The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (25 page)

“The daughter he never got to touch.” Earl Parker’s daughter, twelve-year-old Danny, in her scout uniform at the unveiling of Bedford’s memorial stone in 1954.
Mary
Daniel Heilig and Virginia Historical Association.

Hal Baumgarten, left, and medic Cecil Breeden at the Colleville American Cemetery above Omaha Beach, 1988. Breeden saved many lives and treated Baumgarten and several Bedford boys on D-Day.
Hal Baumgarten.

Fifty years later. Roy Stevens, center, returns to where his twin brother and so many friends died on Omaha Beach. Photograph taken on June 6, 1994.
Virginia
Historical Association.

Bob Slaughter with President George W. Bush at the dedication of the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, June 6, 2001.
Bob Slaughter.

They died that others might be free. The grave of John B. Schenk, one of eleven Bedford boys resting in peace at the Colleville American Cemetery in France.
John Snowdon.

J
UNE 6, B
EDFORD
, V
IRGINIA
. Viola Parker dozed next to her radio. At 2 A.M., a stern voice interrupted a broadcast: “German radio says the invasion has begun.”
¹
It was 8 A.M. on Omaha Beach, ninety minutes after Company A had landed.

Just after the 2 A.M. newscast, Elva Newcomb woke up in her log cabin. She instinctively checked on her three children: Nancy, Bill, and Garland. They were sleeping soundly. “I had been worried about Earl for some time,” she recalled. “His mail had been held up for some reason. I turned on the radio and heard about the invasion. Then I was really worried because they were saying we might have to pull out because it was so rough. I couldn’t sleep after that.”
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At 3:32 A.M., Viola Parker’s radio announced that the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force in London was confirming German reports of an invasion. Viola finally stirred at 4 A.M., turned up the volume on her radio, and heard: “Under the command of General Eisenhower, Allied naval forces, supported by strong air forces, began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France.”
³

As the sun rose, the bells of Bedford’s central Presbyterian Church began peeling.

Bells rang all across the United States that morning, from Alaska to Florida. The great crusade had finally begun.

In Philadelphia, mayor Bernard Samuel tapped the famous Liberty Bell for the first time since 1835.

In New York, a two-minute silence marked the opening of markets on Wall Street and then the money men and war-profiteers returned to their war efforts. The Dow Jones would rise 142 points that day to a new high for the year. In many factories and stores, workers were told to go home. Broadway shows were canceled, as were all baseball games. Newspapers cleared advertising and features to make space for blanket coverage of the invasion. In Times Square, somber crowds craned their necks to watch news bulletins flicker across message-boards high in the clear summer sky.

In her parlor in Bedford, Ivylyn Schenk sat with her mother close to an old radio. “Mama brought me what she thought I would enjoy eating, and she sat there with me most of the day as we listened to all the reports,” recalled Ivylyn. “I knew that John would be involved in the invasion. He had not told me anything directly but in a round-about way I knew.”
⁴

Across town, other wives and parents also rose early; many, like Elva Newcomb, worked the day’s first shift in several of Bedford’s factories producing war supplies. Bettie Wilkes switched on the radio while eating breakfast. At 7 A.M., she had to be at the Belding Hemingway plant, where she made material used for parachutes—the same parachutes used by the 101st Airborne on D-Day. “I caught the early news. I thought John might be involved but I hoped he was not. We were just hoping to get through the war, begin our lives together. . . . In his most recent letter, John had said: ‘I probably won’t be able to write for a while, but I will as soon as I can.’ ”
⁵

Twenty-year-old Bertie Fellers prayed that morning for her brother, Captain Fellers, and for her husband, Clarence Higginbotham, who was serving with the Engineer Corps in England. “The previous evening,” she recalled, “my mother and my sister and I had attended a prayer service at Oakland Methodist Church near our home. We knew something was going on even though we had not yet had news.”
⁶
Bertie had just sent her brother a birthday card. He should have been thirty on June 10.

At 7:30 A.M., over a hundred conscientious objectors boarded trucks at the former CCC camp at Kelso. They would spend all day working on local farms before returning to the camp at 5:30 P.M.

As other Bedford residents went to work, they picked up the
Bedford
Bulletin
from their mailboxes or in stores.

