The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (32 page)

By 1948, reformed Company A had 124 men, nearly double its prewar strength. There was no chance of this generation’s meeting its predecessor’s fate. National Guard units would in future be spread among different divisions to prevent a similar catastrophe.

Putting the war behind them was as hard for Bedford’s widows. But some were fortunate enough to find love again. At a Christmas celebration in 1945, Ivylyn Schenk met a local farmer, Ralph H. Hardy, who had almost joined Company A before the war. Taylor Fellers had tried to recruit Hardy, but he had “been unable to commit”
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because he had to look after his sick mother and feed and educate nine of his siblings after his father’s death.

“After a wonderful Christmas meal,” recalled Ivylyn, “Ralph came upstairs to meet my mother. We had a good game of carom—a board game derived from pool. It was not long until we started dating.” A few months later, Hardy proposed to Ivylyn. She warned him that she would never stop loving John. “I know that,” he replied promptly. “But I want to make a place for myself.”
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In July 1946, Ivylyn and Hardy were married. She still cherishes her memories of John and has kept all their correspondence, many photographs, and several of his personal belongings which she received a few months after he died. She chose to leave his body in the American graveyard above Omaha Beach with his friends.

After the war, Bettie Wilkes and Viola Parker attended a night class together in Lynchburg, home of Company B, hoping to qualify as beauticians. In early 1946, Bettie met Master Sergeant Lewis Hooper on a train from Washington to Bedford. Hooper was returning from fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. “I knew of him because his aunt was a friend of mine,” recalled Bettie. “We got to talking. He was just glad to be coming home. The next week, he called me. After the war, no one had any cars, and he said he was going to Roanoke to try to find one. If he found one, could he take me out to dinner?”
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They were married in 1948. By then, Bettie had found work as a beautician. When people brought up the war, Bettie would sometimes criticize Eisenhower for his decision to proceed with the invasion on June 6. The bad weather and cloud cover that day meant Omaha Beach was not bombed. If it had been, perhaps John would have found cover in a crater, perhaps he would have survived, perhaps so many other Bedford boys would have come home.

Frank Draper Jr.’s father was much more outspoken, telling co-workers at Hampton Looms one day that he wanted to “blow Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brains out.”
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Grant Yopp’s sister, Anna Mae Stewart, was also “mad at the world.” “Where were those bombers?” she asked herself. “Why didn’t they get those Germans?” Today, she still questions why the invasion went ahead in such atrocious weather: “I say to this day that [Eisenhower] made a bad decision. Why he did I don’t know . . . I still dream about my brother. I still dream about him coming home.”
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Viola Parker, betrothed at nineteen, a mother at twenty, a widow at just twenty-one, also remarried in 1948. She had met and fallen in love with McHenry Nance, a local banker, fifteen years her senior. Perhaps she felt more comfortable with an older man given that D-Day had, as she put it, “taken away [her] youth.”
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As with other widows, Viola struggled to find out how her first husband had actually died, if in fact he had. At first, none of the Bedford boys would tell her much. All she had to go on was the missing-in-action telegram. Eventually, she visited Ray Nance. “I told Ray that he’d better tell me something,” Viola recalled. “I told him I didn’t believe Earl was dead, and he said I’d better believe it.”
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Apparently, Earl had been hit by a mortar shell. His body had then been washed out into the English Channel, never to be found. He had died instantly without pain. That was a comfort. A far greater one was the love of her daughter: Earl had left her with the greatest of parting gifts. “I was so lucky to have my little girl,” said Viola. “She was an inspiration to go out and do something instead of sitting around crying all day.”
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A
FTER A STINT AT FARMING
, Ray Nance became a mail carrier. His route each morning took him past several of the Bedford boys’ homes. One belonged to Martha Jane Stevens, mother of the Stevens twins. Many mornings, she would be there waiting at the front gate, ready to ask Nance for news about Ray, hoping he had brought a letter or telegram to finally end her questions. “Mrs. Stevens came out each morning. She’d ask me what happened over there, where was her Ray?”
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Nance would often see Earl Parker’s parents when he delivered mail to their box. They had aged considerably since D-Day, having lost another son, Joseph, in Normandy. A third son, Billy, survived almost a year in a brutal German prisoner of war camp and had arrived home on July 11, 1945, unaware of his brothers’ deaths.
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Mr. Parker had to break the news.
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Not content with bringing back Company A, Nance decided that such parents should have a focus for their grief, a permanent monument to their sons. Nance mentioned the idea to a local newspaper publisher, Kenneth Crouch of the
Bedford Democrat
. Crouch began to lobby state and town officials.
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Members of the town’s Parker-Hoback post of the 29th Division also pushed hard to get a monument built. The post was named after the two pairs of brothers who died in Normandy. Clyde Powers coordinated fundraising. Pride Wingfield was responsible for getting a memorial stone to Bedford. Allen Huddleston prepared a suitable inscription.
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Ten years after D-Day, Bedford got a monument to its lost sons. Over 4,000 people—the largest crowd ever to assemble in Bedford— squeezed into roped-off streets facing the west lawn of the Bedford courthouse. The
Bedford Bulletin
reported that “older residents of Bedford said they could recall no gathering in Bedford that was larger or more deeply moved by what they heard and saw.”
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On June 6, 1954, before a tearful crowd, Taylor Fellers’s mother unveiled the memorial of polished granite, carved from the very cave near Vierville sur Mer that served as the first command post of Major General Charles H. Gerhardt. It seemed to glimmer in the sunshine.

