The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (11 page)

What most upset many Southerners was the sight of English women dating black Americans. “The men were not used to seeing that, and couldn’t get used to it, though I’m sure they could if they had tried,” Nance said.
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A black lieutenant, Joseph O. Curtis, was also stationed in the area. That March, he wrote to a friend back in segregated America: “You know, the more I see of the English, the more disgusted I became with Americans. After the war, with the eager and enthusiastic support of every negro who will have served in Europe, I shall start a movement to send white Americans back to England and bring the English to America.”
³⁹

In local pubs, Company A ran into blacks but also weary veterans from the 1st Division. They were brutally honest when asked what combat was like: horrific and very short, especially for officers of Nance’s and Fellers’s ranks. They could expect to fight for no more than a couple of weeks. If they were lucky, they’d receive a “million dollar” wound and be shipped home as an invalid. The only other way back to Bedford would be in a coffin.

One day, as the 29ers marched along in perfect formation, chanting “29, Let’s Go!,” a 1st Division soldier shouted back: “Go ahead 29, we’ll be right behind you!”
⁴⁰
“England’s Own” were so goddamned eager, so naively gung-ho, and so well-disciplined they even kept their chin straps buckled.

T
HE COUNTDOWN TO THE
real thing finally began in early March 1944. Company A’s four platoons were reorganized into six boat teams and the exercises “became serious.”
¹
From now until D-Day, the thirty men in each boat team would train, eat, and sleep together. The teams included two officers, a four-man 60mm mortar crew, a four-man machine gun crew, five men responsible for demolition of beach obstacles, five riflemen, and four men armed with Bangalore torpedoes for blowing holes in wire. Everything they did was focused on working in harmony to “assault enemy beaches and be able to establish a beachhead by neutralizing all obstacles and pillboxes.”
²

Suddenly, the Bedford boys found themselves with very specific roles that they would perfect on the moors and at a specially built series of assault training centers (ACTs) around Woolacombe and Braunton on the south coast. Buck privates as well as General Gerhardt praised these facilities as superb.

Ray Stevens, Roy’s brother, led a mortar squad and was widely thought to be the most accurate man in the company with the 60mm. He was so proficient, in fact, that he was placed in charge of training the company’s other squads.

John Schenk, Company A’s communications sergeant, was now responsible for making sure that the six boat teams all had operational walkie-talkie radios and that the men operating them could do so under enormous pressure. Far shorter than Captain Fellers, Schenk would scurry after his captain on maneuvers relaying orders to each of the teams. “Tail Feather” Fellers darted around with a sprinter’s pace, prompting some Bedford boys to nickname Schenk “Duck Legs” and Fellers “Long Legs.” When the Bedford boys did not form up quickly enough or exited mock-up landing craft clumsily, Fellers would bark “too slow, too slow, too goddamned slow!”
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“Several times we left our headquarters at Ivybridge to go on a full dry-run operation,” recalled John Barnes, a rifleman in Roy Stevens’s boat team. “This would involve marching to the railroad station near the village or a truck assembly point. We left camp at night and marched through Ivybridge, its houses dark and people silent, up the hill to the railway tracks. I often thought at the time, why did we go? . . . Were we lining up like sheep off to the slaughter that we knew was ahead? What forced us to obey when our heads, our hearts, and our feet wanted to go no further? Was it the fear of military discipline? Was it patriotism, love of flag and country?”
⁴

The trains and trucks took the Bedford boys to a sealed camp near Weymouth. Then the men would walk in their boat teams up gangways onto a British troopship, the
Empire Javelin
, to be ferried to Slapton Sands. An area designated on England’s south coast since 1943 for practicing large-scale amphibious assaults, Slapton Sands resembled several beaches in Normandy: gently sloping stretches of sand and shingle flanked by a five-foot-deep salt marsh.

Several miles out at sea, in pitch blackness, the Bedford boys would crawl down cargo nets flung over the ship’s side and step into bucking LCVPs (landing craft, vehicle and personnel), which would take them to Slapton Sands. The Allied Supreme Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, would later credit these craft, commonly known as Higgins boats, with winning the war.
⁵

Over 20,000 Higgins boats would carry more Americans into combat than all other crafts combined. The boats were thirty-six feet long and ten feet wide, made from plywood with a metal ramp that lowered to allow a fast exit, and could carry up to thirty-six men quickly to shore even in rough seas. Highly moveable and powered by a very reliable diesel motor, the Higgins boat’s only defect was that it shipped water and bounced around in heavy seas, causing acute seasickness. The British equivalent, the LCA (landing craft assault) was produced in far fewer numbers, but had benches to sit down on and some protection from the elements.

