The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (10 page)

The weeks before Christmas were particularly hard on Earl Parker, ever more desperate to see his daughter. “Dear Danny, Maybe Santa Claus will bring you lots of things if you are a good little girl,” he wrote in early December. “I sure hope I will be there next Christmas. I don’t suppose you will know your Daddy when he comes home. I don’t believe it will take us long to get acquainted. Don’t tell mother that I said this, but I love her a lot and think she is real sweet. I wish I could be there with you and Mother tonight. With all my love, Daddy.”
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By New Year’s day, 1944, the 29th Division no longer had Britain to itself. Being a Yank armed with pass and a fat wallet was no longer so much fun. In a massive build-up to the invasion of Europe, over 1.6 million other Americans were soon crowding an area not much bigger than Virginia. They would share this “occupied territory” with well over ten million civilians, 1.7 million British troops, over 150,000 Canadians, and 60,000 from other Allied nations, including a Polish armored division and parachute brigade. In total, the Americans in Britain would comprise six armored divisions, thirteen infantry divisions, and two airborne divisions. Ports would soon be jammed with over 4,000 landing craft and 1,300 warships. Added to this colossal force were 165 U.S. Air Force squadrons.

As this “American occupation” gathered pace, many 29ers discovered that some Brits had finally had enough of the braggart Yanks, spreading venereal disease, packing every decent restaurant and pub, and stealing their girls: over 70,000 British women would marry their Yank boyfriends immediately after the war and return to the United States with them.

New faces started to change things in Company A too. By February 1944, it was under strength; less than a third of its remaining men were from Bedford. Many of the original Bedford boys had received commissions and been transferred. Others had failed increasingly stringent physicals and stamina tests. Having formed the nucleus of the unit since Pearl Harbor, however, most of those issuing orders were still Bedford born and bred.

To bring the 116th Infantry up to full strength—193 men—replacements arrived in batches of up to fifty men. Most were drafted northerners like nineteen-year-old John Barnes, the son of devout Catholics, who arrived with twenty other New Yorkers in the back of a freezing truck one grim afternoon.
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A pound over the cut-off weight at his induction medical in 1942, Barnes was “full of foreboding” and still wondered what he’d have done if he had weighed 119 pounds rather than 120. Like so many others, would he have gorged himself and returned to the scales?

Barnes’s truck stopped and the New Yorkers filed into a Quonset hut. They included a cocky and streetwise Jew from New York City, Hal Baumgarten. The son of Austrian immigrants and a superb athlete, Baumgarten had made a remarkable fifty-four-yard return punt for his high school team the day that Pearl Harbor was bombed. In June 1943, he’d been offered a college exemption from the draft. His professors had advised him to take it, but he did not. Determined to repay his country for the opportunities it afforded his family, he was sworn into the army on July 10, 1943, and soon proved to be a spectacularly gifted marksman, especially with a 1903 Springfield bolt-action.

“The first officer we met was Colonel Canham,” recalled Baumgarten. “He told us: ‘Two out of three of you are not going home.’”
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Barnes and Baumgarten were ordered to go to one of the First Battalion’s four companies: “Able, Baker, Charlie or Dog.”
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They walked down a foggy pathway between more huts and then someone barked: “You, you, you—fall out here!”
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Barnes and Baumgarten entered a well-lit building. There they found a heavy set, tough-looking Virginian with three stripes on his shoulder.

“My name is Wilkes. Master Sergeant John Wilkes.”

The men stood at attention.

“You men have been assigned to A Company. We have been in the ETO [European Theatre of Operations] for eighteen months and we are
ready
for combat. You men
will
be ready too.”

Another man stepped forward—tall and lean, with two silver bars on his uniform.

“My name is Captain Taylor Fellers,” he said in an almost unintelligible Virginia drawl. “This company will be in the leading wave of infantry in the invasion of Europe. You men will be part of a great force to end the war. Good luck!”
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Barnes’s heart sank. “What have I gotten into?” he thought.

