The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (20 page)

As Baumgarten and his group moved forward, an MG-42 opened up, hitting every man. “I was shot through my left lip and lost part of my right upper jaw, teeth and gums.” Nearby, one of the men shouted: “Help me, Jesus!” The others moaned in pain. Baumgarten drifted into a “hallucinatory dream state”:

I pictured a box of goodies from my mother that I was opening back in Camp D-1. The homemade cookies, cake, and salami were shared with my Company A buddies. They were cooking the green mold covered salami (result of the long shipping time from the States), stuck on their bayonets over an open fire.
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Back on Dog Beach, Thomas Valance—one of the few survivors from Master Sergeant John Wilkes’s boat—watched darkness fall around 11 P.M. He had been placed on a stretcher in a clearing surrounded by barbed wire. Sometime after dark, litter-bearers moved him onto a LST loaded with wounded and emergency medical equipment. He was headed back to England. After three months in various hospitals, he would return to Normandy and then fight on through Germany before going back to America in December 1945.

“I’ve wondered over the years about one thing,” Valance wrote on Veteran’s Day 1987, “and that is why we, in A Company of the 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry, 29th Division, were chosen to be the American equivalent of stormtroopers. Was it because we had such potential? We had no combat [experience], and the other troops that were around and with us in the invasion, such as the 1st Division, were highly trained. Or was it simply because we were considered expendable?”
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Finally, the longest day drew to a close. There had been an estimated 2,500 casualties on Omaha, and less than a tenth of that number on Utah, the other American beach. Total casualties—dead and wounded—for the entire Allied invasion forces approached 10,000, a loss of 10 percent given that just over 100,000 men were now in Normandy, and far less than the 25 percent that Allied generals had predicted for infantrymen.
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All along the bluffs and hedgerows that had cost so many lives, the 116th Infantry dug in for the night. Most men had not slept in well over two days. Many barely had the strength to scoop out shallow foxholes. “We started to dig a foxhole,” recalled one private, “but the ground was rock hard and we were both totally exhausted by the time the hole was about three inches deep. Finally, standing there in the dark, aware that it was useless to continue, my sergeant said, ‘Fuck it. Let’s just get down and get some rest.’ And so, D-Day came to an end with both of us sitting back to back in the shallow trench throughout the night.”
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Sometime near midnight, Hal Baumgarten awoke on the road above Omaha’s bluffs and saw German fighter planes above. All the men in his group lay dead from their wounds. Baumgarten felt as if he was dying. There was little pain—just a cold clamminess, and pins and needles all over. To fend off the agony from four wounds received in twenty hours, he had continually injected himself with morphine. To prevent dehydration, he drank from his dead buddies’ canteens.

Company D’s Bob Slaughter saw the same belated attack by the Luft-waffe. “An enemy ME-109 fighter plane flew over the entire Allied fleet, from right to left above the barrage balloons. Every ship in the English Channel opened fire on that single airplane, illuminating the sky with millions of tracer bullets. The heroic Luftwaffe pilot defied all of them—not even taking evasive action. I wondered how he ever got through that curtain of fire.”
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Company B’s Bob Sales and several exhausted Virginians settled down to snatch desperately needed sleep. “It was very cold,” recalled Sales. “I never dreamed it could be so cold in France in June. So I traded a bunch of K rations with an old woman for a blanket and slept with my gun right beside me, back to back with another guy. I woke up suddenly and I thought it was Bob Slaughter poking me awake but he wasn’t moving. It was the old French woman trying to steal the blanket back. I pointed my gun at her and she ran off.”
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Around 3 A.M. two medics lifted Hal Baumgarten into an ambulance. His uniform was dripping with the blood of his fellow Stonewallers, men who “gave above and beyond, and [would] never be cited for their bravery.”
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The ambulance took Baumgarten down to Dog Beach where he was placed on a stretcher besides other wounded.

Incredibly, the battle was still not over for Baumgarten and the men around him. “While I was laying on the beach on a stretcher, around 10 A.M. on June 7th, a sniper shot one of the aid men right through his red cross. Then he shot me in the right knee and started picking off all the wounded next to me. The next shot would have gone through my head. But the destroyer
McCook
offshore blasted away the sniper before he got to kill me.”
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Baumgarten’s longest day was finally over. For the few who had survived unscathed, the nightmare of Normandy had only just begun.

“We were poor but we didn’t know it.” The Powers family in 1928; oldest brother Clyde stands to the left of Billy and above Jack. To sister Eloise’s right is Archie Russell. Clyde, Billy, and Jack would all experience combat. One would be killed on D-Day; one would endure a brutal POW camp; and the other would be severely shell-shocked.
Eloise Rogers.

“We were so young!” Left to right: Billy Parker, Pride Wingfield, and Earl Parker at Wingfield’s childhood home, where he lives to this day. Earl Parker would be killed on D-Day. Wingfield transferred to the Army Air Force in 1943 and was at home in Bedford on D-Day.
Rebecca and
Pride Wingfield.

“Who said eat?” The Schenks run to supper outside their home in Bedford. John Schenk is to the far right beside his young bride Ivylyn.
Ivylyn Hardy.

The wrong side of the tracks. Frank Draper Jr.’s childhood home was only yards from the Norfolk and Western railway line in Bedford. Draper collected coal from passing trains to keep his family warm during the Depression.
Warren Draper.

The Bedford Fireman’s Band, 1940. Sixteen-year-old clarinet player Eloise Powers— sister of Company A brothers Clyde and Jack Powers—stands to the left of the band leader at center. The band played when the Bedford boys were mobilized and left Bedford in February 1941.
Eloise Rogers.

“A time to be envied in most respects, safe and carefree.” Master Sergeant John Wilkes with his young bride Bettie near a waterfall in Bedford County, summer 1941.
Bettie Wilkes Hooper.

Harold Edward Wilkes, one of the fortunate few to return home.
Eloise
Rogers.

Frank Draper Jr., superb athlete and even better soldier.
Warren Draper.