The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (30 page)

“Elizabeth, if a message comes for my mother, can you call me?” he asked.
³⁰

Teass nodded. Of course she would.

Later that morning, a telegram arrived: Roy Stevens was listed as missing in action as of June 6. When Harold showed the message to his parents, they were just as startled and confused as he was, having read a letter from Roy in England postmarked after June 6. Had the War Department or some officer made a mistake? Had both their sons died, as had so many others in Company A? From what people were saying, it seemed that every boy from Bedford in the Stonewall brigade had been killed on D-Day. Perhaps their troopship had been torpedoed in the channel—how else could so many have been lost?

Harold comforted his parents. All they could do was pray and wait until further news arrived: another letter from Roy, or a telegram confirming either son’s death.

Meanwhile, Ivylyn Schenk was driving across town with her mother. They were going to spend a few days with John’s family. “Moma and I drove up into the yard at the Schenks’ place,” recalled Ivylyn. “Mother Schenk came out of the house to greet us. I knew right away that things were not right. She told us he had gone. . . .”
³¹

Ivylyn and her mother stayed with the Schenks as planned. Instead of enjoying a short vacation, they grieved and prayed with John’s two older sisters, two half sisters, and a brother. Later that afternoon, John Schenk’s mother visited the Drapers to offer her condolences. Her husband stayed at home.

“Mr. Schenk was angry,” remembered Elva Newcomb. “He thought his son should not have been killed, said John was supposed to be behind the lines like [my husband] Earl. He blamed people, wouldn’t talk to boys who later came back. Mrs. Schenk later sent me a letter saying she was sorry he felt that way.”
³²

Ivylyn discovered that John’s parents had been in contact with one of John’s cousins, who also belonged to the 116th Infantry regiment. The cousin had been able to prepare John for his burial in Normandy. The cousin did not know how John had died. But as a radio operator like John Clifton, Schenk was probably one of the first to be cut down as he struggled to get ashore weighed down by the metal target on his back.

As families throughout the county rushed to comfort each other, it seemed to Ivylyn that no one would ever be able to adequately express how much hope and joy had been destroyed so fast: “It was as if there was a big window wide open and then suddenly it was all shut down.”
³³

At the Hoback farm that afternoon, Lucille and her sister Rachel were busy making peach ice cream as a treat for their mother, Macie. They thought it might cheer her up. Suddenly, they heard their father call them to the kitchen. He had just received another Western Union telegram. Raymond was missing in action.

“My parents were never the same,” remembered Lucille. “I had never seen my father cry, but he did that day.”
³⁴

At five o’clock that afternoon, Elizabeth Teass switched off the teletype machine and left work. That day nine telegrams had arrived declaring Bedford men dead or missing in action on D-Day.

As dusk settled on Bedford, several families walked in shock and tears to the white, two-story wooden home of Andrew Coleman in the heart of Bedford. His family had placed him in an open casket in their parlor. Sibyle Kieth Coleman was present as bereaved parents arrived to pay their final respects. “They were wailing, crying, grabbing for each other. They had lost their own sons and were coming into the room, emptied of furniture, and then, well, you can imagine, they see a dead boy lying there. . . . It was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. Coleman’s mother was in a room across the hall from where they had the casket. She was in bed, still very much crippled with terrible arthritis.”

At some point during the evening, Dr. Grey from the Presbyterian Church in Bedford came over to pray with the families. “He had led the service on D-Day, and he had a soft voice,” recalled Coleman. “He looked every inch a minister. Everyone admired him.”
³⁵

Later that week, Anna Mae Stewart learned that her brother Grant Yopp was missing in action. She was still sharing an apartment in Washington, D.C., with Yopp’s wife, Elsie. “I went down to the post office where we both worked. I had to call her outside and tell her what had happened. . . . Later, I was told that Grant had got to the shore but the paramedics couldn’t get to him and a lot of the boys before they bled to death.”
³⁶

On Wednesday, July 19, the
Bedford Bulletin
’s editorial brought fresh tears to many eyes:

