The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (12 page)

Their lack of combat experience actually increased their confidence, some historians have argued. It was to the Allies’ advantage that so many men had not seen combat; young men who have seen the horror of war are far less likely to rush headlong towards it. Naïveté can perhaps be a powerful weapon. Only one of the eleven American divisions in Britain before D-Day—the 1st Division—had seen combat.

The Bedford boys’ senior commanders were also confident—they believed the troops would meet little resistance. The boys didn’t need to be combat veterans, they figured, because they did not envision a prolonged firefight on the beaches.

Confidence was vital to success in such a risky operation as Overlord. But in the last weeks before D-Day confidence evaporated among many senior American generals and officers. What caused their self-assurance to slip was witnessing one of the greatest military blunders of World War II. Near Slapton Sands, in one night of miscommunication, panic, and organizational chaos during an invasion dress rehearsal, more Americans died in a tragic accident than died on all but one of the Overlord beaches. Many survivors and witnesses viewed the catastrophe as a terrible omen.

On April 27, 1944, barely twenty-four hours after the Bedford boys had practiced their Omaha-invasion scenario by storming Slapton Sands for the final time, Operation Tiger—an invasion rehearsal for the 4th Division— began after dark. Twenty-five thousand men were due to land on Slapton Sands, which had been prepared to resemble Utah Beach in Normandy. Three hundred thirty-seven ships were involved, with the British Royal Navy providing an escort and protection from attack from any German craft patrolling the channel. The men needed the practice because the 4th’s previous exercise on Slapton Sands, “Exercise Beaver,” had been “far from successful: co-ordination between units broke down and the men who took part remember it mainly for the confusion.”
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Shortly after midnight on April 28, nine German torpedo boats moved into Lyme Bay, close to Slapton Sands. Lured by heavier than normal radio traffic, the E-boats suddenly found themselves in the midst of Operation Tiger.

German E-boats, “Schnellboote,” were designed to wreak maximum havoc in the channel. A hundred feet long, armed with two torpedoes and powered by 6000-horsepower Daimler Benz engines, painted black for nighttime camouflage, able to attack at a maximum speed of 40 knots, the boats also carried two 20mm cannons, which fired green tracer bullets that lit up far from their source to prevent Allied vessels from quickly identifying their position. The rehearsal’s slow moving LSTs (landing ship tanks) were no match.

Because of widespread confusion among the British escorts, that night the E-boats were able to get close enough to the Tiger convoy (co-denamed T-4) to launch their torpedoes. Warnings had been issued about the Germans’ presence but no preventative action taken. The result was an unmitigated disaster. One LST was seriously crippled. Another burst into flames, trapping many of the victims below deck. A third sank immediately, sending hundreds of U.S. 4th Division soldiers to their deaths.

As bodies washed ashore along England’s South Coast in the days after, the official death count rose to 749. Quartermaster soldiers on board LST 531 were among the hardest hit. The 3206th Quartermaster Service Company was virtually destroyed. Of its 251 officers and men, 201 were killed or wounded.

U.S. Navy Medical Corpsman Arthur Victor survived the sinking of LST 507, which had been “packed with about 500 soldiers . . . amphibious [vehicles], jeeps, trucks . . . loaded from one end of the ship to the other, top deck and tank deck. We were a floating arsenal.”
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Like hundreds of other survivors, Victor would spend the night clinging to a life raft as his countrymen slipped into death by hypothermia. By 3 A.M., the channel waters were “almost unbearably cold. . . . I had also been swallowing oily tasting salt water that made me nauseous, and I started puking. I pissed my pants to feel the warm. I remember how good it felt pouring over my thighs.”
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Victor watched buddy after buddy fall away into the black waters, unable to struggle on. Soon, more than half of those who had clung to the life raft after 507 sank were dead.

