealing woolen bathing costumes and the Bedford boys would sweet talk them as they jitterbugged the night away. But above all the Bedford boys were looking to pocket a dollar every Monday night after marching practice at the Bedford armory.
³

Like most of the men in Company A, the Stevens brothers had grown up on a farm just outside Bedford, a tight-knit community of three thousand whose English ancestors had settled the area in the 1700s. By 1754, the town lay at the heart of arguably the most bucolic county in all Virginia: 764 square miles of rolling hills and lush valleys with mountains reaching 4,200 feet above sea level. The county was named after John Russell, the fourth duke of Bedford, who served as Britain’s secretary of state before the Revolutionary War.

Even in the 1930s, Bedford was still a quintessentially English town. The names carved into headstones in its Greenwood cemetery were almost all British; several of the town’s merchants could trace their trades back to English craftsmen and artisans; and in many homes furniture and heirlooms dated to the early colonists. The town was first named Liberty after the Colonial victory over Cornwallis at Yorktown. It was renamed Bedford in 1890 and to this day has signposts boasting that it is “the best little town in America.”

The Stevens family had farmed in Bedford since anyone could remember. Roy and Ray were two of fourteen children (including triplets) and had attended a one-room schoolhouse before finding jobs to help their family through the Depression. Fiercely competitive, they learned to box at an early age and by the mid-thirties were regularly fighting each other to earn a few cents: “There was a filling station near our home and we would go out there some nights with an older brother who had boxing gloves,” recalled Roy. “He’d put up a kind of ring, call folks over, and then take a collection. We never did see much of that money. Soon as we were done he’d take the money, ask somebody for a lift, and go see a girlfriend in Roanoke.”
⁴

The Stevens brothers were no strangers to tragedy. The triplets all died shortly after birth. In 1934, Roy had watched helplessly as an older brother died from a seizure. “I was putting his socks on and he just tightened up so much, the doctor later said, that his veins burst. I was standing right beside him. First person I ever seen die. He was a real good boy.”
⁵
The loss had left Roy heartbroken but also determined to do all he could to protect his remaining siblings.

After leaving high school, Roy worked on the production line at one of the town’s largest employers, a mill called Belding Hemingway, and Ray in a grocery store. Once they knocked off for the day, they were inseparable. “A twin is a little bit different than an ordinary brother or sister,” recalled Roy. “They depend on each other a lot more. We were close.”
⁶
For a few months, they even dated two sisters, Emma and Jane Thaxton, sometimes taking them to one of Bedford’s two movie theaters which showed such classics as Bette Davis in
Jezebel
and Spencer Tracey’s
Boys Town
. The Liberty Theater, at the heart of Bedford, was the more conservative of the two cinemas. In 1937, under pressure from Bedford’s powerful Ministerial Association, the theater’s manager had stopped showing movies on Sunday.

In 1938, the Stevens twins acquired a 136-acre farm as a home for their parents and as a place they hoped to work on full-time when the Depression ended.
⁷
They got the property, complete with several pastures ideal for dairy farming, at a bargain price—$3,700—and payments were deferred for several years, but they knew they would have to wait until the economy rebounded before they could hope to make a living working it.

After the Wall Street crash in 1929, prices of crops had collapsed in America, and hundreds of thousands of farmers had been forced to sell. In 1930, the Brookings Institution discovered that 54 percent of the nation’s farm families—17 million people—earned under $1,000 per year.
⁸
By the late thirties, little had changed in rural areas. Small-holders who could actually afford to support families were a rare breed. Although farming had been in their blood for generations, however much they yearned to farm, all the Stevens brothers could do was hope and wait until prices of crops rose again. In the meantime, their day jobs and the extra dollars they earned in the National Guard helped feed their siblings.

In August 1939, the Stevens brothers joined other Bedford boys for their yearly exercises, sharing a tent for thirteen days in northern Virginia near the town of Manassas. They camped beside a hundred other young men from Bedford in Company A, who spent each day attacking imaginary lines, wearing gray armbands and shouting the battle cries of some of their great-grandfathers who had won undying glory in previous wars.

Company A belonged to the 1st Battalion of 116th Infantry Regiment of the 29th Division, which had not seen combat since the trench battles of World War I. The 1st Battalion’s Company B was drawn from the city of Lynchburg, Virginia, twenty-five miles to the northeast of Bedford. Company C hailed from Harrisonburg in northern Virginia. Company D comprised men from Roanoke, thirty miles to Bedford’s southwest.

Many Bedford boys would still be in Company A on D-Day. By then, Corporal Elisha Ray Nance, from a respected tobacco-farming family, would be a lieutenant. Second Lieutenant Taylor N. Fellers, the son of the chairman of the Bedford County board of supervisors, would command the company after a series of rapid promotions.

Company A’s privates first class that summer of 1939 included road-digger Earl Newcomb, ex-miner John Wilkes, and twenty-six-year-old Earl Parker, a lighthearted young man madly in love with one of the prettiest and most popular girls in Bedford, Viola Shrader, who worked at Belding Hemingway.

