The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (28 page)

To his horror, Stevens was placed in a sick bay with men deemed unlikely to live. “I was still bleeding pretty badly out of my neck. I lay down in that place, and I looked over, and there was a soldier lying there—he was German. He wasn’t moving. Then a nurse came by and I just grabbed her by the smock she was wearing. She was a nice-looking girl. I’d been away a long time: All of the nurses looked great by then.”

Stevens told her he would live. He just needed some help.

“If you turn me loose,” the nurse replied, “I’ll see what I can do.”
⁴⁵

Stevens let her go and waited. Finally, she returned. Stevens was operated on by a captain from Oklahoma, and then told he would be flown to a hospital in England to recuperate.

The day Stevens was wounded, the famous American war correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote from Normandy to a friend: “This hedge to hedge stuff is a type of warfare we’ve never run into before, and I’ve seen more dead Germans than ever in my life. Americans, too, but not nearly so many as the Germans. One day I’ll think I’m getting hardened to dead people, dead young people in vast numbers, and then next day I’ll realize I’m not and never could be.”
⁴⁶

On July 6, 1944, Stevens was flown to England. He was one of 27,000 American casualties evacuated from Normandy since June 6. During his time in combat, 11,000 of his countrymen had been killed and a thousand more were missing in action. But what they had achieved was nothing short of miraculous. Over 71,000 vehicles had been brought ashore and then inland through draws such as the Vierville D-1 draw. Almost half a million GIs had crossed the channel. Throughout Normandy, the Germans were putting up a spirited and lethal resistance but were running perilously low of men, ammunition, and other materiel.
⁴⁷

The Allies enjoyed total air supremacy. Fortress Europe had been breached. “The weapons which alone could have enabled us to banish the danger—the Navy and Luftwaffe—were almost non-existent,” recalled Generalleutnant Joseph Reichert, one of the senior German officers ordered by Hitler to repulse the 29th Division. “It was like pitting two people against one another, one with bows and arrows and the other with firearms.”
⁴⁸

When Stevens landed in England, he was able to walk unaided off a plane carrying other wounded. “There was another boy with me who’d also been hit pretty bad. We both saw this beer joint—a mess or something— at the end of the runway. Well, I wasn’t hurting that bad so we decided to take off, hoping maybe we’d get some whiskey. We started joking that if I did get a drink it would probably come out of the hole in my throat. But then some MPs grabbed us. When we told them what we had in mind, they got to laughing too.”
⁴⁹

The MPs took Stevens and his friend to their assigned hospital in a jeep. A few days later, Stevens wrote a poem which he slipped into a letter to his mother back in Bedford:

I’ll never forget that morning. It was the 6th day of June. I said farewell to brother. Didn’t think it would be so soon. I had prayed for our future. That wonderful place called home, but a sinner’s prayer wasn’t answered. Now I would have to go there alone . . . Oh brother, I think of you all through this sleepless night. Dear Lord, he took you from me and I can’t believe it was right. This world is so unfriendly. To kill now is a sin. To walk that long narrow road. It can’t be done without him. Dear Mother, I know your worries. This is an awful fight. To lose my only twin brother and suffer the rest of my life. Now, fellas, take my warning. Believe it from start to end. If you ever have a twin brother, don’t go to the battle with him.
⁵⁰

A
FTER LEARNING ABOUT THE
invasion, many of the Bedford boys’ relatives and wives returned to work with renewed energy. The war effort meant more than ever: In the week after D-Day, Bettie Wilkes and other women rolled an astonishing 23,950 bandages in just two nights.
¹
But however many bandages they rolled, the wives couldn’t stop thinking about their husbands. “The wait to find out was so long,” recalled John Schenk’s wife, Ivylyn. “My mother and I visited other families. We took a flower or some treats and tried to comfort those who had lost sons in other parts of the world.”
²

Viola Parker still fell asleep listening to the radio in her childhood bedroom. “We knew the casualties were high, but we always hoped it wasn’t ours. As time went on we had no letters. We were lucky not to have had televisions then because we would’ve seen what happened.”
³

By early summer 1944, at least two dozen homes in Bedford already had the saddest of decorations in their windows: a gold star and the words “Gold Star Mother,” signifying the loss of a son. There were bound to be more, every mother in Bedford knew that. But they hoped to God they would be wrong. Throughout Bedford, parents began to cross themselves and pray when they heard or saw the mail carrier enter their street. Mothers fretted most. They wrung their hands when they weren’t washing them over and over. They cleaned house obsessively, preparing their sons’ rooms for when they returned. They quizzed others for every snippet of news as they worked long shifts in production lines at nearby factories. They reread their sons’ last letters. Every new day and every evening, they prayed.

