The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (27 page)

“As sure as there is a damned heaven in the sky, we are going to kill these sonsabitches,” Canham said. “Some of you will be heroes. Some of you will die. Some of you will die quickly.”
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Other officers were even more to the point, telling men they were as good as dead so why not spend their last moments fighting with honor, getting the job done?

“D-Day was the longest day, there’s no doubt about that,” recalled Company B’s Private Bob Sales, “but for those who survived, it was just one day. I had a hundred and eighty to go. I couldn’t begin to tell you how many men right beside me got killed. The average infantryman survived a week, if he was lucky.”
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As he waited to “jump off” on another attack, Roy Stevens received a letter from his parents wondering about him and Ray. “I didn’t want to write back. I still didn’t want to believe that grave was my brother’s. I still hoped he might show up.”
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Roy finally wrote his parents. He was alive. He did not mention Ray, unable to tell them what he had only gradually come to accept—Ray had been cut down savagely with so many other Bedford boys, probably before he got to fire a shot, in the shallows of Omaha Beach.

By the third week of June, the 29th Division was meeting ever-stiffer resistance: The Germans were throwing everything they could into a desperate attempt to contain the Allies to a narrow beachhead. At all costs, they must be stopped from taking strategically crucial cities such as Caen and St. Lô.

Every day, it seemed, Company A lost another squad as it advanced. It looked as if there were only two ways out of the nightmare of Normandy— dead or on a stretcher. “That was all you could look forward to,” said Stevens. “Hurt or killed. You looked forward to it.”
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“Your best hope was for a million-dollar wound, nice clean sheets and a pretty nurse,” remembered Company D’s Bob Slaughter. “You didn’t want to lie out there and bleed for a long time. I’d see guys on a stretcher, and they’d been shot through the leg and they would be smiling. ‘I’ll see ya buddy!’ they shouted. You didn’t want it in the groin or stomach but the legs, arms, shoulders, hands. That would have been wonderful. Fingers didn’t count.”
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Like Slaughter, Roy Stevens quickly came to recognize every sound of every weapon. The Wehrmacht’s MG-42 machine gun, which had killed most of his friends and brother, sounded like a giant piece of fabric being torn close to one’s ear. Company A at full strength—193 men— had just two machine guns, while a full German infantry company of 142 men carried fifteen MG-42s. Not surprisingly, Company A often found itself pinned down by MG-42s until artillery support made up for the imbalance in firepower.

The German 88mm guns, which had killed Bedford Hoback, fired shells at head height down lanes at nearly three times the speed of sound. At close range, flesh and blood targets never heard the shells coming. At a mile, men had perhaps a split second to react. “As soon as you heard an 88, you hit the ground,” recalled Company B’s Bob Sales. “If it caught you standing up, it would put some shrapnel in you. You knew what it sounded like because you saw so many men die because of it.”
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Then there was the German Panzerfaust, again superior to the American equivalent, the bazooka. Its sudden “whoooosh” echoed in the fevered sleep of many American tank crews. But perhaps the worst sound of all was the wail of “Moaning Minnies,” the bombs fired almost simultaneously by Nebelwerfers. The Germans nicknamed them “Stukas on Wheels” because the sirens with which the shells were equipped, like Stukas, were so terrifying that they sent many GIs insane.