After three hours in the water, a man shouted that he could hear a ship’s engine. Another LST, Number 515, had come to the rescue. The 515 lowered three LCVPs into the water and one of the boats designed by Andrew Higgins to storm enemy beaches quickly made its way towards Victor. He had held a fellow survivor’s hand most of the night but now, only minutes from rescue, the man gave up. “I was so mad that the ludicrous thought came to mind that I could have killed [him].”
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Julian Perkin, a British warrant officer candidate, arrived off Slapton Sands aboard HMS
Obedient
near daybreak on April 28: “The sight was appalling. There were hundreds of bodies of American servicemen, in full battle gear, floating in the sea. Many had their limbs and even their heads blown off. . . . Those the doctor pronounced dead were pushed back into the sea [where] small American landing craft with their ramps down were literally scooping up bodies. It was a ghastly sight!”
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The dead were buried in military graveyards around England. The wounded were segregated for days from other troops and, according to some survivors, told not to say a word to anyone before the invasion. “We were told to keep our mouths shut and taken to a camp where we were quarantined,” recalled 4th Division infantryman Eugene Carney. “When we went through the mess line we weren’t even allowed to talk to the cooks. If, for example, we wanted two potatoes, we were told to hold up two fingers. If three, three fingers.”
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On April 29, corpsman Arthur Victor joined other survivors who were taken to a “dilapidated barracks, under guard, for three days, and ordered, under threat of court martial, not to discuss the incident with anyone outside our immediate group.”
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On the evening of April 29, General Eisenhower wrote to General George C. Marshall, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Washington. The disaster meant that the Allies had no reserves of LSTs, vital to Overlord’s success. “We are stretched to the limit in the LST category,” wrote a concerned Eisenhower, “while the implications of the attack and the possibility of both raiders and bombers concentrating on some of our major ports make one scratch his head.”
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More worrying to Eisenhower than the communications failure that had exacerbated the disaster was the 4th Division’s woeful performance once it had actually landed on Slapton Sands. Harry Butcher, Eisenhower’s aide, was, like his boss, deeply troubled by “the absence of toughness and alertness of the young American officers whom I saw on this trip. They seem to regard war as one grand maneuver in which they are having a happy time. They are as green as growing corn. . . . We should have a more experienced division for the assault than the 4th which has never been in a fight in this war.”
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But there was only one division that was not green, the 1st Division, and due to concerns about the 29th Division’s inexperience, it had been slated to join the 29ers in the joint operation to seize Omaha Beach.

Secrecy about the Slapton Sands disaster was crucial. If it became common knowledge, it would have an irreparable impact on morale and alert the Germans to Overlord. Yet despite the gag order imposed on many survivors, rumors spread fast through many officers’ quarters. Some were so shocked by the scale of the botch-up that they began to question their roles in Overlord. The tragedy also affected Company A’s commanding officer, Taylor Fellers, who may have heard about the disaster because some survivors were temporarily housed at Blandford, near the holding area for the 116th Infantry. “He was all excited when he told me about the disaster,” recalled Lieutenant Nance. “It upset him a whole lot. He said it could have been us guys. We had done exactly what they had done, only two days before them. [Operation Tiger] made us even more aware of our responsibilities. We had these young men’s lives in our hands. It deeply affected us.”
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Officers Nance and Fellers did not say a word to anyone else in Company A about the disaster. According to Roy Stevens, this was just as well: “It would have given us something else to worry about. . . . We already had a lot on our mind.”
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So did the Allies’ senior intelligence officers. What, they wondered, had happened to the officers involved in Operation Tiger who knew the details of Overlord? Staff headquarters for General Montgomery was in a panic. “There was a whole day when it was seriously contemplated trying to alter the [D-Day] operation because of the knowledge which the enemy must now be presumed to have—the detailed knowledge of almost everything we planned.”
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But over the following days the bodies of every intelligence officer were found, even though hundreds of other corpses were never recovered. It was “one of those amazing miracles which characterize war.”
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Overlord was still a secret, it seemed. But only on D-Day would Allied intelligence know for sure.

