The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice

Copyright © 2003 by Alex Kershaw

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First Da Capo Press edition 2003
ISBN 0-306-81167-7
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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9—07 06 05 04 03

For Bedford,
veterans of D-Day,
and those who died that others might be free.

This book could not have been written without the help and cooperation of many extraordinary people in Bedford. On several visits to this enchanting town below the Peaks of Otter, I was treated with the utmost kindness. It was a great honor to spend so much time trying to commemorate such a wonderful group of men and the families and community that reared them. Bedford represents all that is great and gracious about America.

I would like to thank the following relatives, veterans, and various experts for providing me with information and photographs, and in some cases enduring several hours of interviews and many, many phone calls over the last three years: Eloise Rogers, Johnny Powers, Earl Boyd Wilson, Dorothy Goode, Hazel Clifton Pierce, Linda Gilley, Carol Tuck-willer of the National D-Day Foundation, John Barnes, Harold Baum-garten, Marcia Apperson, Mitch Yockelson of the National Archives, Elizabeth Teass, Major Jimmy Kilborne of the Staunton Armory, Russell Pickett, Bob Slaughter, Lucille Hoback Boggess, Ellen A. Wandrei and her wonderful staff at the Bedford County Museum, the astonishingly helpful Michael Edwards of the Eisenhower Center, Betty Wilkes Hooper, the outstandingly patient Roy and Helen Stevens, Ray Nance, Eleanor Yowell, Elaine Cockes, Allen Huddleston, the marvelously hospitable Pride and Rebecca Wingfield, Bertie Woodford, Billy Parker, Gamiel Draper, Bob Sales, Jimmy Green, Ivylyn Hardy, Mabel Phelps, Jack Mitchell, Earl and Elva Newcomb, Verona Lipford, Anna Mae Stewart, Billy Parker, Mary Daniel Heilig, staff of the
Bedford Bulletin
, Beulah Witt, Ellen Quarles, David Draper, Michael Zimmerman, Sibyle Kieth Coleman, Gary Bedingfield, Laura Burnette, Octavia White Sumpter, Kevan Elsby, Judy Monroe, George Gillam, Peter Viemeister, and Linda Gilley.

The staff of the following institutions provided invaluable help with my research: The New York Public Library, the Sawyer Library at Williams College, Loyola Marymount Library in California, the Imperial War Museum, Bedford County Museum, the National D-Day Museum, the McCullogh Free Library in Bennington, and the Eisenhower Center.

I have been exceptionally lucky to have had such an astute, skilled, and enthusiastic editor as Robert L. Pigeon of Da Capo Press. I cannot thank him and his team enough for their support for this project. My agent, Derek Johns, once again helped in every way he possibly could. I am enormously grateful to him for his long-standing patience, support, and generosity. My wife, Robin, and son, Felix, once again tolerated my absence and obsession and brought untold joy. I would also like to thank the Loerch family, and of course my own, for their long-standing support.

Abbott, Leslie C., Sergeant
Broughman, Cedric C., Technician
Carter, Wallace R., Private First Class
Clifton, John D., Private First Class
Coleman, Andrew J., Private First Class
Crouch, George E. Technician
Draper, Jr., Frank P., Sergeant
Edwards, Jr., Robert D., Sergeant
Fellers, Taylor N., Captain
Fizer, Charles W. Private First Class
Gillaspie, Nicholas N., Private First Class
Goode, Robert L., Sergeant
Hoback, Bedford T., Private
Hoback, Raymond S., Sergeant
Huddleston, Allen, Sergeant
Lancaster, James, Private First Class
Lee, Clifton G., Private
Marsico, Robert (Tony) E., Sergeant
Mitchell, Jack, Sergeant
Nance, Elisha R. (Ray), First Lieutenant
Newcomb, Earl R., Sergeant
Overstreet, Glenwood (Dickie) E., Private First Class
Parker, Earl L., Sergeant
Powers, Henry Clyde, Sergeant
Powers, Jack G., Private First Class
Reynolds, John F., Private First Class
Rosazza, Weldon A., Private First Class
Schenk, John B., Sergeant
Stevens, Ray O., Sergeant
Stevens, Roy O., Sergeant
Thurman, Anthony M., Sergeant
Watson, James W., Private First Class
White, Jr., Gordon H., Sergeant
Wilkes, Harold E., Sergeant
Wilkes, John L., Master Sergeant
Wingfield, Pride, Sergeant
Wright, Elmere P., Sergeant
Yopp, Grant C., Sergeant

Dean, John W., Master Sergeant

Parker, Joseph E. (Earl’s brother), Sergeant

Companies A, C, and F were part of the 116th Infantry Regiment commanded by Colonel Charles D.W. Canham. The 116th was part of the 29th Division commanded by Major General Charles H. Gerhardt. Brigadier General Norman D. Cota was Assistant Division Commander of the 29th.

