The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (26 page)

As soon as they had returned from church later that afternoon, many families tuned to the news broadcasts on their radios. The United Press now reported that the invaders had “met surprisingly little opposition from the enemy land forces and practically none from the German air force, but at points on the beach losses were quite heavy from concentrated machine gun fire. A beachhead was quickly established, troops began pushing inland and within a few hours had gained a strong foothold.”
²¹

That week’s
Bedford Bulletin
, read by many that evening after long shifts in the local factories, included a letter from a Mrs. H. M. Lane. It echoed the prayers of so many families that night as Bedford wondered what had happened to its sons and when news would arrive from Europe:

Dear Father and Great Maker of all things: Beauty that dies the soonest, lives the longest. Who can fail to see the beauty and sacrifice our brave lads are making? Because they cannot keep themselves for a day, we’ll keep them forever in memory and give them immortality.
²²

At dusk in Bedford, about fifty women—three times the usual number— sat in the Bedford County library rolling bandages. By midnight, they added another 9,000 bandages to the 68,300 they had prepared in May.

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. . . .
²³

Three thousand miles away, as the lights went out in Bedford that night, nineteen of its sons already lay dead.

E
ARLY ON J
UNE
7, Roy Stevens and the twenty-eight men placed under his command landed in Plymouth, England. They included Bedford boys Charles Fizer, Harold Wilkes, and Clyde Powers, and New Yorker John Barnes. It was as if they were “on a secret mission to a foreign land” recalled Barnes. “We were told not to say where we had been or what had happened. We went to a Reppledepple, that is, a replacement depot. There we were re-armed and sent on our way. . . . We traveled by civilian train to Southampton. Though the news of the invasion was all over the English papers, we never spoke of anything military to the English people we encountered. At Southampton, we embarked on our second voyage across the channel.”
¹

On June 11, Roy Stevens and his boat team returned to Dog Green on Omaha, landing without so much as getting their feet wet. In just four days, the beach had been transformed into a bustling port, through which tens of thousands of reinforcements and countless armored vehicles were now pouring. Most of the corpses had been removed from the beach, although here and there the tide had brought in new bodies that had been sucked out to sea on D-Day. The sun shone fiercely. Barrage balloons dotted the sky “like big white doves” as protection against air attack. The channel was dark blue and glistened in the sun. As Stevens and his men left the beach, they passed the ruins of a pillbox. An American flag had been draped across its encasement.
²

Before joining Company A, Roy Stevens and Clyde Powers decided to visit a makeshift graveyard near the village of Colleville sur Mer. Not far from the graveyard, they came across a work detail of German prisoners. A few prisoners had passable English. Stevens struck up a conversation. It seemed the Germans had fled the American attack soon after H-Hour. “Why hadn’t they stayed in their foxholes,” asked Stevens, “and fought to the bitter end?”

“We got scared when we saw all the boats,” one of them replied. “So we just got up and left.”
³

The graveyard was lined with several rows of crosses. From each cross dangled a dog tag. Bodies lay in neat rows ready for burial. German prisoners brought yet more in two-wheel carts from piles on the beach. “All they had to bury you in was a bed-sack. They didn’t have no coffins or nothing like that. Just a bedsack tied up at the end.”
⁴

Stevens walked to a section for men with second names beginning with an “S.” He scraped some mud from a dog tag. It belonged to his twin brother Ray. In shock, he walked on through the graveyard, looking at more dog tags on more crosses. One bore the name of Jack Powers— Clyde’s brother. “We didn’t know what to say to each other,” remembered Stevens. “I felt like crying but couldn’t.”
⁵

It could not be true. There could not be so many dead from Bedford: By the time Stevens and Powers had walked along each avenue of crosses, they had found all but six of the Bedford boys who had landed on D-Day. How many others had been blown to pieces or washed out to sea and would never be recovered didn’t bear thinking about. Corpses discovered on Dog Green beach included those of Master Sergeant John Wilkes . . . Captain Fellers . . . John Clifton . . . Clifton Lee . . . Tony Rosazza . . . John Reynolds . . . Gordon Henry White . . . John Schenk . . . Bedford Hoback . . . Wallace Carter . . . Nicholas Gillaspie . . . Grant Yopp . . . Jack Powers . . . Elmere Wright . . . Ray Stevens. Of the thirty-four Bedford boys who had left the
Empire Javelin
in the early hours of June 6, nineteen were dead.

Stevens and Powers left the graveyard, overwhelmed and dumbstruck by the tragedy.