That first night, the replacements bunked in Company A’s Nissen huts. “Why are they sending you kids over here?” several Virginians asked nineteen-year-old Baumgarten.

A couple of days later, the replacements were ordered to sleep in tents nearby. For several weeks, they lived under sodden canvas without heat in an increasingly muddy field. To other recruits such as riflemen George Roach, Gil Murdock, and Thomas Valance, it seemed that the Southerners were deliberately testing the northern replacements, ostracizing them until they were deemed tough and fit enough to eat and sleep beside the stalwarts of Company A. “The Bedford men were like one big family,” recalled Baumgarten. “When we came out of our tents to line up in the morning for reveille, they were all calling each other by their first names, kidding with each other. The captain knew every one of them.”
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After a month, the replacements were finally allowed to join the rest of Company A under a roof. Hal Baumgarten slept on a top bunk opposite Jack Powers. “He was very good to me. He’d trained to be a Ranger and wasn’t too happy to be back [his unit was disbanded]. He was a great soldier and taught me a lot of tricks. Bedford Hoback was also friendly.”
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At first, however, most replacements made uneasy bedfellows. “Those boys from up North, you had to ride them or they’d ride you,” recalled Mess Sergeant Earl Newcomb. “You had to holler at them sometimes or they’d forget who you were. They didn’t want to be disciplined like you had to have them.”
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Other men bridled at some of the new city boys’ preconceptions of the Southerners in the 29th Division as dumb hicks. Accents got thicker, drawls even slower. Some shared their grandfathers’ contempt of the infernal Yankees. The Civil War was not over yet, and there was many a fierce but mostly good-natured debate about slavery, reconstruction, and the key battles of the war.

Each night, Captain Fellers would do a bed check before lights out. “I still find the battle of Bull Run and Gettysburg going on,” Fellers wrote his parents. “They sit around and smoke their pipes and fight it all over again. Among them are diplomats, statesmen, politicians, and guard house lawyers. It is really interesting just to listen. And when one of them gets back from pass and starts telling about a girl he met, from his description you would wonder how Heddy Lamar and Lana Turner ever got so popular.”
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Before turning in, one of A Company’s four lieutenants or Captain Fellers would censor the men’s mail to be sent to America the following day. The rhyming slang and private codes men used to express their feelings fascinated Fellers. “Those boys really have a technique on some of their phraseology to the girls they left back there,” Fellers told his parents. “And from the local mail it seems that the same tactics work with the local lassies too.”
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As Fellers became more involved with preparations for Overlord, he relied more than ever on Master Sergeant John Wilkes to deal with problems of morale or discipline. Wilkes was particularly tough on replacements who didn’t adapt quickly enough to Company A’s rigid discipline and strict regulations. A bunch of rowdy, slack city kids were not going to undermine the fighting force he and Fellers had primed since Fort Meade.

Wilkes had put on twenty pounds since leaving Virginia and when angry was so intimidating that one New Yorker thought he looked like a huge “wall” about to fall on him. He often chewed a potent brand of Virginia tobacco and on several occasions reminded new arrivals how to stand to attention by spitting a large wad between their legs. Men quickly learned to salute correctly with their heels firmly locked together.

One morning, John Barnes woke up with a terrible pain in his jaw. He couldn’t bear shaving in cold water. Knowing Wilkes would make him shave, Barnes reported sick to another company’s medical station. “I was desperate. I knew I couldn’t show up to roll call with stubble because I would be really chewed out.”
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It didn’t take long for Wilkes to find out what Barnes had done.

“I’ve had a skin infection for the last three weeks,” he barked, “and I’ve shaved every day! Go back and shave.”