Among the onlookers was thirty-year-old Captain Edward Gearing of Silver Spring, Maryland, who had kept his men together in the water on D-Day. “Company A was different from other organizations,” he would later write. “It was made up of ‘home town’ folks—fathers, cousins etc. Under these circumstances it is more difficult to see these men die and as difficult to return to the same community and resume the same way of life.”
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Bedford survivors from Company A—Ray Nance, Earl Newcomb, Tony Marsico, Anthony Thurman, Roy Stevens, Clyde Powers, Allen Huddleston, and Dickie Overstreet—were also present. Among the families were Lucille Hoback and her parents and Earl Parker’s mother, Mrs. Joe E. Parker.

Earl Parker’s daughter, eleven-year-old Danny, stood besides her mother, Viola, and her new husband. “I was already aware of what had happened in France because I had unveiled another monument to the boys at Bedford High School,” recalled Danny. “I still have a picture of me standing near my grandmother that day [in 1954]. I was wearing my Girl Scout uniform.”
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The only other fatherless child was Earl Parker’s nephew, Peter Royce. He was two when his father—Joseph Parker, Danny’s uncle—had left for Europe.

The Bedford Fireman’s Band played the French and American national anthems, “La Marsellaise” and finally “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Admiral André Jubelin, naval attaché at the French Embassy in Washington, then spoke in appreciation of Bedford’s sacrifice. “This rock, upon which are inscribed all the names of these young heroes, will stand out for generations to come as a memorial of their sacrifice, and as a token of gratitude from France to the people of Bedford.”
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Then General Charles Gerhardt walked to a rostrum set up on the courthouse steps. It was his birthday. That morning, he had driven down from Baltimore, through the heart of Virginia, and had thought about the generations of men from America’s first colony who had fought and died for what they believed was right. “Remember,” Gerhardt told the bereaved mothers of Bedford, “your sons were with friends and that means a great deal . . . no finer tribute to a commander can be made than to be asked to come to such a ceremony as this.”
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The Bedford boys had been engaged in a great crusade, an ultimately glorious battle to preserve the very foundations of Western civilization, of Christendom itself. D-Day had been the “Day of Pentecost” in the lives of Bedford’s sons.

“The rushing mighty wind, the tongues of fire, the coming of the Spirit,” said Gerhardt, “that great and mighty wind . . . those tongues of flame . . . those of us who were there certainly remember that phase of it. The Spirit was there, too, the spirit of the men of the 29th as typified by A Company. The spirit of those boys was an inspiration for those who went in later. It is the spirit that counts, ten to one, over material in such a contest.”
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Gerhardt went on to explain why a bunch of farm boys from Bedford, who had joined the National Guard to put food on the table, had been selected for the most crucial assault of World War II:

Why was the 116th picked for that particular job? Because they showed the characteristics necessary to assure success on that particular day. Who were these boys? The record of the 29th Division goes back to 1620, through the regimental history of Virginia troops, and their record has been unequalled. Those boys were the descendants of the men who fought with Jackson and Lee and Stuart.
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Gerhardt also spoke about the taking of the Vierville sur Mer D-1 draw: “The best exit of Omaha Beach [that had] a gun position which had to be taken only by individuals. The quarry from which this stone came was about 200 yards from that gun. It was our first command post on the night of D-Day.” Gerhardt ended with a prayer that “A Company, as it now stands, will not be asked to face what A Company of ten years ago faced and conquered.”
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Three days before the dedication, Clyde Powers had placed an urn beneath the memorial. It contained a SHAEF shoulder patch with a drawing of the patch autographed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Dr. Editha von Rundstedt, daughter-in-law of the late Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, German commander-in-chief in France during the 1944 invasion, had sent her father’s field marshal sticks.
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That week, many locals had expected to open
Life
magazine and read a special commemorative story about Bedford. But sadly the piece was spiked. Space was needed to honor Robert Capa, who had died in Vietnam. On D-Day, Capa had been the only photographer to cover the first wave assault on Omaha Beach.