We can only point out that these Bedford men have given their lives in the same cause for which men in all ages have made the supreme sacrifice— the preservation of the ideals of liberty and justice toward which mankind has been struggling since the dawn of time. . . .
³⁷

On July 25, 1944, Bedford’s Eleanor Yowell wrote to her husband, “Pinky,” an American pilot based in England:

Apparently, the 116th Infantry Division, Company A, really was “cannon fodder,” as they were in the lead assaults to hit those heavily fortified Normandy beaches. The town has been in a state of shock. . . . I just hated to write you about it. The war is really hitting home now.
³⁸

Many Bedford boys had brothers in service. David Draper was a heavy equipment operator with the Navy Seabees on an island in the Asia-Pacific theatre. He was cleaning his eating utensils when his lieutenant commander took him aside and told him that his brother Frank was dead. “He said I could take two days off. I said: ‘No, I don’t want to.’ I had a job to do beating the Japanese. . . . They weren’t like us. They were brutal. But we got to be just like ’em in the end. Just like animals. That’s what it took to win.”
³⁹

In early August, the Hobacks received a package from Europe. It contained Raymond’s Bible, inscribed “Raymond S. Hoback, from mother, Xmas, 1938,” and a letter:

19 July 1944. Somewhere in France.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Hoback

I really don’t know how to start this letter to you folks, but will attempt
to do something in words of writing. . . While walking along the beach
D-DAY plus 1, I came upon this Bible and as most any person would do, I
picked it up from the sands to keep it from being destroyed . . . . You have
by now received a letter from your son saying he is well. I sincerely hope
so. I imagine what has happened is your son dropped the book without any
notice. Most everybody who landed on that beach D-Day lost something.
⁴⁰

The letter was from Corporal H. W. Crayton of West Virginia. The Bible was the only personal belonging of Raymond the Hobacks ever received. “There was almost nothing from Bedford,” recalled Lucille Hoback. “A billfold, with nothing in it, and perhaps a fountain pen but that was it.”
⁴¹

The Bible had no water stains. Perhaps Raymond had gotten onto the beach before he died. “My mother always treasured the Bible so much,” Lucille said. “She said that, next to her son, she would have wanted to have his Bible.”
⁴²

A few days later, the following words appeared in the
Bedford Bulletin
:

MEMORIAM

Do not say my sons are dead;
They only sleepest . . .
They loved each other, stayed together
And with their comrades crossed together
To that great beyond;
So weep not, mothers,
Your sons are happy and free. . . .

    MRS. J. S. HOBACK.
⁴³

But the Hobacks did weep. Things were never the same. That summer, Lucille was barred from going to Bedford County Lake or doing anything that might have been fun. Her mother spent hours alone and rarely left the house. Every evening felt like a wake. “My sister and I were always trying to make everybody feel better. There was [to be] no laughing and no chatting. I was very close to my mother, so anything that hurt her, hurt me. I felt helpless.”
⁴⁴

Later that summer, Lucille asked if she could go to an amusement park in Roanoke. Her parents said no. She thought she understood why: “They were the only ones who lost two sons on D-Day.”
⁴⁵

All across Bedford County, joy died that summer. “Life seems so useless without you darling,” wrote Bettie Wilkes in a memorial notice published with dozens of others from bereaved relatives and widows in the
Bedford Bulletin
. “There is only one hope left now, to meet you up there where there is no night but eternal rest and peace.”
⁴⁶

Families grieved behind closed doors, sharing their pain with relatives and God. “People didn’t feel like going out and doing things for a good while,” recalled Marie Powers, a junior at Bedford High School who loved nothing more than jitterbugging in her saddle shoes to Glenn Miller tunes at dinner club dances. “Most all the activities were discontinued. It was just such a sad time. It was terrible. But people loved one another, and people supported each other.”
⁴⁷

By the time Powers returned to High School that fall, the War Department had confirmed that in all nineteen men from Bedford had been killed on Omaha Beach on D-Day. Three more Bedford boys had died later in the invasion. In cities close to Bedford, where blood lines also went back several generations, the slaughter had also taken a heavy toll. Sixteen of Bob Sales’s buddies in Company B from Lynchburg had died on D-Day. Eighteen of Bob Slaughter’s buddies in Company D would never go home to Roanoke. But no community in the state or in America or indeed in any Allied nation had lost as many sons as Bedford.