In some homes, radios played news bulletins around the clock. Families were no longer so interested in the latest episode of the radio soap,
Ma Perkins
, or another hit show,
Amos and Andy.
Fathers turned the dial to every decent news station and paced back and forth, memories of waiting for loved ones to return from the last war suddenly flooding back. Broadcaster Walter Winchell had angered many in Bedford when he’d insinuated in 1941 that the Stonewallers were shirkers as they practiced maneuvers in North Carolina. But now everyone hung on Winchell’s every word.

Ernie Pyle, America’s most celebrated war correspondent, had written a chilling account of D-Day in his most recent Scripps Howard syndicated column. He had mentioned “many casualties” and described the “human litter” he had found on Omaha Beach: “It extended in a thin little line, just like a high-water mark, for miles along the beach. This was the strewn personal gear, gear that would never be needed again by those who fought and died to give us our entrance into Europe . . . There were the latest letters from home, with the address on each one neatly razored out—one of the security precautions enforced before the boys embarked. There were toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand.”
⁴

Other newspaper reports repeated the official line that the invasion had entailed “considerable sacrifice.” In a June issue, the immensely popular
Life
magazine contained photographer Robert Capa’s astonishing images of the first minutes on Omaha. They were far from reassuring, showing men cut down in the surf and struggling to get ashore.

Tensions rose with the summer temperatures. Then, a fortnight after D-Day, letters from soldiers in Europe finally arrived in Bedford. Jack Harris, a military policeman from Bedford, told his parents that since arriving in Normandy he had met many men in the 29th Division who were full of admiration for what Company A had done. “That outfit sure made a name for itself in the invasion.”
⁵
But he said no more.

On June 17, Earl Parker’s mother received a telegram informing her that thirty-year-old Earl was listed as missing in action. The town doctor, Pete Rucker, dropped by to check on his mother and then volunteered to tell Viola, Earl’s wife. She was stunned but refused to think the worst. For Danny’s sake, she could not accept that Earl was dead. She would not until she received official word, however long that might take. “I went on looking after my baby,” she recalled. “You do what you have to do.”
⁶

On July 1, Viola Parker spotted the mailman coming to her door. To her relief, he wasn’t carrying a telegram confirming Earl’s death. But he did hand her a distressing bundle—her recent letters to Earl. They had been returned to sender. Viola asked why. The mailman said he didn’t know. Again, she refused to believe the worst.

On July 4, Bedford tried to put on a cheerful face for Independence Day. Lucille Hoback, who had celebrated her fifteenth birthday a few weeks earlier, visited nearby Bedford County Lake where other teenagers and families gathered for holiday picnics, swimming, and boating, and where Clyde Powers had learned to swim. That night, the town watched a rather muted firework display at the Bedford High School’s athletic field.

Like her friends living on farms throughout Bedford County, Lucille worked every day from sunup to sundown, caring for chickens, picking berries, milking cows, tending to vegetables that her parents sold every weekend at market in Lynchburg. “Every evening, my parents listened to the radio,” she recalled. “When Walter Winchell spoke, no one else could. We were just hoping to hear something, anything. We hadn’t heard from Raymond and Bedford. My parents were anxious—the whole town was nervous.”
⁷

Melba Basham, niece of Nicholas Gillaspie, wondered why her uncle had not written to her for several weeks. Gillaspie was a prolific correspondent, writing to over a dozen friends and neighbors who had grown accustomed to receiving witty letters and postcards from England. “Neighbors would receive a letter from him and they were just tickled,” Melba recalled. “They would come right over and tell us.” But then came D-Day and the letters stopped. “I can remember several of the neighbors coming by and they would say they were really worried about Nicholas. Everyone was.”
⁸

Meanwhile, one of the Bedford boys was lying in a hospital ward in a converted hotel in West Virginia with other GIs who had been brought home from Europe. Andrew Coleman was so ill with Bright’s disease that he was barely conscious. His body was filling with poisons because his kidneys had failed. Sibyle Kieth Coleman, the wife of one of Andrew’s nephews, was deeply moved when she saw Coleman and the many other young Americans lying in cots, some close to death, at the elegant Greenbrier Hotel in Sulphur Springs. “I went to see Andrew with my husband,” she recalled. “Andrew was just lying there, not able to talk. He had a lot of swelling. It was very upsetting to see him and all the other wounded men. They were so young. It was a shock.”
⁹

On July 6, 1944, the
Bedford Bulletin
revealed that the town’s own Company A had landed in the first wave on D-Day and been commended for its role: “There have been no reports of fatalities, but as yet the government has given out no complete list of casualties. There has been considerable uneasiness about the fate of the men, as it seemed too much to hope that all of them could have come safely through the landing ordeal and subsequent fighting.”
¹⁰

Frank Draper Jr.’s younger sister, Verona, worked at the Belding Hemingway textile mill that summer. She had heard a radio report a few days after D-Day and had cried at reports of “significant” casualties. “For weeks, my mother couldn’t eat or sleep. She was so worried about Frank she would sit and just look far out in distance.”
¹¹

