The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (31 page)

The bus dropped Stevens off on Main Street, not far from Green’s drugstore. Barracks bag slung over his shoulder, Stevens marched down a sun-bleached road to the farm which he and Ray had bought before the war, and where his parents were now living. On the way, he stopped at a farmhouse. “A guy lived there—Charlie Zimmerman—who had been a bootlegger before the war.”
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Roy bought some moonshine and took a good long swig. He needed something to help him face his parents alone.

Stevens’s parents were waiting. His mother ran from the front door and hugged him.

“Well, at least one of you got back,” she said.

“We just grabbed one another,” recalled Stevens. “My Daddy was a big fella but boy he cried that day. He and Ray were very close. They’d worked on the farm together before the war. Ray’s death shook him a whole lot.”
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Stevens found it impossible to settle back into his old life. He drank hard to calm his nerves but the whiskey also fueled his rage at the deaths of his friends. “I tried to forget, wash the memories away,” he said. “But you can’t. As soon as that whiskey dries out it all comes right back.”
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Stevens cursed so often it was as if he was still living in a foxhole. Then one day his mother scolded him and he dropped the foul language. But he didn’t stop the bad living until he met twenty-year-old Helen Cundiff at the Bedford County fairground. She was pitching pennies. He kept tossing coins until she agreed to a date. They were married on Groundhog’s Day, February 2, 1946. About the same time, Roy joined a local church and vowed to dedicate himself to “God’s works.”

Foxhole buddy Clyde Powers returned a few days after Stevens. On his way from Washington to Bedford, he stopped in Richmond, Virginia, where his younger sister, Eloise, now a beautiful, dark-haired twenty-year- old, was a cadet nurse at the Grace Hospital. It was mid-morning when Clyde walked along its spotless corridors in his crisp uniform. “There’s a good looking paratrooper asking for you,” said one of Eloise’s fellow nurses. Eloise was amazed to see Clyde. She had thought he was still in England. In the thirty-one months he had been overseas, he had become lean and rugged. But he was still as nonchalant, as unflappable, as she remembered.

Thirty-year-old Clyde grabbed his little sister and hugged her. He was not the kind of man to cry. For the rest of his life he would keep his emotions bottled up. Eloise couldn’t hold back the tears. “I can’t go home alone,” Clyde said calmly. He had left Bedford with his brother. He couldn’t face returning without a sibling by his side. Eloise asked the nursing director if she could have the day off to go home with her brother. Of course she could.

Eloise changed out of her nurse’s uniform and called her mother, Alice, to tell her that they were on their way. They caught the 2 P.M. bus to Bedford. Later that afternoon, they arrived home. Clyde’s mother hugged her son: “I’m so glad you’re home.” She cried but did not ask about Jack that day.

“It was very hard for Clyde coming home,” recalled Eloise. “He felt enormous survivor’s guilt. How could you not?”
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Clyde would not talk with Eloise or anybody else in his family about what had happened in France. It was too much to bear. “People say the men who died on the beach were heroes,” recalled Eloise. “I think the heroes are the ones who came back and had to live with it for the rest of their lives.”
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Elva Newcomb had waited for three years to feel her husband’s arms around her. Finally, she received a telegram from Earl, who had just landed on American soil: “I’m over here from over there.”
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A few days later, Earl called her around 11 P.M., and told her to meet him in Lynchburg the next day. They drove into Bedford on June 13, 1945, in Earl’s 1935 Ford coupe and fourteen days later celebrated their third wedding anniversary: “I had told him when he left: ‘Just you make it back for our wedding anniversary.’ He didn’t make it for the first, or the second, but the third was just as good.”