That week’s paper contained an eerily prescient full-page advertisement for war bonds: “America—this is it! Don’t let them down! Do your part as they are doing theirs . . . This is America’s Zero Hour—Civilization’s Zero Hour!”
⁷
It was also reported that a plaque honoring servicemen in arms had been erected at Hampton Looms with names added as employees left for service. It already held the names of Frank Draper Jr. and Clifton Lee.

Election season was well under way in Bedford on June 6, 1944. Sergeant Allen Huddleston’s former boss, Dr. W. L. Lyle of Lyle’s drugstore, was running hard for mayor against incumbent J. W. Gillaspie, who had been challenged only three times during a fourteen-year-term. Lyle hoped to turn Bedford into “THE tourist town of the State, perhaps of the South.”
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The vote would be on June 13, exactly a week after D-Day. A turnout of over 90 percent was expected.

The
Bulletin
also mentioned that parents throughout Bedford County were worried about an outbreak of infantile paralysis. Medical authorities had begun to urge them to keep their children away from crowded places until the epidemic was over. Nevertheless, local Girl Scouts were still going from house to house canvassing for a forthcoming bond rally organized by the town’s undertaker, Harry Carder.

It was a beautiful morning, warm but not too humid. Up on the Peaks of Otter, ramblers noticed that the dogwood blossom had passed. Rhododendron and laurel were still in bloom, and monks’ hood and May apple had taken the place of trillium and ladies’ slippers. Cherry trees promised a bumper crop. Down in the valley, in Bedford’s Mud Alley, trains crammed with war supplies and troops passed Frank Draper Jr.’s home. His mother and sister, Verona, worked in Frank Sr.’s garden, harvesting the season’s first vegetables, which they had planted in March. Canning had started in earnest. Tobacco farmers throughout the county were also starting to harvest, hoping they would receive even higher prices at the Bedford Tobacco Market than they had the previous year. Prices had risen significantly since before the war.

Local stores advertised Father’s Day gifts for June 18. “Shop early for Fathers in the service!” they declared. Brightly striped broadcloth pajamas, sizes A,B,C,D, were a bargain at $2.98. It was also bargain day at Liberty cinema—adults were charged just twenty cents to see the musical extravaganza
Trocadero
starring Rosemary Lane.

Around mid-day, Bedford native Eleanor Yowell sat down and wrote to her husband, a pilot based in England:

The big news came this morning, and my heart has been so full all day it’s been hard for me to get anything done. I know it is a big show, probably the biggest that has ever been staged in the world for that matter, but it still is so damn unnecessary that it makes your blood boil when you think that a few people whom money and power control started the whole business. They are not the ones who have to pay for it either; it is the innocent masses of people who do. We are having a prayer service over here at 2:30 this afternoon, and Dr. Grey is coming over to lead it. All the churches everywhere are having services all day long. Let’s hope that these prayers will be heard for the good of everyone.
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One man from Company A was actually in Bedford on June 6. In October 1943, Sergeant Pride Wingfield had been accepted for training into the Army Air Force and was now on furlough from a camp in Missouri. He listened to the radio with his mother in their 1933 home on Oak Street, a block from Bedford High School, which had graduated its 1944 class the week before.

Wingfield had recently started dating a pretty nineteen-year-old, Rebecca Lockard, who worked in a beauty shop, Modernique, above Green’s drugstore. They would marry on October 22, 1945. “I was always running down there, getting change or sandwiches,” recalled Rebecca. “It was a focus for women in the community, especially us women who had been left behind. When word got back about D-Day, we all finally knew what the boys had gone over to England for.”
¹⁰

At the back of the drugstore, twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth Teass worked at the Western Union counter. Her hours were from 9:30 A.M. to 5 P.M. All morning she watched as townspeople came in and sat and talked over lunch, a Coke, or fresh coffee. There was just one topic of conversation—D-Day.