Over several weeks, Company A refined their landing techniques on two-day exercises and tried to keep their nerve: Bullets flew overhead now as they crawled through barbed wire blown by Bangalore torpedoes. “The beauty of the Bangalore was that they blew aprons of barbed wire by exploding sideways and not towards the men in front of the barbed wire,” recalled rifleman Hal Baumgarten of boat team number six. “They enabled us to blow a path through many rows of barbed wire rapidly.”
⁶
The men fired at targets. They tested different forms of grenades. At first, smoke was used to provide cover but then it was decided that the smoke caused too much confusion and would not be employed on D-Day itself.

Machine-gun operators practiced jumping down into craters, blown or dug in the beach, and then firing from awkward positions—it was assumed in all beach exercises that craters would pepper the real beach on D-Day, thereby providing crucial protection. Mines had to be scouted and then carefully uncovered with bayonets. Dummy positions stormed and concrete pillboxes blown with TNT. When the beach had been secured, the Bedford boys had to climb bluffs and seize homes emptied of British residents only months before.

Assistant flamethrower George Roach was in Master Sergeant John Wilkes’s boat team. Fifty years later, he would vividly recall the procedure for storming a beach:

As the boat would land at the beach, the ramp was dropped. The lieutenant would be the first one off the boat, usually, followed by four or five riflemen who would be in a position to fan out, followed by Bangalore torpedo people and wire cutters, then the flame thrower and his assistant, then the demolition team which carried pole charges of TNT, then second in command, in [my boat], Sergeant Wilkes. . . . The Bangalore torpedo people would run up to where the barbed wire was, throw a pole charge across the barbed wire, explode it so that the riflemen could then follow on and fire at the pillbox which was usually situated at a distance from us, and then the flame thrower would activate his flame thrower at the embrasure and then the pole charge people would come up and lay their TNT packages against the embrasure and blow a hole in it.
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“Man, Slapton Sands was tough,” recalled Roy Stevens. “You realized very quick you had to stay down as low as you could to keep your head.”
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The U.S. army allowed for 5 percent casualties in training, far less than the Germans and Russians. In some elite SS combat units, the allowance was 10 to 15 percent: a cathartic masochism attended the ritualistic preparations for killing among Hitler’s most fanatical followers.

According to Hal Baumgarten, there was “loss of lives and casualties, which were hushed up,” in every fullscale rehearsal on Slapton Sands. In Company A, there were minor injuries—sprained ankles, cuts, and bruised egos—but no serious casualty until one particularly cold day when Bedford boy Andrew Coleman collapsed with pneumonia aggravated by the cold and wet conditions.

Coleman had grown up in a lovely old two-story home on Grove Street in the heart of Bedford, the son of a widely respected carpenter. Perpetual pain had cast a long shadow over his life: For most of his youth, Coleman’s mother had been severely crippled with arthritis. “She lay in bed in a room downstairs,” recalled Sibyle Kieth Coleman, the wife of one of Andrew’s nephews. “She couldn’t move her arms, her legs, any of her fingers, hands. She had terrible pain.”
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In the hospital in England, Coleman rapidly developed an agonizing kidney complaint, Bright’s disease, which made his “whole body and stomach swell up.”
¹⁰
The infection rapidly developed into chronic nephritis which causes progressive, incurable kidney damage. In the days before dialysis and kidney transplants, patients could expect only a slow and agonizing death. Coleman was soon so ill that he was shipped back to America by the end of April 1944.
¹¹

Boat teams practiced over and over until the assault procedure went like clockwork. If teams couldn’t get it right, they were taken out onto the moors where they trained until Captain Fellers was satisfied. On a drizzly Sunday in late March a boat team was trying to perfect the technique for blowing up a pillbox when the man assigned to lobbing a TNT package into the pillbox’s slit was killed; the TNT exploded in his face, perhaps because of a faulty or damp fuse.

