The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (33 page)

Other veterans around the world began to share their experiences. Here was a generation that had fought and won a “good” war and then possessed the dignity to keep quiet about their sacrifice. America had suddenly discovered its “greatest” heroes—hundreds of thousands of them.

In 1994, by contrast, Viola Parker had had enough of digging up the past. “People still expect to see [me] crying with a long face,” she said before she died in 1996. “We’ve cried long enough. Let’s do something that lets us love, respect and honor them without being morbid all the time.”
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Viola’s second husband had passed away in 1968. Since then, she had become more somber, less witty, increasingly withdrawn. Many friends felt she had never recovered from Earl’s death, and the loss of the second great love of her life was just too much for even the most resilient of the Bedford widows to endure in one lifetime.

What of the Bedford boys’ parents? How did they feel about the “good” war? Sadly, by 1994 there was only one parent of a Bedford boy still alive: ninety-four-year-old Gordon Henry White Sr. According to a relative, George Sumpter, D-Day had meant only tragedy to him: “Mr. White always said the war took his son and his wife.”

Mr. White’s wife, Rose, had suffered a terrible stroke on February 20, 1948, the day after her son returned to Bedford in a casket. His burial had to be postponed when she fell into a coma but finally went ahead, her family slipping away unnoticed from Rose’s bedside to pay their final respects to Gordon Henry White Jr. He was interred in the family’s corner of the graveyard at Forest Baptist Church. In 1958, Rose was buried beside him, leaving her husband to care for their six children. “It just broke [the] home completely,” said Sumpter.
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To the day he died in 1995, Mr. White couldn’t let go of the past, his grief, nor belongings that had been so precious to his son. He had once refused to put down his son’s beloved shire horse, Major, even though the horse was old and infirm. Incredibly, the horse had lived until 1959.
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Raymond and Bedford Hoback’s mother, Macie, died, like most of the bereaved parents, of old age and a broken heart in the 1970s. For many years, Macie had a deep loathing for Germans, once even refusing to attend her church when a German missionary visited. “She never allowed us to take the pictures of my brothers off the top of her TV,” recalls daughter Lucille Hoback Boggess. “She would never let go of them. As she got more and more feeble, it seemed that she felt they were going to come back. She’d wake up in the night asking over and over: ‘Where are my boys? Where are my boys?’”

The fiftieth anniversary of D-Day was not the end of the saga of Bedford’s lost sons. Given the nation’s new fascination with D-Day, it was hoped that perhaps the first national memorial to commemorate D-Day might be built in the town. For several years, Company D’s Bob Slaughter had been pushing for such a memorial. “After the war, I went to work, finished school, and then I married, had children,” he said. “I didn’t have any time to think about the war or any other thing. At first, I didn’t like to talk to people who had not seen combat. They didn’t know what you were talking about. They didn’t understand.

“Some people would say to me ‘all you think about is war.’ At reunions, we survivors would talk, but it wasn’t done otherwise. Then, around the time I retired, I found out that many people had forgotten D-Day around [Roanoke]. People, especially younger generations, didn’t know that June 6, 1944, was the largest air, ground and sea battle ever fought.”
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Slaughter had formed a committee in 1988 to explore ways to erect a memorial, envisioning a modest statue somewhere in Roanoke, but the project was too ambitious, he was told, for the town to afford. Slaughter’s dream languished until 1994. “Then, with all the publicity about the fiftieth anniversary, people saw that D-Day was worth remembering.”
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Town officials in Bedford were told about Slaughter’s plan and provided eleven acres of land. Slaughter’s committee bought more. When Virginia’s Republican Senator John W. Warner heard of Slaughter’s plan, he introduced legislation in Congress and Bedford was officially made the site for a national D-Day memorial.

Plans and designs were debated. Finally, it was agreed that America’s first national World War II memorial would comprise three core features denoting the key stages of Overlord: the years of preparation, the actual invasion, and, finally, victory in Normandy. There would be an English formal garden, an education center, over eighty acres of landscaping, many life-size bronzes of soldiers. A landing craft would sit in a reflecting pool leading to a wall representing the bluffs and cliffs along Omaha Beach.

A local historian and businessman, Richard Burrow, was brought in to make the monument a reality. Hired in January 1996 as the executive director of the National D-Day Foundation, Burrow set out to raise the many millions needed to build such an ambitious memorial. In October 1997, he was delighted to hear that one of America’s most famous World War II veterans,
Peanuts
cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, wanted to pledge $1 million. Schulz was then asked to head a fund-raising campaign. He and his wife had long known about Bedford’s sacrifice and were eager to give the campaign a jump start. Soon other high-profile figures such as Steven Spielberg, director of
Saving Private Ryan
, also donated significant sums. Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film had included powerful scenes of the first minutes on Omaha Beach.

Burrow’s next challenge was staying on schedule for a planned opening of the memorial on June 6, 2001. In press interviews, Lucille Hoback Boggess said she hoped the memorial would act as a place of solace for veterans from all over the world. “We actually considered Washington to be the wrong place for this memorial,”
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Burrow added just before the memorial was opened by President George W. Bush on June 6, 2001.

Company A veterans too infirm to join 15,000 people at the actual memorial saw President Bush honor them and the Bedford boys on national television: “Here were the images these soldiers carried with them, and they thought of when they were afraid. This is the place they left behind. And here was the life they dreamed of returning to. They did not yearn to be heroes. They yearned for those long summer nights again, and harvest time, and paydays. They wanted to see Mom and Dad again, and hold their sweethearts or wives. . . .”
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The National D-Day Memorial now sprawls across an eighty-eight-acre site and has become a major tourist attraction in Bedford County, bringing much needed revenue to the area. “It seems like a lot of [men] who survived the war almost have a guilty feeling that they survived and these men died,” said Lucille Hoback on the memorial’s completion. “It’ll give them a place to go and have some quiet moments with their thoughts and memories of those who died.”
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On September 11, 2001, just three months after President Bush opened the memorial, over three thousand Americans died in a single day, victims of the worst terrorist attacks in history. That morning, a shaken Lucille Hoback Boggess visited the D-Day memorial. Dozens of people stood in silence.