The first hard news of Company A in the
Bedford Bulletin
mentioned that they and the 116th Infantry Regiment had been “awarded a presidential citation . . . for the work of the 116th on D-Day and subsequent operations. This is the highest award a unit can receive and is given only when an entire organization has acquitted itself with exceptional valor in important operations.” The newspaper added that Company A had been “continuously in the line throughout the French invasion and is at present engaged in the St. Lô battle, according to a dispatch from the front.”
¹²

Another news item caused widespread concern: “Mr. and Mrs. Charles Fizer have received a letter from their son, who has recently been made a sergeant in Company A, saying he was in France and O.K. He had quite an experience [on] Invasion Day. The transport on which he was, while traveling from England to France, was sunk. There were 2,500 soldiers on board and all were saved except five, ‘Billy’ being one of the fortunate ones who were rescued.”
¹³
The report was incorrect of course. It was not a transport that sank with Fizer on board but a landing craft, and all but the radio operator, Padley, had been saved.

A month after D-Day, Bettie Wilkes wondered why John’s letters weren’t getting to her. “There were rumors that some of our men had died but this was secondhand information.” Perhaps Company A’s mail had been lost on a ship sunk by a U-boat? Or were regulations so strict that the men could not write until the battle of Normandy was over? There was a reason for no word. God only knew what it was. But soon enough John would contact her in some way to let her know he was all right. “Everybody went on about their business,” recalled Bettie. “We all just stayed busy, busy.”
¹⁴

Whenever Bettie met another wife, relative, or girlfriend of one of the boys, the first question she heard was not the customary “how are you?” but “have you heard?” closely followed by “did you get any mail?”
¹⁵

On Monday, July 10, Bettie finished her shift at Belding Hemingway and headed down Main Street towards Green’s drugstore. “I had been preparing a package for John over the weekend—toilet articles, cigarettes and things like that. I had it all fixed—except one article I wanted to pick up at the drugstore. I had the package with me, ready to post.

” She was about to enter the drugstore when she heard a familiar voice.

“Bettie!”

She looked around. She saw a woman she knew. To this day, she won’t give her name. Bettie stood on the corner of the street and waited for the woman to cross the road.

The woman asked Bettie if she had received any news.

Bettie shook her head.

“No. Have you?”

“Yes. I got a letter today.”

“Well, good. What did it say?”

“John was killed.”
¹⁶

Bettie stared in disbelief and shock. She managed somehow to make her way back to the rooms she shared with her sister at Ramsey Apartments, the first new building in Bedford since the war started. The next few days were a blur but within a week, she recalled, “Family and friends had just about convinced me that the letter could not be true, and that I would have been notified by the government first. They insisted I wait until I got official word before I gave up hope. They kept telling me it was probably a mistake even though no letters or news was yet received from John. So I decided to go back to work and wait for official word.”
¹⁷

It was also on July 10 that Taylor Fellers’s family heard of his death. That afternoon, they sat in the shade of a tree in front of their home in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Taylor’s youngest sister, Bertie, suddenly saw a car pull up in the dusty driveway. The local mailman, a Mr. McCauley, his wife, and dark-haired teenage daughter, Ellen, got out of the car. “The whole family had decided to bring a letter to us,” recalled Bertie, “because they knew we were so anxious to hear the news.”
¹⁸

Bertie had sent her brother a card for his thirtieth birthday on June 10 but it had been returned to sender. She knew her mother and father had begun to suspect the worst. McCauley handed Taylor’s mother a letter postmarked from England. She couldn’t bear to open it so she handed it to Ellen and asked her to read it. The letter was from Taylor’s friend in England, Mrs. Lunscomb. “Taylor had been to her home (shortly before D-Day),” recalled Bertie. “Several of the other Bedford boys went by her place too. She had kept in touch with my mother, sending her news.”
¹⁹

According to Mrs. Lunscomb, Taylor had died on D-Day. Ellen stopped reading. Bertie ran to her mother as she started to cry: “It was a long time before anybody could say anything. Later that night, I read the letter three or four more times.”

The news spread fast. Families from neighboring farms dropped by to console and pay their respects. “Bertie, can you read the letter?” asked Taylor’s mother. Bertie read it over and over again.
²⁰

Later that week, the
Bedford Bulletin
reported:

Mrs. Lunscomb stated that Lieutenant Bill Williams, of Company B, Lynchburg, had visited in her home at the same time as did Captain Fellers and that he was wounded sometime during the invasion and was returned to a hospital in England. He first called her by telephone and then wrote telling her Captain Fellers was killed in action. He said, however, that he had not seen Captain Fellers killed, but was told of it by a comrade who did see him. Since no official word has been received, there is still a chance that he was not killed but wounded too badly to send word home, although Mr. and Mrs. Fellers have been convinced of his death. Officials have warned that it is very risky to accept as final reports sent home by the men in battle since they can, during all the excitement and confusion, make many mistakes.
²¹

On Saturday, July 15, the
Bedford Bulletin
contained the following lines: