The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (14 page)

Stevens listened carefully as an intelligence officer pointed to a “promenade” road that ran parallel to the beach and then sloped steeply towards Vierville sur Mer. Before the road left the beach at the D-1 draw, there was an old house just to the east. This would be the first objective for Stevens’s boat section. The briefing over, Stevens assembled his men and explained what lay ahead. “I wasn’t too keen to tell them what we were facing. We were really going to have to do something now all right. That was for sure.”
³⁷

Company B’s Bob Sales would land sixteen minutes after Company A. By now, he recognized many of the Bedford boys after eighteen months of drinking in some of the same pubs and tramping around moors and parade grounds. When Sales asked about the threat of harrowing machine gun fire, his company commander, Captain Ettore Zap-pacosta, replied: “Don’t you worry about that. The naval bombardment and air force will take care of all that.”
³⁸

“They also told us,” recalled Bob Slaughter of Company D, “that where we were landing, there was going to be twenty-two strong points, but only one or two of them would be manned. . . . Then we had to be dug in real well because there would be a counterattack afterwards that we had to be worried about. We would have to use the armor, and the German Panzers would try to drive us back into the sea.”
³⁹
But the counterattack would fail. Victory was not in doubt. Company A rifleman Murphy Scott recalled being told he would be in Paris in a week and then Company A would be shipped back to the states to train other units.
⁴⁰

Among America’s most senior generals, there was no such optimism. General Omar N. Bradley, commander of American forces on D-Day, recalled that “Overlord represented both [Hitler’s] greatest danger and his greatest opportunity. If the Overlord forces could be repulsed and trounced decisively on the beaches, Hitler knew it would be a very long time indeed before the Allies tried again—if ever. . . . The Third Reich might yet prevail.”
⁴¹

Bradley’s superior, General Eisenhower—overall Allied commander— was “seething with the gravity of the invasion,” according to a recent biographer, Carlo D’Este. “His health again deteriorated from a plethora of ailments. . . . As D-Day neared his smoking had increased to four packs a day.”
⁴²
At the end of April, V Corps commander General Gerow had written to Eisenhower outlining serious reservations about cooperation between the British navy and American assault troops and defensive obstacles on the beaches. Eisenhower rebuked Gerow, an old friend, for his skepticism. Gerow replied that he was not being “pessimistic” but simply “realistic.”
⁴³

Britain’s Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was also full of doubts, telling a senior Pentagon official, John J. McCloy, that he would have liked to have had “Turkey on our side, the Danube under threat as well as Norway cleaned up before we undertook [Overlord].”
⁴⁴
The British General Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, had faced the Germans in Normandy in 1940 before the British Expeditionary Force’s narrow escape at Dunkirk. Only hours before H-Hour he wrote in his diary that he was “very uneasy about the whole operation. At the best it will fall so very very far short of the expectation of the bulk of the people, namely all those who know nothing about its difficulties. At the worst it may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war!”
⁴⁵
Brooke was almost right.

It was essential that the 29th Division and other invading Allied armies have complete confidence in Overlord even if some of its architects did not. And so in late May every general of standing with the invasion forces appeared at various “sausages” to rally the troops. “In the final days before we embarked,” recalled Bradley, “I made a point of visiting as many American units as I could, both to allay the growing rumors that we would suffer heavy casualties and to give the men some final words of encouragement.”
⁴⁶

On May 30, Bradley visited the D-1 containment camp holding the 29th Division’s 116th Infantry. Some 3,500 men stood around a small wooden platform on a windswept hillside. Bradley spoke slowly into a single microphone. “You should consider yourselves lucky,” he concluded. “You are going to have ringside seats for the greatest show on earth.”
⁴⁷

Private Hal Baumgarten stood listening to the final pep talk. “Our helmets shined with oil. Our bayonets gleamed. The 29th Division band played. I had had my head shaved. We had been given a lot of new equipment, including new assault jackets for D-Day. I didn’t wear mine. My best buddy told me not to—‘don’t wear it Hal, it’s going to drown you.’”
⁴⁸

When Roy Stevens tried on his assault jacket, he found it was too loose around his shoulders so he had it altered for a closer fit—a decision he would soon bitterly regret. Like every other Bedford boy, Stevens was also issued a $10,000 life insurance policy. Frank Draper Jr. made his out to his mother even though back home he had a fiancee, Nellie McKinney, whom he wished he had married before leaving for England. Finally, men checked their weapons and kit for the last time. Company A Private Thomas Valance recalled lining up to sharpen his bayonet on a large whetstone. “We were also issued some French francs, script it was called at the time,” he said. “There was no explanation exactly where we were going to spend it.”
⁴⁹

Colonel Canham ordered that a message be read to all the men before they left the containment camp: “There is one certain way to get the enemy out of action and that is to kill him. War is not child’s play and requires hatred of the enemy. At this time we don’t have it. I hope you will get it when you see your friends wounded and killed. Learn to take care of yourself from the start. Remember the Hun is a crafty, intelligent fighter and will not have any mercy on you. Don’t have it on him. . . . To each one of you Happy Landing and come off those craft fighting like hell.”
⁵⁰

At a meeting of his staff officers, a cautious Brigadier General Norman Cota warned: “This is different from any of the other exercises that you’ve had so far. . . . The air and naval bombardment and the artillery support are reassuring. But you’re going to find confusion. The landing craft aren’t going in on schedule and people are going to be landed in the wrong place. Some won’t be landed at all. The enemy will try, and will have some success, in preventing our gaining a lodgement. But we must improvise, carry on, not lose our heads.”
⁵¹

On June 2, Company A was ordered to break camp the following morning. To their dismay, the Bedford boys learned that Captain Fellers was lying in a cot on the second floor of Doulish, the ancestral home converted for military use at the southwest corner of their “sausage.” He had a bad sinus infection and would not be fit to lead them on D-Day. Morale plunged. That night, Fellers had trouble sleeping. Sweating profusely, with a bright rash on his face from the infection, he knew that in a matter of hours Master Sergeant Wilkes would order thirty-four of Bedford’s sons to fall in and then board trucks bound for a channel port.

At some point in the night, Fellers struggled to his feet. A medical officer tried to get him to go to a military hospital. Instead, Fellers discharged himself and returned to his company. “He’d been with those men a long time and trained with them,” explained his sister, Bertie. “He wanted to see it all the way through.”
⁵²
Grant Yopp was also laid up in the sick bay. He too got to his feet and returned to Company A against the advice of medical personnel. According to Yopp’s sister: “[Grant] had some kind of respiratory illness. When he heard about the boys leaving, he went AWOL and rejoined his buddies. I’ve always thought: ‘Oh, gosh, why did he do that?’ He just wanted to be with his buddies.”
⁵³

Company A’s mess sergeant Earl Newcomb and two of his cooks, Bedford boys James Crouch and Cedric Broughman, had been frantically busy for several hours, checking that all the equipment and supplies needed to feed Company A were in order. Fellers suddenly appeared in the mess. Newcomb was shocked by his appearance: “He looked so sick—he should not have gone.”
⁵⁴
As Newcomb prepared Company A’s final meal on dry land, he overheard Fellers confide in a fellow officer: “I want to go in [with the Bedford men]. If I don’t and something happens to those boys, I’ll never be able to go back to Bedford again.”
⁵⁵

Roy Stevens recalled seeing Fellers appear before the men early that morning: “It really lifted our spirits. We had our leader back again.”
⁵⁶
Fellers said, “I’ve trained you. I’ll die with you too if it comes to that.”
⁵⁷

Company A loaded into trucks and then joined a huge convoy trundling south towards the sea. “Hedges that lined the narrow, winding roads were green and fragrant,” reported the
Baltimore News-Post
. “Gorse splotched the broad and rolling moors with gold. From the tops of hills, irregular patches of farms spread in kin-folk shades of brown and green.”
⁵⁸

In towns and villages, crowds soon formed, lining the road as the drab olive gray trucks sped along with MPs directing traffic at every junction. Children were held up for soldiers to kiss when the trucks dawdled, waiting to move closer to the coast. Every few miles, the men gaped at huge stockpiles of weapons, trucks, explosives, and endless rows of jeeps and artillery. They were part of an invasion force so vast it had filled most of southern England with troops and supplies. Thirty-nine divisions were leaving the crowded “sausages.” Over 175,000 men would be involved with Overlord on D-Day. Standing by were 11,000 planes other than strategic bombers, and 6,939 boats were assembled along the coast—the greatest invasion armada in history.
⁵⁹

Company A finally arrived in Weymouth and formed up on the dockside. Again, Colonel Canham prowled the wharves, barking orders.

Company A marched towards its troopship, the
Empire Javelin
.

“Are you ready, men?” asked General Gerhardt, as he stood watching on the dockside.

“Yes, sir, general!” replied Bedford Hoback. “We’re sure ready.”
⁶⁰

C
OMPANY A FILED UP THE
gangway of the HMS
Empire
Javelin
. From the main deck, British Sub-Lieutenant Jimmy Green watched as the Bedford boys and their fellow Stonewallers of the 116th Infantry came aboard. Green was in command of the flotilla of six landing craft that would deposit Company A in Normandy in a matter of hours.
¹
Company A was scheduled to land at 6:30 A.M.—“H-Hour.” Green and other British naval officers had already dubbed Company A “the Suicide Wave”—the men under Fellers looked so young and naïve, somehow sacrificial. “Actually, we also referred to ourselves as the suicide wave,” recalled Green, “and to be honest we were all quite proud of the label.”
²

Green had already met Captain Fellers during maneuvers near Slap-ton Sands. Their conversations had been brief and mostly limited to logistics and landing procedures. As the
Empire Javelin
now prepared to leave harbor on June 4, Green and Fellers got to know each other better. “It was Fellers’s first action. He told me his troops were National Guard, and he was worried how they would react under fire. He asked if I could put them ashore as quickly as possible when we got near the beach, and then fire over their heads to give them some encouragement. He said they’d need all the help they could get to get them moving forward.”
³

Green was surprised that Fellers would ask him to place covering fire above his men. It betrayed a lack of confidence. During exercises, Fellers had been composed and friendly, if a little too serious for the Brits. “He regarded us navy chaps as rather lighthearted in our approach. Although we were serious and professional, we talked about Wrens and [soccer] matches rather than what we were going to do.” For some reason, Fellers had changed since they had last met in April. In Green’s eyes, Fellers now seemed very reserved and enormously burdened. It was as if he “had a premonition of doom.”
⁴

As the Bedford boys settled into their berths aboard the
Empire
Javelin
, at Allied Headquarters General Eisenhower faced the most momentous choice of his life. “Low clouds, high winds, and formidable wave action were predicted to make landing a most hazardous affair,” he wrote later. “The meteorologists said that air support would be impossible, naval gunfire would be inefficient, and even the handling of small boats would be rendered difficult.”
⁵

Should Eisenhower order a postponement or proceed as planned? General Montgomery, who would command all land forces in Normandy, said the invasion should go ahead. Eisenhower deliberated and then decided it would have to be postponed one day, until June 6. The question now was whether the largest armada ever assembled could reform and land as planned within twenty-four hours? Many ships were already in the Irish Sea, where gale forces had caused considerable problems and confusion. All Eisenhower could do was hope and pray that his staff would be able to reorganize in time.
⁶

That afternoon, Company A learned of Eisenhower’s decision. “Word came that the invasion had been changed from June 5,” recalled Captain Robert Walker of the 116th’s regimental headquarters staff. “We also heard, along with every kind of rumor imaginable, that in the U.S. it had already been broadcast that the invasion had begun. There was surprisingly little reaction among the troops, as if everyone was already numb to the situation. Or maybe it was just because they were good soldiers.”
⁷

The eternal wait resumed. Roy Stevens tried to stay busy, sharpening his bayonet and dagger and visiting the
Javelin
’s canteen. He didn’t like the British food aboard—too much fish. So he bought plate after plate of cookies. He shared some with his equally nervous brother and a jittery Earl Parker. A young man who had been an acrobat distracted them by walking down steps on his hands. “We knew somebody was going to die,” recalled Stevens, “and it wasn’t going to be long.”
⁸

At 9:30 P.M., RAF Group Captain James Stagg, chief meteorological officer for Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, stood just inside the entrance to the library at SHAEF headquarters, Southwick House, near Portsmouth, England. Before him, the leaders and architects of Overlord settled into couches and armchairs.

“Gentlemen,” Stagg said, “some rapid and unexpected developments have occurred over the North Atlantic. In particular a vigorous cold front . . . is approaching Portsmouth now and will pass through all channel areas tonight or early tomorrow. . . . There will be a brief period of improved weather from Monday afternoon. For most of the time the sky will then be not more than half covered with cloud and its base should not often be below two thousand to three thousand feet. Winds will decrease substantially from what they are now. These conditions will last over Monday night and into Tuesday.”

Stagg answered several questions concerning how long the window of relatively good weather would last and whether he could predict conditions reliably beyond the next three to four days.

Air Chief Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory looked grave. “With the cloud conditions Stagg has given us,” he said, “there’s certain to be difficulty getting markers down accurately, and the bombing will therefore suffer.”

Eisenhower’s deputy, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, also looked anxious. Air power, he believed, would win the war and make all the difference on D-Day. He and Mallory had fought hard to secure enough bombers from RAF Bomber Command and the United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe. It was only after their boss, Eisenhower, had threatened to resign that they had been given the requisite planes that April.

Tedder agreed with Leigh-Mallory: “Yes, the operations of the heavy and medium bombers will probably be a bit chancy.”

Eisenhower looked over at General Montgomery.

“Do you see any reason why we should not go on Tuesday?” he asked.

“No,” replied Montgomery without hesitation. “I would say go!”
⁹

Late into the night the question of whether to launch Overlord or not was debated. Just about 4:15 A.M. on June 5, Eisenhower again paced back and forth slowly at another meeting of Overlord’s top generals in the library at Southwick House. “His head was slightly sunk on his chest, his hands clasped behind his back,” recalled Major General Kenneth Strong. “From time to time he stopped in his stride, turned his head quickly and jerkily in the direction of those present and fired a rapid question at him . . . then resumed his walk.”
¹⁰

Montgomery looked impatient as Eisenhower walked over to a sofa and then sat down for five minutes, still weighing whether or not to launch the invasion. At 5 A.M. Eisenhower finally said: “OK, we’ll go.”
¹¹

By mid-afternoon on the 5th, the
Empire Javelin
was heading out to sea. Men gathered nervously on the ship’s main deck to watch the vast armada dotting the horizon. Typically, to ease the tension, Master Sergeant John Wilkes joked that every man in Company A would get the Bronze Star after landing in France.
¹²
Hal Baumgarten made his way to the bow. On the back of his field jacket he had painted a large Star of David using his standard issue “Eversharp” blue ink pen. He’d etched “The Bronx, New York” around it. At the bow, Baumgarten struck up a conversation with Morris Saxtein, a balding, overweight forty-five-year-old fellow Jew from New York who had just joined the headquarters staff for Company A.

“Why are you here?” asked Baumgarten.

Saxtein puffed on a pipe.

“All I want is one German . . . You, Hal, will be a hero tomorrow morning—whether you like it or not.”
¹³

Baumgarten would never see Saxtein again.

Earl Parker stood at the
Empire Javelin
’s rail with the Stevens twins. “It was a solemn thing,” recalled Roy Stevens. “We sat around and talked about what we would do when we got back home.”
¹⁴
Suddenly, Parker pulled out a picture of his sixteen-month-old daughter, Danny. “If I could just see her once,” Parker said, “I wouldn’t mind dying.”
¹⁵

It was a bright evening with dusk beginning well past 10 P.M. Groups of officers huddled, cracking Mark Twain jokes about the weather, gossiping, signing each other’s 100-franc notes, trying to control their fear. But it showed in many of their eyes. They were as afraid of death as they were of not being equal to facing it.

As the
Empire Javelin
and hundred of other ships crossed the English Channel, General Eisenhower visited Newbury airfield, a launch area for the 101st Airborne, the “Screaming Eagles,” who would be the first American paratroops to land behind enemy lines in France, shortly after midnight. Eisenhower was not expected. Taking his time, he wandered among the young men, their faces blacked up, hair shorn in Mohican haircuts, chutes, and packs neatly stacked at their sides. He asked several where they came from. Texans, Missourians, Californians, and many others cheered as they heard their home state named.

After wishing the men good luck, Eisenhower stood and watched them board gliders and leave Newbury on their way to the blackness of occupied France. There were tears in his eyes. In his wallet was a draft of a press release in case things went terribly wrong:

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.
¹⁶

Meanwhile, Captain Fellers visited the
Javelin
’s operations room several times to consult maps etched with red and blue lines and to examine photographs of Omaha Beach. When he and other officers returned to the deck, they could not help but notice that the evening sky was clouding over. The wind was rising.

At 11 P.M., darkness enveloped the
Empire Javelin
. A gale was now blowing. Every officer now had the same concern as their generals—bad weather could destroy the invasion just as it had destroyed the Spanish Armada. A strict blackout was imposed and smoking banned on deck for fear that even a lighted stub might alert German E-boats and the disaster at Slapton Sands would be repeated.

Below decks, the 116th Infantry attended religious services. John Barnes went to what he thought would be his last mass. “I was deeply conscious that my parents’ (especially my mother’s) great prayer was that [their] son would grow up to become a priest. When I graduated from high school, I had to tell her that I didn’t think I was cut out to follow religious life. It was a great disappointment to her. As I prayed that night, I thought I would make a bargain with God. My life spared tomorrow, and I’d become a priest. Then I thought that was a bad deal, and especially a bad bargain, either for Him or me, so I said I’d take my chances.”
¹⁷

The crossing got rougher as the night wore on. Many men became terribly seasick. It is thought that John Schenk lay groaning in his bunk, clutching a sick-bag, courtesy of the British navy, when he wasn’t up on deck vomiting over the ship’s rail with dozens who had also taken their standard issue seasickness pills. British sailors working the decks briskly reminded the green-gilled Yanks to puke “to leeward, mate—leeward!”

Hal Baumgarten was also feeling under the weather as he talked with Company A’s Private Thomas Mullins, a medic from Worcester, Massa-chussets. Mullen gave him some “APCs”—Aspirin Phenacidin Caffeine— not realizing the aspirin would make Baumgarten bleed more profusely if wounded. Mullins was one of two medics who would go in with Company A’s headquarters boat led by Lieutenant Nance. The other was Cecil Breeden, a soft-spoken and unflappable man from Iowa who called Colorado home.
¹⁸
During training, Master Sergeant John Wilkes had pointed at Mullins and Breeden and then told the rest of Company A: “Be nice to them! You may need them one day.”
¹⁹

At 4 A.M., the Bedford boys stood on deck ready to climb into the British LCAs that hung over the sides of the
Empire Javelin
suspended from davits. For a few moments, they stood in silence. It seemed that whatever each man was thinking formed part of some communal prayer. The silence was broken as an officer read Eisenhower’s final words of encouragement over the J
avelin
’s public address system:

Soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave allies and brothers in arms on the other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
²⁰

Company A went to its boat stations. Groups of thirty men were assigned to six boats. An additional seventeen men, including Lieutenant Ray Nance, went to a seventh boat that would land nineteen minutes after the others with vital communications equipment. Boats with even numbers would go in to the right of the odd ones. Captain Fellers thanked his men for their hard work during training and asked them to be careful. “This is it,” he added. “This is the real thing.”
²¹