In a matter of minutes, a couple of German machine gunners had broken the town’s heart.

F
OR THE YOUNGEST, AT LEAST
, Bedford’s sad summer ended with a fresh start. In early September 1944, Bedford County’s children went back to school. Ivylyn Schenk returned to Moneta grade school where she welcomed a new class. That summer, one of her thirty-five pupils, seven-year-old Booker Goggin, had written her a deeply moving letter of consolation in his small first-grade handwriting. “Those boys and girls gave me great heart to carry on,” recalled Ivylyn. “They were still my children. I still claim them all as mine, and their children and their grandchildren. They’re still all mine.”
¹

The
Bedford Bulletin
continued to feature memorial letters and poems from relatives.

To mark Frank Draper Jr.’s twenty-sixth birthday on September 16, his mother and family sent a memorial letter to the
Bulletin
which they addressed to “Frank.” His mother wrote:

I can’t even see your grave except in a dream. Now my mind wanders thousands of miles across the mighty deep. To a lonely little mound in a foreign land where the body of my dear soldier boy might be lain away. This tired, homesick soldier boy who attended church in Bedford all his life. He was not buried in a nice casket, flowers and funeral procession. His dear body was laid to rest in a blood-soaked uniform. Maybe it was draped in an American flag. There will not be any more cruel wars where you have gone, dear Frank. . . . The old rugged cross has a two-fold meaning for me, for my own dear boy shed his precious blood like Jesus on the cross at Calvary. For our religious freedom, they say. A dear price to pay.
²

Kathleen Bradshaw, the young Virginian nurse who had met John Reynolds in England and hoped to marry him, sent a poem:

How sad I was that lonely day
When I heard that you’d been called away . . .
I can’t forget your smiling face,
Full of love, friendship and grace;
God called you on that other shore,
To rest with Him forever more.
³

Elaine Coffey, the “dear sweetheart” of Bedford Hoback, wrote of how “in the stillness of midnight my tears in silence flow. . . . Will I forget you? Oh no! For memory’s golden chain will always bind my heart to thee until we meet again.”
⁴

A Mrs. Keith Harvey, co-publisher of the
Bedford Bulletin
, “went around to see some of the families. There wasn’t any weeping and wailing. It was all so quiet. There wasn’t any hysteria. Everybody was just stunned. For those not involved it was hard to comprehend, but the families took it. There weren’t any mothers saying, ‘My son shouldn’t have been over there in the first place to fight this dirty old war.’ ”
⁵

Back in France, Company A had been decimated time and again as it had fought through St. Lô, and then taken Vire to the south. The 1st Battalion of the 116th Infantry had been awarded its second Presidential Unit Citation for the capture of Hill 203 near Vire. The first had been for actions on D-Day. The battalion had then joined Patton’s Third Army during the Allied breakout of Normandy, before being sent west to take the Brittany port of Brest, a vital objective because of its many U-boat pens.

On September 16, Sergeant Allen Huddleston of Bedford rejoined Company A in the outskirts of Brest, having fully recovered from his broken ankle. “When I got back to the company,” he recalled, “there wasn’t a single boy I recognized from Bedford. There was Newcomb and Mitchell in headquarters but I didn’t see them.”
⁶
That afternoon, as he moved up to the frontline, Huddleston heard that Company F’s Joseph Parker, Earl Parker’s brother, had been killed just hours earlier in fierce fighting.

Colonel Canham, now assistant division commander of the 8th Infantry Division, accepted the German surrender at Brest two days later. When he entered the headquarters of German General Ramcke, Can-ham was asked for his credentials. Without hesitation he turned and pointed to the GIs accompanying him: “These are my credentials.”
⁷

Over 40,000 Germans were taken prisoner. “They marched past us, thousands and thousands,” recalled Company B’s Bob Sales, by now a platoon sergeant. “There were so many they marched past us all morning until one in the afternoon.”
⁸

After the fall of Brest, the 116th Infantry boarded trucks and trains headed east. It was a remarkable journey through a newly liberated and grateful France. At night, men tried to sleep in the cramped compartments but with little luck. Every few hours they would free their legs from the tangle of their buddies’ limbs, and stand in the doorway, left ajar for fresh air, and watch the silhouettes of French hamlets and towns pass by.