“You never got used to combat,” recalled Sales. “Every damn morning, you got up wondering if you were going to live through the day. You didn’t sleep too damn much—the Germans would send out patrols, and they wouldn’t shoot you because that would alarm everybody. They’d cut your throat. That’s why most of the time we slept two to a hole. Neither of you were ever really sound asleep. Next morning, you got up, and if it had rained, you’d be soaked, and then you ate your cold mess breakfast, again wondering if you were going to live that day.”
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Men became terribly numb to the death around them. Bodies lay for days within yards of foxholes, swelling in the sun, beside the carcasses of livestock. “After a couple of days, the smell became unbelievable,” recalled Bob Slaughter of Company D. “Bodies would blow up into a purple balloon, and the smell would stay with you, always with you. . . . I was out there forty-two days without changing socks, without changing underwear. It was hell every day. You get up at 3 A.M., go after the next hedgerow, fight for that hedgerow, then get knocked back a hedgerow, lose half your company, and then get men straight from the states who couldn’t fire a rifle. It just got worse.”
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Roy Stevens also ate hastily prepared K rations only yards from the dead. When he looked at the corpses, he mostly felt pity and envy. One day, as Stevens crawled through a hedgerow, he came across a dead GI. Stevens looked at the man’s face. “He doesn’t have anything to worry about,” Stevens thought. “Maybe he’s the lucky one.”
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Surviving the next firefight was now all that mattered. Nonessential weapons and kit were quickly dumped. Whenever possible, machine guns were salvaged from the battlefield—the Yanks needed all the firepower they could get against the Germans’ MG-42s. The rule that chin straps be buckled was universally ignored.

Dead Germans lay everywhere, along every road, in every hedgerow. “I used to love to take pictures off the dead Germans—all of them had pictures of naked women,” recalled Bob Sales. “The prisoners we took would say: ‘Look, wife, wife.’ They were naked most of the time. I’d take a look, give the picture back. But I’d always keep their watches. Man, I had a damn bag full of watches, and several pistols. That German technology! . . . Word got back one time I’d been hit. They were fighting over my bag back in the kitchen!”
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It was now impossible to tell officers from noncommissioned ranks. Even the greenest “ninety-day wonders” quickly learned to strip off insignia that made them prime targets for snipers. “Even Colonel Canham looked like the rest of us,” recalled Roy Stevens. “The only way you could tell his rank was by looking at the back of his helmet.”
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Just two weeks after D-Day, a 35th Division lieutenant, fresh to the frontlines, came across a group of 29ers. Their uniforms were barely recognizable, the Blue and Gray patches faded and often torn, their assault jackets slick with oil, dirt, and sweat. “We found all of the men wearing their field jackets reversed. The field jacket had a kind of shiny, almost sailcloth kind of material. It reflected a lot of light.”
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By turning the jacket inside out, the men had made themselves less obvious; some had then stained it with mud and grass.

Bob Slaughter’s jacket was also unrecognizable. Since landing on D-Day, all but a couple of his buddies from Roanoke had been killed or wounded. Slaughter thought his number would also come up soon. One afternoon, he was ordered to take command of a defensive section badly exposed to enemy fire. He crawled forward and finally got to an observation trench on the frontline.

“Don’t stick your head up,” a sergeant warned. “There’s a sniper. He’s killed several riflemen.”

“Goddamn,” said Slaughter, “we got to keep a look out in case those Germans sneak up on us.”

“OK, you go ahead and do it.”

Slaughter had to prove he was not afraid. “So I stuck my head up and wham! God almighty! I felt like a baseball bat had hit me in the head. My helmet flew off. My eyes were all swollen. I’d not been up there twenty seconds and he drilled me. My ears were ringing. I saw a million stars. I’m on all fours down in that foxhole, and the blood is just pouring out.”

Slaughter looked at the sergeant.

“Get me a medic!”

The sergeant’s eyes bulged. He stared in disbelief, frozen to the spot.

“Never mind,” said Slaughter. “I’ll get him myself.”
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The bullet had grazed Slaughter’s scalp. Three days later, he was back on the line, his head so tender he couldn’t wear a helmet.

The longer a man spent in combat, the more likely he was to die but also to break down with mental and physical exhaustion. One morning in late June, Roy Stevens came across a Company A man from his boat team: “Back in England, this little feller always had a smile on his face— he was a real nice guy. I’d get on at him for smiling all the time.”

The boy no longer smiled. His nerves had been shot to pieces. “Can I go back to the kitchen?” he asked Stevens. “I don’t feel good.”