In Company A, one thing was certain: Captain Fellers had changed. Before Operation Tiger, he had been infectiously confident and self-assured. Now he was full of doubt.

A
T LAST, ON MAY
18, 1944, the Bedford boys climbed into trucks and were driven to containment camps in preparation for Operation Overlord. The camps were called “sausages” because they were located alongside roads and actually resembled sausages on maps. By D-Day they would contain over two million men, the greatest gathering of personnel in the history of war.

The Bedford boys’ “sausage” was code-named D-1 and located ten miles north of Dorchester, a half-hour truck drive from the English Channel. “Its tents contained the entire 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry,” recalled Hal Baumgarten. “Company A was in the northeast corner of the camp . . . Foxholes were dug in the calcified English earth. There were outhouses with collecting pails. The collected excretions were regularly burned, and shipped away for fertilizer. The acrid odor of the smoke was very unpleasant.”

At the southwest corner of D-1 stood an old English ancestral home, Doulish.

The Bedford boys were now sealed off from the outside world. The only way out would be on a truck bound for Weymouth where the boys would board the
Empire Javelin
and then cross to France. No passes would be issued to anyone for any reason. “Sentries were posted everywhere to keep us from escaping,” recalled John Barnes. Barbed wire curled along high perimeter fences, giving D-1 the look of a POW enclosure.

At first, the men were kept busy with final kit preparations. Every square inch of their uniforms had to be gas-proofed, waterproofed, and then camouflaged. That done, they sat for hours, speaking little, nursing their own thoughts, writing letters to loved ones. They could not write a word about Overlord but many hinted in letters that they were about to see action.

Captain Fellers ordered his officers to be especially attentive when censoring the men’s mail. John Barnes remembered that “any attempt to pass on news of the upcoming invasion was censored by cutting out the offending words. Any slight reference to any person, place, or thing was deleted. I’m sure our letters looked more like ribbons than anything else.”
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“It was my turn to read the boys’ letters home and censor them,” Lieutenant Nance recalled. “Once, I came across a suspicious-looking letter, with illegible words repeated over and over. It looked like some kind of code, which we’d been warned to look out for.” Nance called the private who wrote the letter into his office. “This doesn’t make sense,” Nance said. “Well, my wife knows what it means,” said the private.

I LOVE YOU were the only words the private had almost learned to write.
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Earl Parker wrote as often as he had promised, at least once a week, never failing to tell Viola about the latest “flick” on base, as the Brits called films. He had seen his first castle in Scotland and other sites around England. He asked about Danny, now over a year old. Viola had kept the boy’s name because she thought it would make Earl happy.

Dickie Abbott had always written “cheerful letters” to his grandmother. He hadn’t realized how much he loved her and his parents until he got to England. When he came home, he wrote, “he would like to work on the farm with Uncle Jerry.” But in his most recent letter, he was “sad, blue and all down in the dumps.”
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His grandmother wrote back expressing so many other grandparents’ hopes: “I pray our Dear Lord to be with you, protect and help you and bring you safely home. God bless and be with you, and each dear child in the service of our country. Dear God, be with dear little Dickie is the prayer of Grandmother and all the folks back home.”
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On May 24 Raymond Hoback wrote to his parents. He had been in the hospital with severe nosebleeds, a medical condition that ran in the family, and had consequently been offered a discharge but had refused it. Nothing was going to separate him from his brother and friends.
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John Schenk asked Ivylyn to send him a new billfold and a belt, and then added: “Only God, a lot of luck and a deep foxhole can help me now.”
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He hoped she would not be disappointed when she saw him: His hair had turned gray.
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That spring, Schenk had also had the opportunity to avoid the invasion— he had been offered a commission in a different outfit. “Ray Nance and John [Schenk] were buddies,” recalled Ivylyn Schenk. “They shared packages we sent from home—candy, good cookies, fruitcake, canned ham and chicken. Ray tried to get John to take the commission [as a second lieutenant]. But John thought it would mean he would take a lot longer to get home, and he wanted to stay with the Bedford men.”
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Leaving Company A would have felt tantamount to desertion.