“Earl was different when he came back,” added Elva with a smile. “I had a time getting him back to like he was. He’d been telling boys what to do for fifty-five months and I had to teach him all over that I knew better.”
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Earl felt compelled to visit some of the grieving families of Bedford boys. He had known the Schenks well before the war but when he visited their home, John’s mother, Rosa, told Earl that her husband, George, would not talk to him. “Mr. Schenk felt that if his son hadn’t come home,” recalled Earl, “he didn’t want to speak to anyone who did.”
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Like the rest of the 29th Division, Earl was not yet demobilized. War still raged in the Pacific. He had sixty days’ leave but then he would have to return to a camp in North Carolina and then ship out to the Far East. Earl had seen enough of war so he tried to extend his leave, sending a telegram that claimed he had responsibilities he couldn’t evade at home. The army promptly replied: “Regret you have not reason. Desire you to come back.”
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On August 10, 1945, the B-29 bomber
Enola Gay
, named after its commander’s mother, dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. On September 2, the Japanese formal surrender was signed. Earl didn’t have to ship out after all. V-J Day was celebrated in Bedford with enormous joy. It was as if the small town had won the World Series. “The wailing of the blackout siren was followed by the spontaneous blowing of car horns and the ringing of bells as people drove through the streets,” reported the
Bedford Bulletin
. At Rubatex, Hampton Looms, and Belding Hemingway, the shift whistles blew late into the night. The Bedford Fireman’s Band bashed out “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the courthouse steps, and hundreds of revelers sang “God Bless America,” many with tears in their eyes, and then whooped and cheered and sang into the early hours. When most revelers had gone home a “lone victory serenador was heard wandering about the streets singing lustily: “Happy Days Are Here Again.” He repeated the song over and over, pausing now and again like a town crier to yell with a ringing cheer: ‘The war is over!’ ”
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Now all the town’s sons could come home.

Sixteen million Americans had been in uniform during the war. Four hundred thousand would never come home. Half a million more had been wounded. But for many on the home front, it had mostly been a good war. Personal incomes had doubled at least since Pearl Harbor. Unemployment had virtually disappeared. Indeed, no country in the world now enjoyed such prosperity and such a high standard of living as America.

By 1947, most veterans across America were enjoying the good times too. In Bedford, several lost sons finally made it home. The first to arrive, in a casket draped with the Stars and Stripes, was Sergeant Dickie Abbott, just twenty-two when he died storming Dog Green beach. On the sixth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1947, the Bedford Fireman’s Band again gathered at the courthouse and this time played “Nearer My God to Thee.” Abbott’s casket was placed on the courthouse steps before two thousand people who had to come to pay their respects to Abbott and 116 other Bedford County boys who had died in the war.
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The next Bedford boy to arrive back on the slow night train, the Pocahontas, was Frank Draper Jr. His sister Verona and the rest of his family walked to the station along the Norfolk and Western tracks from their home in Mud Alley, right beside the railroad. “It was around 9:30 P.M. when they took his casket off the train,” she recalled. “It was draped with a flag and there was an honor guard. My brother left from that station and he came back from it in a box.”
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Mrs. Mary Draper had her son’s casket brought back to the house. “She wanted him home with her before he was buried,” recalled Verona. The local undertaker, Harry Carder, who had delivered telegrams that terrible July day in 1944, was forced to squeeze the casket through a window because the Drapers’ front door was too narrow.
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A few days later, Verona and her family gathered in a private room at the Carder Funeral Home. “Mr. Carder sprayed something in the air and then they opened the casket because my Mom wanted to be sure it was Frank. I knew it was him as soon as I saw. I could tell by the form of his head— he had the prettiest little old head. He was still in his uniform. His face looked like if you blew on it the skin would just float away.”
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The U.S. Government had given relatives the option of leaving their loved ones in war graves in Europe or reburying them in America. In all, seven Bedford boys were exhumed and shipped to America. Most of the boys who came home in coffins now rest in Bedford’s Greenwood Cemetery.

On a late fall evening in 2000, Roy Stevens walked from grave to grave, smiling as he recalled each man. As the years passed, he said, Bedford struggled to come to terms with its loss. There was no uplifting fable of grief ending in redemptive healing. Therapy did not exist. The Bible sufficed. The pain faded at times but never went away.

