“We knew somebody was going to die,” recalled Stevens, “and it wasn’t going to be long.”
I recently finished Alex Kershaw's book, The Bedford Boys. I have read a fair number of WWII books over the years and this is one of the best. Highly recommend it.
JUNE 6, 1944, 12:30 A.M.: The British troopship, the Empire Javelin, steamed steadily across the English Channel. Among her passengers were thirty-four young men from the small Virginia town of Bedford. They belonged to the 116th Infantry’s Company A, a select two-hundred man unit. After twenty months of arduous training, Company A had been chosen from among the 15,000 GIs in the Army of the United States’ 29th Division to spearhead the most dangerous and critical American assault of the entire war.
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.”
In 2003, or maybe it was 2004, my wife and I went to the National D-Day Memorial In Bedford. This book has me wanting to go back. At that time I hadn't read a lot of WWII history and I don't think I grasped what the community went through.
Finally, Bedford’s longest day drew to a close. Families listened to President Franklin Roosevelt as he united all America in prayer:
Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor . . . These men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate . . . They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home. Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom. . . .
Three thousand miles away, as the lights went out in Bedford that night, nineteen of its sons already lay dead.
It would be weeks before the families would know this.
What Kershaw has done better than the other authors I've read, is really put you into the community at home. I've often wondered what my great-grandparents felt when they got the news that their son, my great-uncle, had been killed in action. How did they find out? Did his letters stop coming home? Were letters they sent returned before they got official word?
SUNDAY, JULY 6 , 1944. Just about 9 A.M., Lucille Hoback was about to walk with her family to Center Point Methodist church, diagonally across the road from her house.
Lucille's brother, Bedford (not to be confused with the town of Bedford), was part of the D-Day invasion.
Suddenly, there was a knock on the Hobacks’ front door. It was Sheriff Jim Marshall, a good friend of Lucille’s father. He had just pulled up in his car. He was holding a telegram. A few minutes later, Mr. Hoback told Lucille and her sister to sit down at the kitchen table. “Mother was sobbing. Father said Bedford had been killed in the war, on D-Day.”
Imagine having to wait a month to get the news that your son or brother had been killed. The Hobacks then told Bedford's fiancé that her husband-to-be was dead.
When Mrs. Macie Hoback got home, she had to be put to bed. Her first child was dead. Her husband went to the barn to cry.
That is one of the saddest sentences I have ever read.
In the back of the local drugstore in Bedford was a Western Union telegram office. On the morning of July 17, 1944, Elizabeth Teass went to work.
Teass’s heart sank as she read the first line of copy: “The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret.” Teass had seen these words before. By July 1944, telegrams announcing the death of a local boy arrived on average once a week. She waited for the message to end, expecting the machine to fall silent. But it did not. Line after line of copy clicked out of the printer.
That day nine telegrams had arrived declaring Bedford men dead or missing in action on D-Day.
Forty-one days after D-Day.
No community in the state or in America or indeed in any Allied nation had lost as many sons as Bedford. In a matter of minutes, a couple of German machine gunners had broken the town’s heart.
Kershaw's book is one that I will recommend along with With the Old Breed and One Square Mile of Hell as my favorites. It's a moving story of a small Virginia town that lost a lot. I'm thankful he shared the stories of the town and the men that went to Omaha Beach.