“How come it ain’t me in the ground?” thought Stevens. “Why did my boat sink? Why should I be living when the rest of them paid the price?”
⁶

Above all, why in God’s name hadn’t he shaken his twin brother’s hand on D-Day before dawn?

Soon, the shock and guilt had turned to blind rage.

“Clyde, let’s go,” Stevens told Powers, still reeling at the discovery of his own brother’s grave. “Let’s get the men who did this.”
⁷

Later that afternoon, Stevens and Powers rejoined their boat team and headed inland in trucks. By nightfall, they were waiting nervously in tents as rain pelted down. Stevens spoke little, numbed by the deaths of so many of his buddies. The following morning, Stevens and his group boarded trucks again. Soon, they heard artillery fire in the distance. John Barnes began to get a “tight iron band of fear around [his] chest”
⁸
as the shelling grew louder. Others struggled to control their fear. For Stevens, there were no qualms. All he could think about was getting even: “I was gonna kill a German for every one of my buddies.”
⁹

The men got closer and closer to combat. “First we came to the 29th Division headquarters, then to regiment and finally, battalion,” recalled Barnes. “At battalion we met some of our company cooks. Sergeant Newcomb and Sergeant Jack Mitchell who we called ‘Mom’ back in Ivy-bridge because he always took care of us like a mother.”
¹⁰

“What happened to Captain Fellers?” someone asked.

“Killed,” they replied.

Just three officers from Company A’s original nine had survived the landings. Only one was still fighting—Second Lieutenant Gearing. Bedford boy Leslie Abbott had been killed in fierce hedgerow fighting on June 9 as the German 352nd Division launched counterattacks. Now Company A was being brought up to full strength. All the officers except Gearing were new.
¹¹

“What about [my brother] Ray?” said Stevens.

“Don’t know,” replied Newcomb. “We haven’t had much information. Haven’t been able to keep up, it’s a mess.”
¹²

Even though he had seen his brother’s grave, Stevens refused to believe he was dead. There had been some mistake. He was missing in action, perhaps wounded. He would turn up some day, he was certain of it. It would be many days before he could accept the reality of his brother’s death.

Newcomb explained that he and Company A’s mess staff had landed on June 7 on Omaha, rolling out of a landing craft through the surf and up the beach in a ten-wheeled truck pulling a trailer holding a new stove and supplies. Newcomb had then been ordered to set up a temporary mess and take water in a jeep to what was left of Company A.

Jack Mitchell, Company A’s supply sergeant, also of Bedford, had joined Newcomb and driven along a narrow road above the bluffs. Eventually, they had found a few dozen men dug in besides a hedgerow. When Newcomb had prepared that evening’s meal, only eight men from Company A had arrived at the mess tent. None were from Bedford.
¹³

In all, an estimated twenty men, approximately 10 percent of full company strength, had survived the landings and fought past the beach, led by Second Lieutenant Gearing. “[Then] on the fourth day after the landing,” Barnes recalled, “[Gearing] had jumped into a trench during a firefight and landed on top of a soldier’s bayonet. Both men were surprised, but he was able to shoot the Jerry with his pistol and was only slightly injured by the point of the bayonet.”
¹⁴

That evening, Stevens and his boat team were finally led up to the line. Foxholes dotted a thick hedgerow. They were to pair off. A lieutenant told them to dig in for the night. They dug three to four feet deep, and then managed a few snatches of sleep before dawn. Not long after first light, enemy shells started to explode nearby. “Get your ass down, or you won’t have it very long,” someone shouted.
¹⁵

Few things in Normandy were as terrifying as finding oneself in the target area of an artillery barrage. Every sinew and synapse screamed for a man to run. But fleeing almost invariably meant death: Shrapnel from 88mm shells often shredded any living object within fifty yards. Finally, the barrage ended. Shaken, muscles taut with fear, Stevens and his men crawled forward to form a new line. They passed spent shells, dead Germans, and dead GIs. Cows had been blown to pieces. In nearby fields, they stood in rigor mortis, grotesque carcasses amid the endless “bocage”—the French word for the maze of hedgerows that dominated the landscape.

For hundreds of years, the Normans had cultivated the impregnable bocage. In some areas, its earth base was over three feet high, the hawthorn hedgerow above so thick with thorny branches that TNT had to be used to get through. For the Germans in retreat, by contrast, the bocage was an ideal natural defense. By placing MG-42s at strategic gates and corners of fields, they were able to slow even the boldest American assaults. American infantry companies sometimes fought all day to secure a single hedgerow.