Most of the survivors remained tormented by what they had experienced. Dickie Overstreet could not erase images from his mind of young GIs being mangled on Dog Green by the tracks of tanks. “When I first got back,” recalled Stevens, “I was jumpy for a while. The wind would blow the shades at night in the summer sometimes and I’d come out of bed in a hurry.”
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In 1948, Stevens quit drinking and the bad dreams started to fade. For other Bedford veterans, they did not: “They were hurt, not so much physically but in the brain. They’d start talking and you’d get to crying. Friends like Clyde Powers . . . they got torn up inside. The drinking—it got a lot of them in the end.”
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Tony Marsico fared better than most. The 116 Yankees catcher returned to his job with the Piedmont Label company, where he would work until his retirement, aged sixty-two. He found solace in a deeply loving relationship with his wife, Hazel, whom he had married in Washington, D.C., in 1942, and eventually in a baby girl, Laura, who was “the apple of his eye.”
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By 1948, he had recovered sufficiently from his D-Day wounds to play golf with his 116 Yankees teammate, Pride Wing-field. Before the war, they had both belonged to the same Piedmont Label side as had Frank Draper Jr. and Elmere Wright. Although their teammates had been killed, their love of baseball had survived. Come what may, they were determined to once again stand on a diamond in the same colors and play ball.

“They did play again—for Bedford in the Skyline League,” insisted Rebecca Wingfield. “I went and watched them with my sister. We would visit all the beautiful little hamlets in the hills around here. They were very good. One year, they won the league.” Marsico could still catch but a wound sustained on Omaha to his upper right arm severely limited his game. Wingfield still fielded as reliably as ever at second base.
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“My Daddy lost a little something inside him when he couldn’t play ball any more,” recalled Marsico’s daughter, Laura, who was born in 1958 when her father was forty-nine and her mother forty-one. “Just before he died in 1986, he was in [a] Veterans’ Home and an orderly tried to lift him and touched him on his leg. The wound still really hurt. Right until he died, he loved golf and above all baseball.

“I have his Purple Heart and a signed baseball from the 1943 [European Theater] World Series,” she continued. “It was probably his most valuable possession. He kept it in a cedar chest and would only occasionally bring it out. He would talk about playing baseball with Draper and Wright in the war but not about what happened to him on D-Day. It was such a horrible experience, and talking about it would have meant reliving it. That was too hard.”
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As America boomed in the late-forties and fifties, so too did the factories in Bedford, which were quickly converted to civilian use in 1945. Roy Stevens got a job at the production line at Rubatex. In 1953, he lost his left hand in an accident. A year later, his foxhole buddy Clyde Powers lost his right hand—burnt off when Powers was electrocuted working on a power line.
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“I went to see Clyde in hospital,” said Stevens. “He was worried to death because he smoked and he didn’t know how he was going to light a cigarette. I got out a book of matches, showed him how to do it with one hand. Boy, he liked that.”
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Like other survivors, Lieutenant Ray Nance couldn’t get rid of horrific scenes from D-Day that would invade his sleep and leave him traumatized. Not long after returning to Bedford, he decided the town needed to find appropriate ways to commemorate and honor its dead before the bereaved could move on with their lives. As Nance saw it, the best way to begin that process was to start a new National Guard company in Bedford so that the town’s tradition of service would live again.

Bring back Company A? Throughout Virginia, people said Nance’s dream of a volunteer corps in Bedford once again would never happen. No one would support it. But Nance was determined to prove them wrong. With the help of other Bedford veterans, he got to work, writing letters, and giving interviews to as many reporters who would listen.

The plan struck a chord with teenagers in Bedford. Everyone had known someone who had not come home. Many had escaped service by just a year or in some cases months, and they were keen to do their part. When Nance held his first meeting for volunteers, he was amazed at how many turned up: “It spread like wildfire among young high school students. They flocked in. They were proud of it.”
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