The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (3 page)

Another recent high school graduate was Gordon “Henry” White, who had joined the National Guard in October 1939, a few weeks after Hitler invaded Poland. Of all the Bedford boys, White was most passionate about farming. As a young boy, he had raced home from school every afternoon, changed into work clothes and stuffed apples into his pockets to snack on as he labored until nightfall on his family’s farm. “He liked to plow, he just liked to be out on the farm,” recalled his sister Octavia White Sumpter. “He just liked the dirt.”
¹³

Eighteen-year-old Raymond Hoback had joined the National Guard that spring, wanting to be with his older brother, Bedford. Like the Stevens twins, the Hoback brothers had been raised on a small farm just outside town.

Bedford, twenty-four, had served in the Regular Army with Company E of the 35th Infantry before joining Company A in February 1937. Nicknamed “Motor-Mouth,” he told tall stories and pretended to be a carefree Don Juan but everyone knew he was devoted to his fiancée, Elaine Coffey.

“Everybody thought [Bedford] was married to her,” recalled Roy Stevens. “If you asked him, he’d say, ‘I’ll bet you a dollar I am, and I’ll bet you a dollar I’m not.’ You never knew what he’d say next.”
¹⁴

Elaine Coffey and Bedford Hoback had a tempestuous relationship, often arguing about Bedford’s wild ways. But they had been in love with each other for most of their young lives. Elaine, twenty-one, a petite brunette with a snub nose and slim hips, had ditched her previous boyfriend for Bedford as soon as he had returned, tanned and lean, from his posting to Hawaii in 1936. Since they could remember, they had always wanted to be together. They had in fact been childhood sweethearts, passing notes to each other at age nine in a two-room grade school.
¹⁵

In contrast to his brother, Raymond was modest, hard-working, and self-disciplined—ideally suited to army life in the eyes of Company A’s officers and men such as Ray Nance, who had been with the guard for several years. Raymond had left school in the eighth grade and worked as a laborer building New Deal roads, saving enough to buy a $750 two-door Chevrolet. He was often to be found with his head in a Bible.

“Raymond was more sincere [than Bedford],” recalled Roy Stevens, who would eventually become his platoon sergeant. “And he was a great soldier but he could never keep in step. Finally, we just gave up on him—he just couldn’t get the rhythm.”
¹⁶

In September 1940, Congress passed a selective service bill, ushering in the first peacetime draft in American history. Eight hundred thousand men were called to arms, dwarfing the numbers in the Regular Army, which had been limited to seventy-five thousand men. Senior officers in the National Guard talked ominously of mobilization. Subtly, things began to change in Company A. Officers grew more serious. Older men and those with “essential” civilian jobs left the unit. On September 8, President Roosevelt declared a state of emergency and called for the creation of an Office of Production Management, which would produce armament and other materials to defend America and help Britain in every way “short of war.”

In October it was announced that Company A would be mobilized into the federal army for a year, beginning in early 1941. None of the Bedford boys had seriously considered that joining the National Guard would actually lead to twelve months in the Regular Army. Most had never been outside Virginia. All but the married men still lived with their parents, and not one had ever fired a shot in anger. For all of them, mobilization would be the first great test of their lives.

The Bedford boys spent the next few months arranging to leave their jobs, finding relatives or friends to fill their places on the farms, making out wills, and in many cases arranging life insurance. On Monday, February 3, 1941, they reported to the Bedford armory, were issued new woolen uniforms, and then sworn in. The new shoulder patches on their uniforms, inspired by the Korean monad symbol that represents life, were one part blue, one part gray, explaining the 29th Division’s popular name, “The Blue and Gray.” The colors represented the deliberate mix of Northerners and Southerners in the division, which had been formed after Reconstruction.