“The days were better,” recalled Joseph Ewing, a rifle platoon leader who would later write an official history of the 29th Division. “The men, sitting and crowding the open doors, waved to French civilians at the lowered gates and grade crossings, and whistled at the French girls riding bicycles along the streets. . . . French housewives came running through their backyards, down to the tracks, carrying apples and pears in their aprons or in baskets. . . . The Blue and Gray soldiers, flushed with all this fleeting attention, waved back happily until their arms were tired. It was a strange, but possibly shallow happiness that they felt as they watched the smiling people of these cities from which the war had fled . . . for the train was pursuing the war, and they knew the pursuit would end at the German border, for the war had stopped there, and had turned around and was waiting for them.”
⁹

Sergeant Allen Huddleston was on board one of the trains. “We went through Paris, where we stopped for a few hours,” he recalled.
¹⁰
The men were not to move from their trains. They would not be getting to see “gay Pareeee” as they called it. Nevertheless, some managed to wriggle out of train windows and doors and go AWOL for a few hours in the city of lights. They just couldn’t bear to roll past the fantasy city they’d heard so much about.

Before dawn, the trains groaned to life and when they stopped again, Huddleston discovered they were near Aachen on the German-Dutch border. It was September 29. “We went into Aachen on a truck some time that night and went on the line the next day. Suddenly, the artillery started and we all jumped over a bank. An 88mm hit me in the shoulder, turned me around, and killed a guy a few feet from me. It was 5 P.M., my first day in combat.

“They took me to the aid station that night, operated on me some place along the line, took out the shrapnel. I stayed in Paris for two or three days while they waited for the weather to clear and then they shipped me back to England. I wound up at the same place where I had been with my broken ankle. I had the same doctor and the same physical exercise sergeant for my rehab, a nice guy—a New Yorker.”
¹¹

Huddleston was the last Bedford boy in Company A to fight in the frontlines. In the rest of the 116th Infantry, there were very few other men still alive who had trained in England for D-Day. Company D’s Bob Slaughter had been wounded by mortar shrapnel in his back and awarded his second purple heart; he would eventually rejoin his unit in Germany. “Everybody alive today from the 116th has got two or three purple hearts,” he said sixty years later. “If you don’t have one, you didn’t see much action.”
¹²

Company B’s Bob Sales was, miraculously, still going strong by November 1944 as the 29th fought to defeat German forces west of the Rhine. On November 17, the 116th Infantry’s B and C companies jumped off under orders to take the Rhineland town of Setterich. They had advanced to within a few hundred yards of the town by nightfall.

At 4 A.M. on November 18, Sales was called by his company commander and ordered to take up position on the other side of a field by dawn. “In those days, if you didn’t like something, you had to keep your mouth shut. Well, the Germans lit that field up with flares like you could play football on it and then opened up on us with tracer fire from a machine gun. When dawn came, I crawled back and then took a tank along a road. We got the German gun. I tapped the tank and hollered, ‘Okay! Let’s get out of here!’ The tank turned and then they hit us with an antitank rocket.

“There were balls of fire rolling out of my eyes. I couldn’t find my gun, nothing. I was hit in both eyes with shrapnel, blood was pouring out of my head from a cut, where my head hit the side of the tank. That finished me. I stayed in hospital a year and a half, lost an eye. The other one is not the best in the world but a hell of a lot better than nothing. I’d been in combat six months. And in that time, you wouldn’t believe how many men I saw die.”
¹³
Sales’s actions on November 18 earned him a Silver Star.

