The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (29 page)

I mourn for you in silence
No eyes can see me weep
But many a silent tear is shed
While others are asleep.
Never did I know that the gift that I sent
Would mean so little to you on your birthday, June tenth;
It will always break my heart and will cause many a tear
Just to know your burial day would have been your thirtieth year.
²²

The poem was from Naomi Newman, Taylor Fellers’s wife.

Nearly six weeks had now passed since the invasion. Families and loved ones were frantic with worry. “We all knew something terrible had happened,” recalled Helen Stevens, then a twenty-year-old factory worker. “It was like waiting for an earthquake.”
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S
UNDAY, 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. The church was typical of many in Bedford: a small, white wooden building with one room that held a congregation of fifty people. Though just fifteen, Lucille sometimes taught a Sunday school class there. Her father, John Samuel Hoback, was the church treasurer.

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.
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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.”
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Perhaps half an hour later, there was another knock on the door. Outside were several members of the congregation, wondering why the Hobacks were not at church. The service was abandoned and instead the churchgoers gathered to pray at the Hobacks’ home. Later that morning, others brought food over. It was also that morning that Lucille’s parents drove to the home of his fiancée, Elaine Coffey. Somehow, they would have to break the news that she would not marry their son.

Elaine was getting ready to go to church when she heard the knock on her door. “Bedford’s parents didn’t say anything,” she recalled. “They just handed me the telegram. I read it, turned around, and went back in my home. I couldn’t cry. It was too much. I went to my room and lay on the bed. I didn’t want to see nobody for a long time. I lay there all day. I didn’t go anywhere for a week. Then I went back to work.”
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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 night, news reached town of the death of another Bedford boy in Company A, thirty-four-year-old Andrew Coleman. He had passed away peacefully at the Ashford General Hospital in White Sulphur Springs in West Virginia, finally succumbing to the kidney disease that had kept him from joining his friends on Omaha Beach.

The next morning, July 17, 1944, just after 8 A.M., twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth Teass was dropped off near Green’s drugstore on the corner of North Bridge and Main streets. She entered the store, passed the soda fountain and a couple of teenage soda jerks working there, then the prescriptions counter and finally walked through booths to her small Western Union office at the rear of the store, a polished wooden booth behind the cosmetics counter. Teass had worked at Green’s since 1942 after graduating Bedford High School.

At several booths customers chatted and sipped freshly brewed coffee. “Many Bedford men gathered there every morning,” recalled Teass. “Businessmen came by. And it was as if we were all a big family— lawyers, doctors, the town’s undertaker, Harry Carder.”
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Several regulars browsed the morning papers and discussed the news. Coca-Cola had produced its billionth gallon of Coca-Cola syrup. Over a hundred children had died in a fire in Connecticut started by inept fire-eaters at a circus. In France, the 29th Division was fighting desperately in the outskirts of St. Lô after a month of deadly stalemate.
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Those reading reports about the battle of Normandy that morning could not know that hardly any men who had landed with Company A on D-Day were still fighting. On July 11, the last Bedford boy who saw action on D-Day, Charles Fizer, had apparently been strafed and killed by the Luftwaffe as he and several others lay sleeping: “They had been out on the front and had come back to rest. They were so tired and worn out they didn’t dig in. They just lay on top of the ground.”
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Of those who had trained with the Bedford boys in England, only medic Cecil Breeden, Sergeant John Laird, Gil Murdock, and George Roach remained in combat with Company A.
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The previous morning, July 16, John Barnes had been wounded in the head by shell fragments a few hours before a reinforced Company A had “jumped off” for the final slog into St. Lô.

It was now 8:30 A.M. in Bedford. Elizabeth Teass switched on the teletype machine for receiving telegrams and then pressed a button that sounded a bell twenty-five miles away in the main Western Union office for central Virginia in Roanoke. All telegrams came to Bedford from this office. She then typed: “Good morning. Go ahead. Bedford.”

Words emerged on a strip of paper chattering out of the printer. “Good morning. Go Ahead. Roanoke. We have casualties.”

Teass’s heart sank as she read the first line of copy: “The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret.”
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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. Within a few minutes, as Teass watched in a “trance-like state,”
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it was clear that something terrible had happened to Company A. “I just sat and watched them and wondered how many more it was going to be.”
¹⁰

The telegrams kept coming. Teass fed the ticker tape into a small barrel of water where the adhesive on the back of the tape was moistened. Using a large thimble, she then ran the tape onto pieces of Western Union stationery, snapping the tape every couple of inches to form a new line. The job required intense concentration and neatness, and Elizabeth took great pride in her work.

“Naturally, I was in shock,” recalled Teass. “I was so afraid the news would be leaked before the addressees on the telegrams were notified. I didn’t want somebody phoning up a relative, a mother say, and telling them before they’d gotten the telegram. That would have been just terrible.”
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For a long time, the teletype machine clattered, spitting out telegram after telegram. When it finally stopped, Teass thought the messages of condolence were over but a few minutes later another stuttered out. “I don’t remember who came first or when,” she recalled. “But I do remember there were a lot of Johns—John Schenk, John Wilkes, John Dean. . . .”
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Green’s caretaker, a “very kind”
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man in his forties called Frank Thomas, usually delivered telegrams around town. But most of the messages that morning were for relatives who lived in surrounding areas on farms. Teass looked around the drugstore. She asked for help, explaining that she needed someone to deliver telegrams as soon as possible. Near the soda fountain sat the town’s undertaker, Harry Carder, “a real small man with a quick step, very polite, always in a navy or black suit and white shirt.”
¹⁴
He quickly left with a telegram.