“Six officers and ninety-two enlisted men of Company A, 116th Infantry . . . were duly inducted,” reported the
Bedford Bulletin
. “The ceremonies were brief but impressive as the khaki-clad line took the oath of transfer and allegiance. . . . In and around the armory, young stalwart men wearing their country’s uniform casts an atmosphere reminiscent of the war-torn days of 1917–18. Crisp, sharp commands; quick, snappy responses. . . . Induction into the United States Army adds credit to that great organization of fighting men who know no defeat; and upon whom . . . hangs the future of this nation.”
¹⁷

Just twenty-four hours before, Wallace R. Carter, barely eighteen, had enlisted in Company A.
¹⁸
A popular player for the Mud Alley Wildcat baseball team, which drew its players from the poorest streets in Bedford, Wallace had worked at a Bedford pool hall after high school. The job paid a pittance but Carter usually had a thick wallet thanks to his winnings “playing eight ball.”
¹⁹

“[Wallace] was a fun-loving guy,” recalled Morris Scott, a childhood friend. “His family was poor. We were all poor, but we didn’t know it; we had so much fun together. He attended lots of movies. He always had an extra dime for a movie.”
²⁰
Beneath his fun-loving exterior, however, was a young man of fierce emotions. He once, according to Roy Stevens, jumped off a bridge after falling out with a girlfriend. Fortunately, his fall was broken by a bank and he was only slightly injured.

Before Wallace Carter and his fellow Bedford boys left the armory on the day of their induction, National Guard officers read out the fifty-eighth and sixty-first Articles of War concerning the crimes of desertion and going absent without leave. It was a disturbing introduction to the rigors of military discipline. They now faced far greater penalties than they’d received for any misdemeanor at school. “The officers would read out those articles a few more times in the coming months,” recalled Roy Stevens. “They wanted to make sure we hadn’t forgotten them.”
²¹

Stringent medical examinations the following Saturday reduced the enlisted in Company A to eighty-six men. Roy Stevens was deemed fit but ordered to get dental repair work, as were other Bedford boys whose teeth, like those of so many inductees in 1941, were so bad that the U.S. Army embarked on a massive dental program to prevent hundreds of thousands of its soldiers from becoming casualties of severe gum disease. In 1939, the U.S. Army had just 250 dentists. By 1945, 25,000 dentists had pulled more than fifteen million teeth from American men allowed to wear general-issue uniforms so long as they had “sufficient teeth (natural or artificial) to subsist on the Army ration.”
²²

Because new barracks to house the 29th Division at Fort Meade in Maryland were not completed, the Bedford boys stayed on in Bedford for a fortnight, attending training sessions at the armory and going home in time for supper. It was a strange interlude, more akin to being at college than in the army. Boys sat around the kitchen table in their new uniforms, listening to the Grand Old Opry on the radio, doing their chores before bedtime, milking the cows before dawn.

On February 17—the day before their departure—the Bedford boys marched behind the town’s widely acclaimed Fireman’s Band to Bedford High School, a stately brick building fronted by forty-foot white columns, where a farewell party and dance were held until the early hours. Over two hundred people danced the night away, alternating between formal square dances and wild and often drunken jigs.

Cans of “Old Virginia” beer, brewed in nearby Roanoke, were all of ten cents. A thick haze of cigarette smoke—a pack of Camels or Lucky Strike also cost just a dime—hung in the air above the khaki-clad boys and their girlfriends as they “shook a leg” to twanging banjos playing hillbilly classics by Old Grandpa Jones. When the home-stilled whiskey ran out, the band packed up and the Bedford boys took off home or into the night with their dates.

The next morning was “right cool”
²³
as the Bedford boys gathered at the rail station at the heart of town near the hardscrabble neighborhood called “Mud Alley.” It was a clear day with wonderful visibility—the Peaks of Otter, snowcapped, pierced the bright blue skies. Roy Stevens remembered that perhaps as many as three-quarters of the boys nursed heavy hangovers from the night before. Most of the town seemed to turn out for the send-off before the boys boarded trains headed for the 29th Division’s main camp at Fort Meade.

As the Bedford boys embraced families and loved ones, many looked sad and close to tears. None cried, however, afraid that they would shame themselves and their friends. But plenty felt like it, according to Roy Stevens, who was leaving home for the first time. Spirits rose when several more bottles of whiskey were produced and the men mixed it with the Cokes they were drinking to ease their hangovers. The Fireman’s Band broke into an upbeat marching song and then Company A finally formed up on the platform, ready to board the train.