Three thousand miles away in England, Bedford boy Sergeant Allen Huddleston heard about the invasion on a radio in a rehabilitation center where he was nursing his ankle back to full strength. It would be several weeks before he realized how lucky he had been to avoid D-Day: “Somebody was looking after me.”
¹¹

In town centers across the rest of Britain there was no dancing in the streets. Silence that morning seemed to blanket much of the island: Everybody was caught up in his or her own thoughts, thinking of relatives involved, reflecting on the long years since Dunkirk. That afternoon, King George VI addressed his subjects via the BBC: “This time the challenge is not to fight to survive but to fight to win the final victory for the good cause. . . . At this historic moment surely not one of us is too busy, too young, or too old to play a part in a nation-wide, perchance a world-wide, vigil of prayer as the great crusade sets forth.”
¹²

All along Britain’s south coast, doctors and young nurses prepared to receive the first wounded from the invasion beaches. John Reynolds’s “sweetheart,” the American nurse Kathleen Bradshaw, worked in a hospital in Plymouth. Now she knew why John had been unable to see her for several weeks.

Another nurse, Mary Verrier, worked at the Queen Alexandra’s Hospital in Portsmouth. Early that afternoon, she went down to the Victorian South Parade Pier to help transport badly maimed men to the hospital. Two days earlier, Portsmouth harbor had been packed with boats and landing craft. Now gray boats slowly pulled into harbor, crammed with wounded. Verrier would later write:

It was a privilege to serve those lads. They never moaned or asked people to hurry up when they were laid on their stretchers waiting to come in. They lay there with patience, a joke and a smile. One chap who was badly burned said to me, “I’m quite good looking really, you know, nurse.” I said, “Your eyes are not bad now, they’re quite saucy.” So he said, “You wouldn’t like to give us a kiss, would you, nurse?” We weren’t allowed, but I looked around and I bent down and kissed him on his horribly burned lips with the awful smell coming off his burns.
¹³

Back in America, another nurse—Eloise Rogers—tended to the sick at a 128-bed hospital in Richmond, Virginia. She had started work at 7 A.M. in the busy civilian hospital, helping with the delivery of babies, taking temperatures, replacing dressings. She heard about the invasion over the radio and immediately thought of her brothers, Clyde and Jack Powers, as well as many of the other Bedford boys such as Harold Wilkes, with whom she had played as a young girl. “I then realized they were probably involved with the invasion. But I only understood what that meant later when I saw a newsreel. That day, I was twenty, getting on with my life. As far as I knew, the boys were still away on some big adventure.”
¹⁴

That adventure gave millions hope. In their cramped hideaway in Amsterdam, Anne Frank and her Jewish family heard of the invasion on their radio. Anne wrote in her diary: “The best part of the invasion is that I have the feeling that friends are approaching. We have been oppressed by those terrible Germans for so long, they have had their knives so at our throats, that the thought of friends and delivery fills us with confidence!”
¹⁵

That afternoon in Bedford, journalists at the
Bedford Bulletin
prepared the following report:

News of the invasion brought a feeling of uneasiness to hundreds of Bedford county homes for many of them have sons, husbands and brothers in the army in England. Old Company A has been in training there for nearly two years and probably was among the first landing forces, and hundreds of other Bedford county men will ultimately be thrown into the fight, and among them some casualties can be expected.
¹⁶

Mrs. George P. Parker also prepared a report that day which she would send to the Virginia state authorities:

Church bells and chimes, but no whistles, have announced the beginning of the invasion. A feeling of awe and extreme quiet is prevailing. One woman who has a brother with the Army in England said, with trembling voice, “I don’t know how to describe my feeling. I can’t cry and I can’t laugh.” A doctor, sitting in a home of illness, heard the announcement before day. The family seemed stunned. There were no comments by anybody— just a quiet tenseness. Churches have been open . . . with sad-faced worshippers going in and out constantly. Tears only occasionally.
¹⁷

At around 2 P.M., many townspeople made their way through silent streets to a stately brick building with a high steeple, the Presbyterian Church. They filed quietly through double doors and took their places at dark wooden pews. Bright afternoon light streamed through tall, clear glass windows. Dr. J. H. Grey, a small, bony-faced man with a soothing voice, stood before them and asked them to pray. “The [service’s] program [also] consisted of music . . . all marking the one theme of supplication to God for guidance and divine aid in the struggle in which the United Nations are engaged.”
¹⁸

So many attended—well over three hundred people—that dozens stood outside and listened to the service through the open doors.
¹⁹
Mrs. Parker reported: “A crowded house, extreme quiet, and rapt attention marked the simple, deeply spiritual service. So many young people in the congregation.”
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