Later that afternoon, the 116th Infantry received orders to secure the Elle River, one of the 29th Division’s key objectives on its push towards the strategically vital town of St. Lô, where several important roads intersected. The 115th Infantry had been battered that morning trying to secure the river, losing seven officers and fifty-nine men. Twice as many were wounded.

That night, Company A jumped off and fought across the Elle, encountering heavy small arms fire, and then set up bivouac for the night. At dawn, Stevens and his men advanced again. By 10:45 A.M. on June 13, Company A and the rest of the 1st Battalion had captured the small town of Couvains. A fierce counterattack was expected. According to the 29th Division official history,
“29 Let’s Go!”
: “Patrolling was insisted upon. 29th Division Field Order No. 6 of June 13 instructed each front line company to send one patrol two miles to the front every twenty-four hours, and each battalion to capture one prisoner in the same period.”
¹⁶

Stevens volunteered to lead a patrol. But in his foxhole later he had second thoughts: “I knew I had volunteered for something I should not have. I was sitting in that foxhole and I asked God to help me. The image of Jesus Christ came up on that dirt, and he says: ‘Go, you’ll come back.’ ”

Clyde Powers shared Stevens’s foxhole.

“Do you want to come?” Stevens asked.

“If you’re telling me I got to go, I’ll go, but I’m not volunteering.”

“If you ain’t gonna volunteer, then don’t,” replied Stevens. “I want you to go of your own free will.”
¹⁷

Stevens blacked up with several other volunteers and then crawled towards the enemy lines. As the “getaway man,” it was up to Stevens to make sure the enemy did not creep up from behind and surprise the patrol. Stevens suddenly heard a movement and then saw the silhouette of a figure. A private named Kessup had fallen out of position and lagged behind: “I nearly killed him. I would have if I’d remembered to bring a knife with me.”

The patrol crossed a hedgerow into enemy territory. A group of Germans opened fire. Stevens dived for cover and returned fire. A sergeant close to him shot a German with his pistol. Stevens threw a grenade. Then he saw one of his patrol go down, badly wounded. He crawled to his side. The man’s eyeball was dangling on his cheek. Stevens did his best to dress the wound. The squad regrouped. They had lost a man. He had been challenged by German lookouts and had replied in bad German, only to be instantly shot.

Stevens returned to his foxhole where he sat and prayed. “I had come back,” he recalled, “just like Jesus had said. There and then I made a deal with God. ‘If you let me get back home,’ I asked him, ‘I’ll be your servant.’ ”
¹⁸

While Roy chased Nazis at night, Clyde Powers huddled in their foxhole and mourned. Later that summer, he wrote to his parents about his dead brother: “[Jack] is buried on top of a hill, overlooking the English Channel, alongside of the rest of the boys he served with. It is a very pretty place, and the French people have planted flowers there. Just be glad, Mom, that he is not missing, for at least you know where he is now, and that is a lot better. He was killed instantly and there was no suffering on his part. I talked to the boy in the medics that saw him get hit and he said that he died instantly. Will tell you more about it when the war is over.”
¹⁹

Despite his close call, Roy Stevens’s hunger for vengeance was just as great as the day he found Ray’s grave. He joined other dangerous missions and even volunteered to run messages to artillery observers. He wanted every chance he could get to kill a German. Eventually, word about Stevens’s apparent death wish got back to the 116th Infantry headquarters. Stevens was called in front of Colonel Canham.

“It’s gonna take us all to win this war,” Canham told him, “so you take it easy.”
²⁰

Stevens saluted and returned to his squad. In England, Stevens had disliked Canham for his overly harsh discipline. Now he had a profound respect for him. Everyone in the 116th knew what the colonel had done on D-Day. “He walked it like he talked it,” Stevens said. “He was a rough, tough dude. We all knew he’d refused to go to hospital when he got shot. We knew he was always going to be with his troops, whatever happened.”
²¹

Stevens cursed as well as any sergeant but was surprised by the constant stream of profanity and blasphemy that issued from Canham’s lips. Stevens in fact worried that if he cursed the Lord like Canham, he’d be headed to hell: “The things he would say. . . . I wouldn’t even want to say them up on the line—you didn’t know what minute you gonna be gone.”
²²

One day, Stevens returned from the line to pick up a group of replacements. Canham addressed the men before Stevens took them into combat for the first time.