J
UNE 6, 1944, 12:30 A.M.
: The British troopship, the
Empire
Javelin
, steamed steadily across the English Channel. Among her passengers were thirty-four young men from the small Virginia town of Bedford. They belonged to the 116th Infantry’s Company A, a select two-hundred man unit. After twenty months of arduous training, Company A had been chosen from among the 15,000 GIs in the Army of the United States’ 29th Division to spearhead the most dangerous and critical American assault of the entire war.

Below decks, twenty-five-year-old Sergeant Frank Draper Jr. scribbled notes in his diary. The army had been the making of him. Draper, naturally ebullient, with finely chiseled features and a superb physique, had grown up on the wrong side of the tracks in Bedford, poor even by the woeful standards of the Depression. Since leaving home, he had become a first-rate soldier, and he was determined to bring honor to his unit as well as to his hardscrabble neighborhood back in Bedford, where he’d scavenged for coal as a boy to keep his family warm. As ever, he wanted to be sure he was prepared for the next day, so he wrote himself a note: “Sleep in your trousers, shirt and gas mask. Breakfast—2.30 A.M. Departure— 4 A.M. Hit water—4.30 A.M.”
¹

Twenty-four-year-old Sergeant Roy Stevens, a handsome, broad-faced farm boy, tried to get some sleep but was too afraid, so he went on deck. Fellow Bedford boys and other GIs were crouched in small groups in the darkness, trying to keep cards and dice from flying or tumbling away across the heaving deck, betting fortunes in poker and craps games: “It didn’t matter whether you won or lost. You knew you probably weren’t going to get a chance to win your money back anyway.”

Roy scoured the blacked-out deck for his twin brother, Ray. Back in England at a training camp, Roy had “hit a streak at blackjack and won a whole lot of money and given Ray half of it, maybe a couple of hundred dollars.”
²
Perhaps Ray was using the last of it to play a final few hands of rook, the Bedford boys’ favorite card game.

The Stevens brothers had shared everything except women since they could remember: poker winnings, uniform, Red Cross parcels, news from home, and their most intimate fears and hopes. But in a few hours’ time, after years of being inseparable, they would not share the same landing craft bound for the beaches of northern France. For the first time since they had joined the National Guard, a week apart in 1938, they would not be side by side. They would not face their greatest test together. They would arrive on Omaha Beach in different boats.

Roy looked around. He wanted to talk to Ray before the ship’s alarm sounded and they went to their action stations. He wanted to remind him of the farm they had bought together, and of their dreams of making it successful after the war, and he wanted to arrange to meet at the crossroads of a small village above Omaha Beach called Vierville sur Mer.

A fellow Bedford boy, Lieutenant Ray Nance, twenty-eight, managed to get a few hours of sleep. Nance could trace his heritage to British aristocracy, George Washington, and Huguenot exiles. Like other Bedford boys, he had joined the National Guard as far back as 1933 out of necessity as much as patriotism. Nance was highly intelligent and soft-spoken. He was also fastidious in everything he did and awoke around 2 A.M., dressed in full combat gear.
³
He had not even removed his boots. Nearby were five fellow officers from Company A. By lunchtime, three of them would be dead.

In the noncommissioned men’s berths, a few men dozed fitfully. Most men sat in silence, alone with their thoughts. Other Bedford boys lay in bunks writing last-minute letters home. Nance knew that some would not live to write another. He felt responsible for them all. He had grown up with these men, trained them to be superb soldiers, censored their love letters to girls he knew back in Bedford. The men under his command were family. Their parents and lovers had entrusted Nance and Company A’s Captain Taylor Fellers with their lives.

At the same time that Nance got up, twenty-one-year-old British Sub-Lieutenant Jimmy Green was woken by an orderly and told that his flotilla commander wanted to see him urgently. Green was second in command of the flotilla but in full command of the first wave of boats that would land Company A in France. The flotilla had twenty craft all told: eighteen LCAs [Landing Craft Army] and two LCPs [Landing Craft Personnel].