On May 27, Sergeant Grant Yopp celebrated his twenty-first birthday. Two days later, Captain Taylor Fellers assured his family all was well and that as “soon as we take Hitler, we’ll be back.” He was looking forward to his thirtieth birthday on June 10.
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Back in Bedford, several wives shared news from the boys over coffee in Green’s drugstore. Some joked that Company A had an official letter writer who mimicked each man’s handwriting and repeated the same message. Many had read a poem their men had sent in letters as a jibe against the censors:

Can’t write a thing
The censor to blame
Just say I’m well
And sign my name
Can’t say where we’re going
Don’t know where we’ll land
Couldn’t inform you
If met by a band.
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In their letters from America to the men in Company A, the wives were just as careful as their men about what they wrote. The U.S. Government’s Office of War Information had warned citizens in the “interior zone” not to unsettle the men overseas. They should be as positive as possible. “Dear John” letters, announcing the end of a relationship or even marriage, could send men over the edge.

The news from Bedford was mixed. Several men had been prosecuted for black market activities. There was widespread concern about the drafting of many fathers in Bedford that March. But there were also signs that severe shortages might be coming to an end. On May 3, the Office of Price Administration in Washington ended meat rationing except for choice cuts of beef.

May is often the most beguiling month in Bedford. Evenings are scented with jasmine, the Peaks of Otter blaze with rhododendrons, the days are mild without too much humidity. Ivylyn Schenk knew spring and early summer was John’s favorite time, as with any keen gardener. He had planted white pines around his parents’ home before the war as a windbreak, and Ivylyn often wrote describing how the trees and other plants were flourishing. Despite a drought she and other “victory” gardeners were confident of eventually producing even more food than the year before.

President Roosevelt had urged Americans to cultivate plots wherever they could and by 1944 “practically every home with even a small plot of ground” in Bedford had a victory garden. In a report to the Commonwealth of Virginia Conservation Commission, Bedford native Mrs. George Parker noted that “experience has taught [townspeople] what to plant, how to cultivate it, and how best to save their ‘truck.’ ”
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While vegetable patches sprang up all over town, Bedford’s farmers had battled to stay solvent. By summer 1944, finding local men to plant and harvest crops was nearly impossible. The previous fall, German POWs had been trucked into the county to pick apples and other fruit crops. But the largest pool of “captive labor” came from the old CCC camp at the foot of the Peaks of Otter, where Earl Newcomb had worked in the thirties. In early 1944, the camp had started to house 153 conscientious objectors, more than half of them members of the Church of Brethren, Mennonites, or Quakers. Of over ten million American men drafted in World War II, approximately 43,000 became conscientious objectors, three times the total in World War I, but still a tiny minority. Six thousand were sent to prison but most ended up in work programs like the one at the CCC camp in Bedford.