Teass spotted Sheriff Jim Marshall and the local doctor, Pete Rucker, a bespectacled man in his sixties with thinning hair, who had been present at the births of several of the Bedford boys. He had an office nearby on East Main Street opposite the post office. “Back then, when you got sick, you called the doctor and he came to your house,” recalled Teass. “Pete Rucker—he born me and my brother on my Daddy’s farm. Lord have mercy, those were the good days.”
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Teass gave Marshall and Rucker a telegram each. That left several more. Most were addressed to farms miles from town. She made a quick list of people in town still driving cars, picked up the telephone, and dialed Roy Israel at his office. Israel, a former cowboy from Texas, ran a taxi company and drove a Cadillac. He often came by Green’s for a coffee and to chat when business was slow.

Israel took a telegram, got a signed receipt from a relative of the deceased, and returned an hour later to pick up another. “Elizabeth, don’t look for anyone else to take them,” he said. “From now on, I’ll take all of them in the county. Just call me when another comes in and I’ll use my taxi and take it out.”
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Israel would stay with family members if they were alone until relatives or neighbors could be found to comfort them. “I’m sure he was nice and compassionate to the families he delivered them to. He was a wonderful, kind, dependable man,” Teass remembered.
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Teass didn’t want the whole town to panic because of rumors. But before Israel had returned to pick up another telegram, news of the tragedy had spread like wildfire from street to street and factory to factory.
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Viola Parker may have received the first telegram. It confirmed that Earl was missing in action. “You’re so hit that you don’t cry, you don’t do anything,” she later said. “I thought, ‘Well, I’d better dust.’ . . . I dusted the whole house.”
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Viola then took her daughter Danny in her arms, left the house and began to walk towards the Peaks of Otter where she and Earl had courted.

“Well, Danny,” she finally said, “we’re going to make it . . . we’re going to make it.”

But she wasn’t sure, and the longer she walked, the more she began to wonder: “What in the world am I going to do?”
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Back at Green’s drugstore, Teass was still snapping pieces of ticker tape and laying them on Western Union stationery. “I had a job to do and a responsibility,” she recalled. “I don’t remember crying, but it was shocking to get so many messages and keep them confidential and find someone to take them out to the families.”
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Teass took a break sometime that morning. A terrible pall had fallen over Bedford: “It was one quiet, still little town. Everybody’s heart was broken. With a lot of the boys, if you didn’t know them, then you knew members of their family. It was a very sad time. Fine young men had gotten killed.”
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Across town, Elva Newcomb was working the first shift at the textile mill, Hampton Looms. The whole factory seemed to be on tenterhooks, a terrible anticipation filling the corridors and machine rooms. “Several of the boys’ daddies and sisters and wives worked with me,” Elva recalled. “There was a large door at the entrance, and that day they left it open.”
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Elva had only to glance up from her work to see who was coming and going. That morning, she could barely look away from the door.

At the Belding Hemingway factory, workers were also dreading the worst. At roughly 9:30 A.M. a manager approached a room where Bettie Wilkes sat opposite her sister, Mildred.

Mildred saw the manager and motioned him to stay outside.

“I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” said Mildred.

“Okay,” said Bettie.

Mildred left. One after another, Bettie’s co-workers also got up and walked out until Bettie was left alone in the department. In the front office, Frank Draper Jr.’s sister Verona saw someone whispering about telegrams. Finally, Bettie went to see what was going on. In the hallway, she saw her sister rushing back to the department.

“We’ve gotta to go home,” Mildred blurted.
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Bettie burst into tears. The factory manager, Mr. Horne, drove Bettie and Mildred to their apartment. Nothing was said. “I knew if the news was good,” Bettie recalled, “they would have said something right away.”
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It was official. The love of her life was dead.

At the Rubatex factory, a few hundred yards from Green’s drugstore, twenty-year-old Helen Cundiff worked in the shipping department on the second floor, not far from Frank Draper Jr.’s mother, Mary. “The minute [Mary] got a telegram, she was out of the place. She went home and never came back. Frank’s father never got over it either.”
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Back at her apartment, Bettie Wilkes heard crying. The sisters of two other Bedford boys shared rooms across the corridor. They had also received telegrams: John Dean, one of seven brothers in service, had fought with Company F and been killed a few days after D-Day; Dickie Overstreet had been wounded on D-Day. “So it was all around our small town and the surrounding farms as the dreaded messages kept coming,” Bettie would later write, “all [twenty-two] of them, with each family receiving their own particular summons to grief and loss.”
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At some point, Bettie collapsed, suddenly overwhelmed by the grief she had suppressed since hearing the rumor of John’s death. Mildred called Dr. Rucker, who rushed over and prepared a sedative. Rucker had been present at Bettie and Mildred’s births.

“This is going to make things better,” said Rucker.

“I just hope you put me to sleep and I never wake up,” Bettie replied.
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Back at Hampton Looms, Elva Newcomb prayed that she would not be called away from her loom. Suddenly, the foreman entered. He walked over to the sister of twenty-six-year-old Private Clifton Lee. It would be years before anyone in Lee’s family would dare mention his death, so devastated were his parents.

It was also that morning that a friend of Verona Lipford called her away from her desk at Belding Hemingway and took her home to the Drapers’ four-room house beside the railroad tracks. “By the time I got home,” recalled Verona, “one of the neighbors had brought the message to my mother that my brother Frank was dead. He was her first born. . . . There was no conversation, just a lot of crying and carrying on. My mother [Mary Draper] was in bed. She had just given up.”
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At Green’s drugstore, Elizabeth Teass suddenly saw Harold Stevens, an older brother of Roy and Ray Stevens. He’d heard about the telegrams from customers at Smith’s market, where he worked on the meat counter, and had rushed over. He was still wearing his white butcher’s jacket, and now stood a few feet from Teass, concern creasing his handsome, tanned face.