Bedford’s last casualty from Company A, Sergeant Allen Huddleston, arrived in America in April 1945. “I went to the hospital, spent a night in New York, and then I got to come home.” A few weeks later, on May 7, he celebrated V-E Day, marking victory in Europe. That morning, at 2:41 A.M., Central European Time, General Alfred Jodl, seated at a plain wood table in a grimy school building in Reims, had signed the official German surrender.
¹⁴

Company A had fought all the way to the Elbe. John Barnes had spent the last months of the war as a company runner, somehow avoiding the fate of the last surviving rifleman from D-Day, Sam Rothenberg, who had died in October 1944. The 29th Division had been 14,000 strong when it arrived in England in October 1942. By war’s end, it had suffered over 20,000 casualties.
¹⁵

On V-E Day, Company A was in a small town in the Ruhr valley, preparing to move to Bremen to begin new occupation duties. Barnes and the rest of Company A celebrated long and hard. “The main claim to fame [of the town] was its gin factory. The name of the town was emblazoned on the earthen bottle that held this fabulous nectar of which we tasted the last sweet drops, our tongues licking the neck of each bottle. What was that delicious mix that we lightly added? Could it have been that awful lemon mix from our K rations?”
¹⁶

Just a few weeks later, Company A held a profoundly moving ceremony in the town of Spaden in the American-occupied zone of Germany. Barnes stood on a parade ground as the reconstituted Company A observed the first anniversary of D-Day. “The entire company fell out for a full dress parade,” Barnes recalled. “As the American flag was raised and taps was played, I tried to think back twelve months to the day of the landing, but I could not.”
¹⁷

Of the Bedford boys who had left America, Earl Newcomb and the company’s supply sergeant, Jack Mitchell, were still serving with Company A. Neither had fought in the front lines. George Roach and Gil Murdock, who swam for their lives on D-Day, were still in the company but not as infantrymen. Roach was now Company A’s clerk. Murdock worked in the regimental headquarters. According to Barnes: “It [was] safe to say that no rifleman now remained that had served on the front and had been in England in Ivybridge in the spring of ’44.”
¹⁸

The anniversary passed quietly in Bedford. There were no special services. America was still at war with Japan and hundreds of Bedford County’s sons were still fighting in the Pacific. It was widely expected that many would be involved in another huge invasion, this time in Japan.

That summer, as America girded itself to deliver to death blow to Imperial Japan, wounded Bedford boys began to return home. “Mothers who had lost sons went out and hugged the survivors who came back,” recalled Elva Newcomb. “They were still family.”
¹⁹

Lieutenant Ray Nance had left Europe in October 1944 by walking along the very same wharf in Greenock in Scotland, where Company A had landed that grim October day in 1942, and then crossed the Atlantic to New York on the
Queen Elizabeth
, crammed with thousands of other wounded GIs. Nance continued his rehabilitation in a hospital in Staunton, Virginia. By late 1944, his heel had mended sufficiently for him to be able to walk unaided and the hospital gave him medical leave. He spent most of it in nearby Petersburg where a statuesque, auburn-haired Army nurse named Alpha Watson was working.

Before the war, Nance and Alpha had gone to the same high school and dated. They had corresponded throughout the war, and while in the hospital in England Nance had proposed to her.
²⁰
They were married on November 26, 1944. Nance was mustered out of active duty on December 15 and then returned to live in Bedford.

Going home was as heart-wrenching as D-Day.

Nance often could not sleep at night and when he did the nightmare of Omaha returned with traumatizing intensity. Was there something more he could have done to save the Bedford boys under his command? Bedford seemed to be full of mothers who had lost sons. Nance stood for hours on street corners, recounting what he had seen on D-Day to widows, and to Taylor Fellers’s father. “I can still see my father now,” says daughter Bertie Woodford, “standing on the street corner, just hoping to see one of the survivors, talking and talking to Nance, trying to find out exactly what happened.”
²¹

Explaining over and over to the bereaved what had happened was soul-destroying. “You wondered what they were thinking,” Nance said.

“Why is he here and not my son or brother who will never be here?”
²²

Fresh-faced Roy Stevens was discharged on July 30, 1945, at Fort Meade, Maryland. From there, he hurried to Washington where he planned to catch a bus to Bedford. While waiting for his connection, he went into a bar. “They wouldn’t sell me a beer! They said I was too young.”
²³