Twenty-one-year-old Jack Powers, over six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds—all of it muscle—stood proudly in line, a few yards from his brother, Clyde, five years his senior, “a clean-cut guy, more conservative and a little shorter than Jack, who was more outgoing.”
²⁴
The Powers brothers had grown up in Bedford not far from the Hampton Looms mill, where their father worked.

Jack could see his little sister, sixteen-year-old Eloise, beaming at him as she played clarinet in the forty-strong Fireman’s Band. “We’d been let out of school to see them off,” she recalled. “They looked like they were all going on a big adventure.”
²⁵

Sixty years later, Eloise would remember Jack being a handsome, bighearted man who loved to dance and play the guitar. “He was always practicing. Some of the neighborhood children got together and recorded some songs. Those wax records didn’t survive long.”
²⁶

Jack could jitterbug to Tommy Dorsey tunes as well as any man in Company A, and many a Bedford girl enjoyed a spin around the dance floor with him.
²⁷
“One of my best memories of [Jack] was [when] I had a kitten, and I had taken him out of the box and was playing with [him] on the front porch,” recalled Eloise. “[Jack] stepped on one of the kittens, and he was so heartbroken, he gave me his skates to make up for the kitten.”
²⁸

Also standing in formation was Harold Wilkes. The same age as Clyde, curly-haired, five-foot-eleven-inch Harold was nonetheless the Powers’s uncle. “My mother’s father was married three times,” explained Eloise over sixty years later. “With his third wife, he had two children— one of them was Harold. He lived just over the road, so we were always over at each other’s houses. Harold was very close to us all, and he considered my mom as his mom.”
²⁹

A front-page report in the
Bedford Bulletin
raved about how splendid the boys looked in their new uniforms. “Not only the physical appearances but the splendid attitude which they have shown has been the subject of discussion and commendation,” the hometown paper added. “There has been an entire lack of grousing or complaining. . . . The town feels strangely empty.”
³⁰

At first, most of the Bedford boys found life at Fort Meade an exciting challenge. They learned how to salute and address officers properly and how to strip a weapon and put it back together so mechanically that some could do it blindfolded, and they were given physical tests and immunization shots. After painting their hastily built barracks, they were issued M-1 Garand rifles, allowed to fire them, and sent on exercises with new radios and motorized vehicles. The nightlife in local towns was even better than at Virginia Beach, and unlike many of the Bedford men’s homes, Fort Meade had central heat and running water.

According to the 29th Division’s official history, “cold, freezing weather blew across [Fort Meade]. . . . Barracks orderlies stoked fires clumsily in their inexperience, as they cursed the complicated furnace units. But the weather was no complaint of the men, for it meant frozen roads, and less time spent in cleaning of overshoes, or in pushing the old two-wheel-drive trucks out of the mud, an assignment which became theirs when the temperature moderated.”
³¹

By summer 1941, boredom had become a problem. The constant, mind-numbing routine and close-order drilling began to grate on men not used to taking orders week in, week out. Above all, the Bedford boys were homesick. Leave was rarely granted and passes issued for no longer than two days. Yet the drive to Bedford alone was seven hours, weather permitting. Despite the distance, Bedford Hoback got home most weekends, often taking several other Bedford men with him in his wood-sided station wagon. “He charged two dollars a piece,” recalled his sister Lucille, “and would pack in as many as he could fit.”
³²

At Fort Meade and other bases in the United States discipline became a widespread problem that summer as morale fell to distressing lows, mostly because of resentment that the men were being kept from their families and jobs for no clear reason. Very few were convinced by warnings in Congress and the press that America would be next on Hitler’s list for conquest.

Life
magazine printed a story on August 18 about “the growing restlessness and boredom of the great civilian army,” and the
New York
Times
ran an article that caused an uproar among the army’s general staff when the paper reported that most men did not believe they were needed in the Army: “They compare it to a football team in training without a schedule of games.”
³³