The death stunned the Bedford boys. No one had yet seen a man killed by an explosion. “Seeing that [man die] hurt those boys more than anything else the whole time we were in training,” recalled Roy Stevens. “They all seen it, you see. And his body was mangled, blown pretty well [to pieces].”
¹²

Even on practice invasion runs, John Schenk found time each night at 10 P.M. to stop and think about Ivylyn. Back in Bedford, she was struggling to recover from terrible headaches and partial paralysis provoked by devastating nightmares. On March 17, she had woken up screaming. In the nightmare, God had told her John would not come back.
¹³

“I was awakened with this violent headache,” explained Ivylyn. “It was the beginning of understanding that I would probably be a widow. I had exchanged sentences with God. I said to him that I didn’t think he could take my husband because we had not had our children and our lives together. John and I wrote all the time to each other about having children when he came back.”
¹⁴

By April, Company A was also on edge. Tempers flared. Officers seemed on particularly short fuses. Men wondered how they would perform in actual battle. Would they disgrace themselves or would they find the courage to fight and kill? There was no way of knowing, veterans said, how they would behave under fire for the first time. Over and over, they speculated as to where and when they would finally gamble with death.

That April, some of the Bedford boys read
Liberty
magazine’s bold prediction: “There will be no needless loss of life in the American Army in World War II if the orders and plans of our High Command are carried out.”
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But the experience of American troops in Italy that spring was far from reassuring. At Anzio, the Germans had contained the Allies effectively, preventing them from reaching Rome, and causing demoralizing casualties as they bombarded trapped troops for week after week. At Monte Cassino, the Allies had also met fierce resistance and become bogged down in a battle of attrition that threatened to become as bloody as those fought in Normandy in World War I. Italy was no “soft underbelly” as Churchill had predicted—far from it. The slog up the country’s mountainous spine did not augur well for the Allies once they had arrived on French soil.

The Germans were formidable soldiers able to impose severe casualties as they fought defensive actions in Italy and on the Eastern Front, where the Russians had yet to launch their massive summer 1944 attack. But they were far inferior to the Allies in matters of military intelligence. In order to maximize this critical advantage, Overlord’s planners set up Operation Fortitude, a plan to convince the Germans that the Overlord forces were double their actual size and that the invasion would take place on the Pas de Calais far from the Cotentin peninsula. Fortitude created phantom divisions, a British Fourth Army preparing to invade Norway, and a U.S. First Army Group, commanded by General George S. Patton, that was poised to land on the Pas de Calais any day. Run by an ultra-secret intelligence committee, “The Twenty Committee” (so-named after the Roman numerals XX—double cross), Operation Fortitude was arguably the most successful of all preparations for Overlord. It so convinced the Germans that even after D-Day they still believed that the main Allied attack would be in the region of the Pas de Calais.

On April 13, Sergeant Raymond Hoback wrote to his parents, who had told him that most of Bedford’s young men had now been drafted: “Looks like they will get all the boys before we come back. Well, the army won’t hurt them much.”
¹⁶
On April 26, Company A performed its final dry-run invasion on Slapton Sands, Operation Fox, sailing on the troopship
Empire Javelin
from Weymouth and landing at dawn in British-built LCAs. The boat teams worked in perfect harmony. Gaps in barbed wire were quickly blown, the beach exits secured, and there were no casualties. The men returned to their barracks confident and keyed up for the real thing. Company A had proved it was good enough to be the first 29ers to land in France. “We had worked especially hard and competed to be the first on the beach,” recalled Ray Nance. “We had tried to be the best in training. It was a matter or pride and honor. And it worked. We
were
chosen to be the first to land.”
¹⁷

Many 29ers believed they deserved, simply by virtue of having spent so long in England, to be first in line to invade Europe. They had trained longer and harder than any other American division. Although they had never seen combat, they were tough, risk-taking, and aggressive troops. General Gerow and General Gerhardt’s training regimes had given the Bedford boys great stamina and a proud, almost cocky, confidence.

Time and again, British officers would later concede that while the American buck private was not as good as the Tommy in saluting and other barrack-room discipline, he was often more gung-ho. The Yanks were paid three times as much, had been reared with a “can-do” attitude, and were supplied by a vast industrial capacity. But the crucial difference lay in memory. The Somme, Paschendaele, and other horrific bloodbaths of World War I had left permanent scars on the British psyche. There was no enthusiasm for full frontal assaults among British tacticians— a generation had been culled between 1914 and 1918 due to callous orders to “go over the top,” and then walk across No Man’s Land in the direct line of fire of German machine guns. The Bedford boys’ ancestors had charged towards death during the Civil War but that was three generations ago. Company A had not grown up with a loathing of war or the resentment of senior officers that had resulted from the massacre of Britain’s youth.