Green’s commander told him the boats would have to leave earlier than planned because weather conditions in the English Channel were so bad. Green grabbed a cup of tea and a “bite to eat” and then drew his weapons from the
Empire Javelin’
s store. He had no illusions about what lay ahead. There would be heavy casualties. In his last shore briefing, he’d been told to expect to lose a third of his men and his boats.
⁴

As Green told his men about the weather conditions and consequent changes in course and timetable, Ray Nance went to the officers’ mess to eat breakfast: pancakes, sausages, eggs, and coffee. Few actually ate the hearty meal, served by upbeat orderlies in starched white uniforms.

“Over breakfast, we sat around and shot the breeze,” recalled Roy Stevens. “We were laughing, joking, carrying on but you could tell it was phony—everybody was scared. They were putting on a good front.”
⁵

After breakfast, Nance gathered his kit and climbed up a gangway. A heavy canvas curtain stopped light seeping onto the deck from below. Nance stepped through and into pitch blackness.
⁶
He went to the rail and looked out at the dark waters, swelling ominously. Suddenly, he noticed Captain Fellers at his side. Fellers had, like Nance, grown up on a farm outside Bedford. The two were cousins.

Twenty-nine-year-old Fellers was tall and thin, with a prominent chin and rolling gait. He was suffering badly from a sinus infection and looked tired and concerned. Before embarking for France, Fellers had confided in Nance, telling him that very few of the officers and men in Company A would come back alive. Fellers had studied the Allied intelligence and countless aerial shots and concluded that Company A was being sent to face certain slaughter.

Fellers and Nance both looked out to sea.

“We stood there awhile,” recalled Nance. “We didn’t say a word, not a single word to each other. I guess we’d said it all.”
⁷

An anti-aircraft gun broke the silence, tracer bullets spitting through the sky, and then a searchlight caught the blaze of an exploding plane. “That brought it home to me,” recalled Nance. “This thing is real. It’s not an exercise.”
⁸

Fellers still didn’t say a word and then turned away and went below. A loudspeaker called the British naval crew to its stations. The troops knew they would be next. Ray Nance made his way quickly to where Company A would assemble on deck.

Bosuns’ whistles sounded.

“Now, hear this! All assault troops report to your debarkation areas.”
⁹

As thirty-four Bedford boys emerged from below into the cold darkness, Nance touched every one of them lightly on the arm.
¹⁰
“It was a gesture, a goodbye,” he recalled sixty years later. “They were the best men I have ever seen in my life. It was a privilege to be their officer. I loved those men.”
¹¹

The men included husbands, three sets of brothers, pool-hall hustlers, a couple of highly successful Lotharios, a minor league baseball player destined for great things, and several Bible-reading, quiet young men who desperately missed their mothers and dreamed of home cooking.

Although they were supremely fit, many of the Bedford boys moved slowly to their debarkation stations, weighed down by their kit. “We had been issued an assault jacket, a sort of vest-like garment with many pockets and pull-strap fasteners to yank off in a hurry,” recalled one of the few privates who would still be alive by nightfall. “In the various pockets we stored K-rations, a quarter pound of TNT with fuses, hand grenades, a smoke grenade and medical kit with syringe and morphine. Besides our regular M-1 clips [for the M-1 Garand rifle], we had two slings of ammo belts across our shoulders. On our backs, we carried an entrenching tool, a bayonet, and a poncho and whatever else we could stuff in.”
¹²
The men’s kit weighed well over sixty pounds.

The men’s M-1 Garand rifles, among the few Allied weapons that were superior to the German equivalents, were wrapped in cellophane wrappers to protect their working from sand and water. Some men had finally found a use for their Army-issued condoms and tied them around keepsakes, lucky charms, and even small Bibles that they wanted to keep dry. Around each man’s waist was buckled a “Mae West” lifebelt which would inflate by squeezing a CO-2 tube.

The Bedford boys checked weapons and kit, exchanged scribbled home addresses “just in case,” wished each other good luck, and tried to bolster others who suddenly looked terrified.

“This is it, men,” a loudspeaker blared to the men of the 29th Division. “Pick it up and put it on, you’ve got a one-way ticket and this is the end of the line. 29, let’s go!”
¹³