News of the arrival of conscientious objectors had incensed many locals. There had been a paid advertisement denouncing these men in the
Bedford Bulletin
, and several vitriolic letters to the newspaper’s editor. Clippings had found their way to men based in England. Two Bedford soldiers, Lloyd Ayers and Jesse Jones, wrote from their base “somewhere in England:” “[We] hate to think we’re fighting for these fellows, who, able-bodied and perhaps in perfect condition, (except in mind) are shunning what a really true American must endure so that in years to come we can return home. It’s going to be a great day when it’s over and we can say ‘did my part.’ Don’t forget the yellow flag pointing toward the foot of good old Peaks of Otter.”
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Bedford native Rebecca Lockard, a perky eighteen-year-old, worked in a “five and dime” store in Bedford that was popular with many of the objectors. “They would come into the store and be seen elsewhere around town,” she recalled. “They weren’t thought of that highly, and you didn’t want to associate with them, but some women didn’t mind them being objectors. Men were scarce around here. There was a girl who worked as maid in town who even married one and had a child.”
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By May 1944, the Bedford boys were not the only absent sons. Over two thousand men from the town and surrounding Bedford County were also in service, roughly one in every fifteen inhabitants.
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Mrs. George Parker noted: “Gasoline scarce—not a drop to be had at times. Workers have doubled up, shared rides, walked when possible, and somehow reached their places of work. No industrial plants have been forced to close, though in many instances labor shortage is acute. Women are replacing men where possible.”
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Every week, there was news of another Bedford man’s death overseas. The
Bedford Bulletin
commented: “Those who have lost sons or husbands in this war inevitably resent comments that the casualties are only a fraction of what some extravagantly pessimistic people predicted they would be. In the homes that have been darkened by the death of a soldier, or have welcomed back the shattered remnants of youth, the burden of war’s tragedy is little lightened by the reassurance that it might have been worse.”
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By May 1944, gold stars signifying the death of a son were displayed in two dozen Bedford homes. By war’s end, there would be another hundred—so many that it “seemed as if every house had a star in its window.”
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Despite the death notices appearing in the
Bulletin
every few days, boys still volunteered, eager to serve. And by 1944, Bedford girls were also joining the women’s wings of the armed services in droves. On April 15, twenty-seven women were named on an incomplete list of locals who had joined up. “They would rally in front of the courthouse,” recalled Bettie Wilkes, “say their goodbyes, and off they would go in military buses. . . . Most had similar backgrounds—untraveled, unsophisticated, and certainly unprepared.”
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Mrs. George Parker also noted that the town’s morale was still high. Bond drives continued to be well supported, and collections at local churches exceeded all precedents. Whatever people could spare, they gave to the war effort. Parker proudly informed the state authorities that after many bond drives, Bedford “responds conscientiously to all government appeals—war bonds, scrap metals, waste paper, fats, etc.”
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News of Japan’s inhuman treatment of American prisoners had “infuriated Bedford people to white heat, and has helped to boost the Fourth War Loan Drive which was launched January 29 by the Lions Club in an auction sale of bonds which brought more than $50,000.”
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One local campaign, funded by several Bedford businesses, asked ominously: “How many of our boys from Bedford won’t come back? Nobody knows the exact number. Nobody. But the number who do come back—on their own two feet instead of in a flag-draped box—will be in exact proportion to the job we do here at home.”
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Several Bedford wives suspected their husbands were about to be involved in an imminent invasion of France. The radio and newspapers reported on the possibility every day. When not at factories, they spent evenings trying to stay busy, knitting, canning goods, and preparing care packages for their men—anything to keep them from worrying for an hour or two.

Each Tuesday, Bettie Wilkes joined other wives in the basement of the Bedford library to roll bandages for wounded soldiers. There was something of a competitive element to the work, with ambitious targets set. The wrapping was sometimes interrupted by air raid sirens, sending families to their basements and reminding them to pull blackout curtains over windows. A bell rang at 9 P.M. to warn children of the wartime curfew.

Many of the wives, reported Mrs. Parker, had returned to their “parental homes or doubled up for companionship, convenience, and conservation of fuel.”
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More than ever they relied on each other, helping haul wood to each others’ homes, sharing rides in horse-driven buggies, which had made a comeback because of gas rationing, caring for children while friends worked at Rubatex or Hampton Looms, pooling resources to send Bedford boys special care packages for their birthdays.

Like other wives, twenty-year-old Viola Parker tried to stress the positive in her letters, although life was increasingly hard without Earl, what with trying to get by and support Danny. By day, she worked on her parents’ farm, where she and Danny were living. Viola slept in her childhood bedroom, Danny in a small crib in an adjoining room. Every night that May, Viola drifted off to sleep with the low whisper of a radio close to her ear. After a few restless hours, she would wake up and lean closer. The dial was set to a station in Washington, D.C., that was usually first with breaking news.
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