From then on, Barnes toed the line. He soon realized that Wilkes was mild in comparison with the regimental commander of the 116th Infantry, whose camp was known to many in the 29th Division as “Colonel Canham’s Concentration Camp.”
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“The officers in England were scared to death of Canham,” recalled Roy Stevens. “I had a sore on my foot one time from all the marching and I had to go to first aid so I wore a tennis shoe. Canham saw the shoe. ‘If you can’t wear a proper shoe on that foot, you’ll go barefooted. Take that shoe off!’ He must have been ashamed of himself sometimes—he was so tough on the men. But it takes men like him to win a war.”
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Even if men returned from forty-eight-hour passes just a few minutes late, perhaps having missed a last train from London, they were fined thirty dollars and kept in camp for a month. Canham had decided on the punishment, which led even Major General Gerhardt to complain one day that he was “too hard on the men.”

“Goddamn it,” Canham replied, “this is my regiment and I am the one commanding it.”

“You know,” said Gerhardt, “the men don’t mind that thirty dollars but they hate that thirty days.”
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The 116th’s officers took their cue from Canham, driving their men harder and harder that winter as the planned invasion got closer. When Company A now formed up for drill, Fellers would prowl along the ranks. If he saw a sloppy uniform or stubble, he shouted angrily: “This parade will never march!”
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Increasingly, soldiers vented their anxieties and frustrations outside camp. By 1944, there were outraged reports about GIs’ heavy drinking and boorishness throughout Britain. Lady Astor now told the Virginians she invited to her home: “Boys, if you’re out on the town and have too much to drink and any English people ask you where you are from tell them New York, New Jersey, or anyplace but Virginia. I have told the English people that Virginia boys don’t drink and rough it up.”
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But Virginia boys did drink and many loved to rough it up. “Most of the boys never really drank before,” recalled Roy Stevens. “The Tommy knew how to drink. We didn’t. They could take a bottle of beer and sit down for an hour and drink it, but if it lasted two minutes with us, that was a record! We drank it down in one.”
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Snake Eyes Carter and John Reynolds were among Company A’s heaviest “boozers.” Both narrowly avoided being thrown in the lock-up for drunken behavior. “Poor old Jackie [John Reynolds], he was a real wild guy,” recalled a Bedford contemporary. “He drank so much one night he came back to the barracks and peed in John Clifton’s bed. He was like a lot of those boys. Most of them didn’t have much chance here in Bedford but they were good-looking, and over there they put that uniform on and they were something.”
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Knowing their “number would soon come up,” other “good-time guys” in Company A started to “come a cropper,” as local landlords put it. Discovered without a pass by MPs one night, Dickie Overstreet suddenly found himself in charge of a flamethrower, arguably the most dangerous job in the infantry.
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Sergeant Jack Powers, one of the finest soldiers in Company A, also got busted, apparently for going AWOL. Although pleased to be back with his childhood friends in Company A after his 29th Rangers had been disbanded, Powers was also deeply dismayed that his months of intensive training, some spent with British commandos in Scotland, had apparently been in vain. For going AWOL, Fellers stripped him of his sergeant’s stripes, making him a private first class. Fellers had done the same to Bedford Hoback for eating a sandwich without permission during a march.

The demotion didn’t seem to bother Bedford too much. In a letter to his sister Mabel he expressed an ever more nonchalant view of life. He was smoking far too much, but what the hell, life was short and he was going to enjoy himself come what may: “Smoking never kills but so many people and they were going to die anyway. So why not let them die happy? I smoke too many, more than a pack each day, and I cough much too but I will die happy with my cigarettes.”
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In nearby Ivybridge, the town center was now a battleground at weekends as drunken GIs slugged it out. There was nothing like a good fight to relieve bottled-up aggression. New replacements were advised to head to the nearest city and bypass the town when they received their first pass. John Wilkes spent many Monday mornings disciplining men who had fallen afoul of MPs in Ivybridge over the weekend.

Increasingly often, the fights in Ivybridge had to do with race. In America, blacks were still segregated. But in Britain there was no color divide. Black soldiers were treated the same as white GIs, to the fury of many Southerners. “The truck company over there was black,” recalled Lieutenant Ray Nance. “They’d meet the outfit in the pubs, and the troublemakers would get to work. There was something going on pretty much all the time with the black men.”
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