Then there were the buck privates: Weldon Rosazza, nineteen, whose family was named after an Italian town; twenty-three-year-old John Schenk, slightly built with penetrating blue eyes and a passion for gardening, who worked in a hardware store; and Grant Yopp, eighteen, who had lived with the Stevens family since the age of thirteen after his father had deserted his family. By D-Day, all three would have earned three stripes on their arms, becoming sergeants.

Many of these Bedford boys were aware of their town’s distinguished history in arms, including Elmere Wright, a twenty-four-year-old minor league baseball player. He had joined the National Guard as far back as 1934, listing on his application an uncle who had fought with the 29th Division in World War I and two other relatives, William Henry Newman and William Wright, who had enlisted in General Thomas J. Jackson’s 1st Brigade, Army of the Shenandoah, during the Civil War.

During the First Battle of Manassas on July 21, 1861, Wright’s ancestors and other Virginians had fought so valiantly that they inspired their fellow Southerners to victory. General Barnard Bee of South Carolina was reputed to have shouted to his men: “Look! There stands Jackson like a stone wall. Rally on the Virginians!” Ever after, the Virginians would be known as “Stonewallers.”

The Bedford boys reenacted the First Battle of Manassas during their annual exercises that August of 1939. They won the reenactment against a group of 29ers, recruited from above the Mason-Dixon line, who wore blue arm-bands. To have lost would have brought permanent shame on their hometown. Then they returned to Bedford sweltering in the lee of the hazy Peaks of Otter in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The peaks—Sharp Top and Flat Top—had inspired generations of Virginians to rapture and poetry and accounted for Company A’s nickname in Bedford, “The Peaks of Otter Rifles.”
⁹

The boys had barely unpacked their kit, and stowed it in their spotless lockers in the Bedford armory, when they learned that Nazi Germany had attacked Poland. Although the Poles put up a fierce resistance, their antiquated army was no match for the ruthlessly trained and superbly equipped Wehrmacht, which stormed towards Warsaw at stunning speed. On September 4, 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. World War II had begun.

On Labor Day, Bedford gathered around radios—there were more than thirty million in U.S. homes by then—to hear President Roosevelt pledge neutrality: “I have said not once but many times that I have seen war and that I hate war. I say that again and again. I hope the United States will keep out of this war . . . and I give you my assurance and reassurance that every effort of your government will be directed to that end.”
¹⁰

When Company A next met at the Bedford armory in the basement of the courthouse at the center of town, some men predicted that they would be called to active duty for a year. Politicians were openly calling for America to come to the aid of imperiled democracies in Europe.

Other Bedford boys disagreed. Hitler wasn’t America’s problem, Roosevelt would keep his word. Isolation was the sanest option and fitted with many Americans’ reluctance to go to Europe’s aid barely a generation after the Great War of 1914–1918—the war to end all wars, they had been told. As long ago as 1796, America’s first president George Washington had warned in his Farewell Address against “interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe.”
¹¹

Besides, the last thing most boys in Company A wanted was to leave families and jobs for twelve months of serious military training. Fighting the Battle of Manassas was one thing; a year in Uncle Sam’s army was quite another. But as 1939 drew to a close, mobilization looked more and more likely. Events across the Atlantic indicated that democracy would soon be under threat across the globe.

The Poles had surrendered on October 5 to the Germans and to the Russians, who had also invaded from the east. There followed what the American press called a “phony” war lasting until spring 1940 as the French and British argued and prevaricated about what course of action would be in both countries’ interest. Meanwhile, Hitler laid plans to impose National Socialism on all of Europe. Denmark fell to the Nazis in early April. Later that month, German stormtroopers frog-marched through Oslo, capital of Norway.

On May 10, Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, an architect of appeasement in the thirties, was replaced by Winston Churchill. But even the “Bulldog,” as he soon became known, could not halt Hitler’s lightning advance across Western Europe. Late that spring, Hitler’s most brilliant generals, notably Erich von Manstein and panzer commander Heinz Guderian, orchestrated stunningly successful Blitzkrieg attacks on Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and then France.

By July 1940, the British had barely evaded capture of their expeditionary force at Dunkirk and stood alone. Only twenty-three miles of the English Channel and brave young RAF pilots prevented the Nazis from gaining complete hegemony over Europe: France had fallen to the German onslaught of Stuka dive-bombers and massed tank formations in less than six weeks.

That August, as the Battle of Britain raged above England’s summer skies, Company A again gathered for its annual training camp, this time at Virginia Beach. Once more the Bedford boys spent two weeks playing soldier by day, drinking beer around campfires at night, and speculating about the availability of girls in the nearest town. But now there were debates as well as drunken sing-songs of old Confederate war tunes. Should America remain isolated or should she save the world from fascism?

There were new faces around the fireside, many of them fresh out of Bedford High School. Eighteen-year-old John Clifton, who had five older siblings, was nicknamed “J. D.” and was known all around town because he had delivered the
Bedford Bulletin
to local homes as a boy. “He was a real nice kid,” recalled Gamiel Draper, a schoolmate. “He wasn’t mean or ferocious. He was quiet, and nice.”
¹²
He was also strikingly handsome, thanks to a Cherokee ancestry: high cheek bones, warm eyes, and lips that always seemed set to smile.