Many Bedford veterans had hoped that one officer above all others would be at the ceremony: Brigadier General Norman Cota, who had done so much to achieve Company A’s initial objective on D-Day. But “Dutch” was too ill to make it. On July 10, he wrote Kenneth Crouch to express his regret at not being able to attend. “My health is coming along just fine,” he added, “am myself once again, and think I might possibly be able to cross Omaha Beach again if I had to, but certainly would not choose to do so. . . . Roll On.”
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Cota’s fellow officer Colonel Canham was also unable to attend. Since D-Day, he had been promoted to major general and he was now one of the most decorated officers fighting in the Korean War. Canham did, however, send a message to the Parker-Hoback Post in time for the dedication: “The 116th Infantry was composed of the finest group of men that I have encountered and a unit that had no peers as fighters. I deeply regret that I cannot be present to pay homage to our departed comrades.”
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The crowds dispersed, the uniforms were mothballed, and the walls of silence went up again. The survivors from D-Day never spoke about their experiences publicly, and very rarely with each other. It was too painful. Some mothers would return each Memorial Day to the courthouse and quietly weep but there were no more public commemorations. It was as if the unveiling of the stone had closed the curtain on a tragic drama. D-Day, it seemed, was finally over, assigned to history, buried like the urn beneath the memorial.

In private, of course, Bedford continued to grieve and commemorate. As relatives and widows got older, many tried to rationalize their loss— it was part of a heroic sacrifice that had marked the beginning of the end for Hitler, and America’s finest hour. But mostly those left behind still tried to overcome grief that seemed for some to get greater as their time left grew shorter.

Viola Parker told Danny as much as she could about Earl as she grew up, hoping she would always be able to cherish an image of the father she had never even touched: “[Earl] had a great sense of humor. That’s what I tried to tell her, the funny things, anything pleasant instead of dwelling on the sadness. You don’t get over it. You learn to live with the memories and thank goodness there are some good ones.”
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Today, Danny remembers her mother describing Earl as “the great love of her life. . . . She also told me he didn’t set out to be a hero. None of those boys did. They had joined the National Guard to make extra money.”
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Time did not assuage Viola’s heartbreak. As the years passed, often when she had drunk a little too much, the old ghosts would return. She found Earl’s letters too upsetting to read. They took her back to that day when her most precious dreams had been destroyed. So she put a match to the old V-grams and sepia-toned envelopes. “One night, I burned all his letters in the fireplace,” she explained. “My brother said if I didn’t stop reading those letters, I’d go plum crazy.”
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In 1975, Frank Draper Sr. shot himself to death. “It wasn’t over Frank’s death like some say,” insists Verona Lipford, Frank’s sister. “My Daddy was sick, real sick for twenty years with emphysema. My Momma cared for him day and night—he wouldn’t let anybody else do it. Finally, he told the doctor he couldn’t take it no more. He was going to take his life. And he did. Three weeks later, my husband died.”
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In 1988, Company A survivors decided to return to Normandy to pay their respects before they became too infirm to walk the sands they had once stormed. They also wanted to witness the unveiling of a National Guard Memorial at the base of the Vierville draw.

Bettie Wilkes Hooper was one of several widows who were to visit Normandy for the first time. Since John’s body had been brought back from Normandy in 1947, she had wondered about his last moments. It still tormented her to think that he had died alone and in great pain. Bettie joined a party of 29th Division veterans and their families for the trip to Normandy. At Dulles airport in Washington, as Bettie was about to board her plane to France, two gentlemen noticed she was wearing a badge with the 29th Division insignia. Bettie was laden down with luggage. One of the men, a man of medium height and build with a friendly face, asked if he could take some of her bags.

Where was she from?

Bedford.

The old man said he had known many men from Bedford during the war.

“Did you happen to know Master Sergeant Wilkes?” asked Bettie.

“Did we know Sergeant Wilkes!” replied Cecil Breeden.

“Were you in his company?”

“I sure was. He drilled the hell out of us, but he also made us men.

” A few days later, Bettie stepped off a tour bus parked near Omaha Beach. Breeden was waiting for her.

“I’ll take you down, if you want to go, to where I found John.”

Breeden walked with Bettie across the promenade road above the beach. There was no longer a sea wall. The skies were overcast and out in the channel a gale was blowing, just like on D-Day. Pebbles crunched under foot and then they were on the sand, a few yards from the water.

“When I got to your husband,” said Breeden, “there wasn’t a damn thing I could do. He had gotten it right between the eyes. You don’t have to worry. He never knew what hit him. He never suffered.”
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Bettie stood and stared at the beach, the bluffs, and the other veterans and their families milling around. At last she knew. John had died fighting. He’d almost made it across the beach. There had been no pain. Before Cecil Breeden died of heart failure in 1993, he wrote to Bettie explaining that he had told her that day about John because he hoped she would be able to sleep better at night. She did.

It was not until 1994 that Bedford’s lost sons came to massive public attention, during the national celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Normandy landings.
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In Bedford, television cameras invaded homes and reporters from around the world kept phones ringing late into the night. Ray Nance gave several interviews, camera lights shining in his pale blue eyes, but then the survivor’s guilt and repressed trauma became too much. He stopped talking to the press and stayed at home, his memories suddenly as vivid as when he’d come home from Omaha Beach fifty years before.

Roy Stevens was one of many who returned to Omaha Beach for the official fiftieth anniversary commemoration. He still had dreams about his lost twin—good dreams, set in a sunny Bedford before the war when they’d boxed each other for a few nickels.
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Finally, he got to the crossroads in Vierville sur Mer, the promised rendezvous with Ray. Stevens stuck his good hand in the air as if Ray was actually there to finally shake it.