“You go back and rest a day or two,” Stevens nodded. “Just go back.”
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The man went back to the canvas tent where Company A’s mess sergeant, Earl Newcomb, was now working day and night to prepare meals for the men. Newcomb knew how uplifting hot chow and a cup of coffee could be to shattered spirits. “So we always tried to set up as close to the boys as we could,” he recalled. “If it was at all possible, we’d get hot meals up to them. They seldom had to eat hard tack.”
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The boy who no longer smiled ate his first real meal in days, went outside, dug a foxhole, got into it and then shot himself to death. “He couldn’t take it no more,” recalled Stevens. “Don’t remember his name. But I’ll never forget his face, the way he smiled all the time. He was maybe nineteen—at most.”
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Three weeks after D-Day, Yanks were shooting themselves in extraordinary numbers. As he dug in one evening, Stevens tallied up how many men in Company A had received SIWs (self-inflicted wounds) that day: at least five. The next morning, Stevens again found himself before Colonel Canham, this time being questioned about several men’s wounds. “If you tell me it was intentional,” Canham said, “I’ll make an example of them.”

Stevens told Canham the wounds had not been self-inflicted. “I knew he would have had those men shot,” Stevens later maintained. “He’d have done it himself.”
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Stevens believed that those who put a pistol or rifle to their limbs and then pulled the trigger were not cowards. They were to be pitied—they had taken more than their minds and bodies could stand. As Stevens saw it, they had reached a breaking point which he too would arrive at sooner or later: “A person’s body can’t but take so much. Those boys, they just couldn’t take it any more.”
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By June 30, 1944, Company A had fought to within a few miles of St. Lô, which had been devastated by weeks of Allied artillery and bombing. That morning, Major Thomas Dallas, the 116th Infantry’s 1st Battalion commander, ordered Stevens’s squad of twelve men to clear a machine gun nest blocking Company A’s advance. The squad included Harold Wilkes and Clyde Powers, who had been in Stevens’s boat team on D-Day.

Stevens’s squad set off across a field of tall grass. Behind Stevens walked the squad’s BAR man, a Private William Green, who was several years older than the rest of the men. Green had not used the vital submachine gun effectively; on a couple of occasions, Stevens had been forced to take the BAR from him to provide covering fire in the nick of time.

Many squads came to depend so much on the BAR’s firepower that they often carried at least two of these light machine guns. They were as portable as M-1 rifles but had the power of a machine gun. Unfortunately, they could not fire for as long as the MG-42. The BAR expended all its ammunition, from a 20-round clip, within a few seconds after the trigger was squeezed. Like all bullets used by infantry squads, the BAR’s ammunition created smoke and flashes, unlike the MG-42. Many squads became reluctant to open fire in case the telltale puffs of blue smoke gave away their position.

That morning, Green took his assigned place in the squad but then moved ahead of Stevens as they crossed the field. The squad’s lookout man, a Private Brockman from Charlottesville, Virginia, suddenly saw a booby trap.
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“Wire!” he shouted.

But it was too late. Green stepped on a “Bouncing Betty” mine and died instantly. “That old boy Green took the load meant for me,”
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recalled Stevens. The mine’s ball bearings peppered several others, also killing them, and hit Stevens in “the shoulder, and through the neck and the jaw.”
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Stevens collapsed. Blood gushed from his windpipe. Rifleman Harold Wilkes rushed to his side and applied a pressure bandage. A few minutes later, Stevens was dimly aware of voices around him. His foxhole buddy Clyde Powers was kneeling at his side, undoing his wrist watch.

“You ain’t gonna need that watch,” said Powers, who then relieved Stevens of the watch and his pistol, figuring he wouldn’t see action again.

“Clyde later had the watch engraved on the back,” recalled Stevens almost sixty years later. “He finally offered to give it back but I let him keep it. Now I wish I’d taken it.”
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By July 4, Powers would also be out of action, the victim of severe shell shock caused when an 88mm landed just yards from him. Wilkes was wounded later that month, hit in the shoulder and arm.

From seeing wounds similar to his own, Stevens knew he would die quickly unless he got to an aid station. Incredibly, just 3.5 percent of men who reached a battalion aid station died of their wounds, and almost three-quarters of men treated would return to duty. Eventually, medics arrived and Stevens was taken to an aid station, where his wounds were dressed, and then to the nearest field hospital—a series of tents shaped like a “T” ten miles from the front.