“I hadn’t had that kind of pain in my chest since I lost my brothers in the D-Day invasion,” she later told the
New York Times
. “So devastating to watch the suffering in New York. And the numbers—5,000 dead— why, that’s the same losses as D-Day.” New York would need a memorial, she added, because the city would stay in pain just as Bedford had.

“This little town was a vale of tears with all those telegrams coming in,” said Roy Stevens. “Not a day I don’t remember [Ray], just like those poor people in New York and Washington have to remember their dead now.”
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Bedford had become a place for the nation to mourn, its memorial a touchstone for generational loss. But some veterans wondered whether the latest generation would be prepared to endure what they had. “I’m not sure if people are up to it right now,” said Bob Slaughter. “The enemy doesn’t come in a uniform. The front lines are going to be cities and water supplies and the air we breathe.”
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A couple of months later, Bedford again hit the
New York Times
headlines. This time, the story was not so poignant. The FBI had been called in to investigate allegations of fraud at the National D-Day Foundation. The prime suspect was Richard Burrow, the man who had the memorial built in time for President Bush’s much-publicized visit in June 2001. Bush had thanked Burrow personally for his hard work.

Burrow was eventually charged with four counts of fraud. It was claimed that instead of waiting to amass enough money to build the $25 million memorial, foundation officials had borrowed it in the hope that donations would come in before creditors demanded their money back. Burrow’s indictment accused him of falsely telling a Lynchburg bank he had collected pledges in excess of $2 million in an effort to gain a $1.2 million loan in June 2001. In October 2002, the National D-Day Foundation filed for bankruptcy, hoping to be able to renegotiate payments to creditors.

Before Burrow was indicted, the foundation’s board members resigned, including a deeply saddened Bob Slaughter and Lucille Hoback Boggess. Slaughter began writing his memoirs and was still tireless in his efforts to ensure that his comrades on D-Day would continue to be remembered. So was Company B’s Bob Sales, a close friend of Slaughter. For many years, he held Company B reunions at his home in Lynchburg. In his enchanting garden, Sales also erected a memorial stone listing the names of his lost buddies. “I’m glad of one thing,” he said. “I never killed a prisoner and I never sent one back when I thought a man would kill him.”
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As with so many whose lives were changed forever by D-Day, Lucille Hoback Boggess continued to dedicate herself to church and community. The first woman elected to office in Bedford County, Lucille became a member of the county’s Board of Supervisors. Whenever possible, she spoke to local school children about Company A and D-Day. “Think what it would be like to take nineteen kids out of a class,” Lucille told them. “That’s what it was like.”

Hoback Boggess also helped organize annual reunions for Company A for over twenty years. Until 2002, candles were lit for veterans who had died the previous year. Sadly, in 2002 there was no reunion for Company A. Too few were alive and well enough to watch yet more candles flicker. Of the 5,000 men who landed on D-Day with the 116th Regiment, less than two hundred were still breathing. It is estimated that 500,000 of their generation die each year. Soon no one will be left to tell what it was like to be on Omaha Beach.

Company A veterans Hal Baumgarten, an ebullient doctor living in Florida, and John Barnes, a retired school teacher in upstate New York, kept going strong. Both wrote books about their experiences. Baum-garten attended the premiere of
Saving Private Ryan
in New Orleans in 1998. His book includes photographs of him with the actor Tom Hanks and director Steven Spielberg.

Seventy-eight-year-old Verona Lipford could still picture her brother, Frank Draper Jr., with a smile on his face that February day in 1941 when he packed his foot locker and left for war. “I have a nineteen-year-old grandson in the marines,” she said. “I wish to goodness he had never gone in. But the recruiter got him. I just hope history does not repeat itself with what’s going on now. They’re nothing but kids over there, don’t know what they’re getting into. My dad always said war makes rich people richer but a lot of poor young boys have to die. He knew that all right. You lose a son, you never get over it. That’s what war’s really about.”
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Eighty-six-year-old Elaine Coffey still wondered how Bedford Hoback was buried and wished his parents had brought his body back home. If they had, she would have been able to put fresh flowers on his grave, as other widows had for so many years. “I wasn’t married to him,” she said wistfully. “So I couldn’t tell them what to do.”
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The Hobacks had decided to leave the brothers together in France, thinking that was what they would have wanted. Raymond’s body was never found. Today, he is listed on a wall of remembrance, a hundred yards from where Bedford Hoback rests beneath an immaculate white cross.

Elaine used to treasure all of Bedford’s letters but then she tore them to shreds one day in a fit of anger. Now all she has is a picture of his old station wagon, which she drove after he died. “War is a terrible thing,” she said, tears in her eyes as she clutched the small photograph. “You wonder why they have it.”
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Roy Stevens came to look back on D-Day with immense pride. “Freedom is not free,” he said when asked to reflect on the loss of his brother and so many friends. He recently battled cancer and was still madly in love with the woman he met in 1946 at Bedford County Fair. He and Helen now have three great-grandchildren.

Eighty-five-year-old Earl Newcomb was, in 2003, still married to the woman he fell in love with before D-Day. And he still cried at the memory of Earl Parker’s saying he wouldn’t mind dying if first he could just see his daughter, Danny.

Today, Danny prizes her father’s letter to her before Christmas 1943, a set of his dog tags, and his Purple Heart. “His body was never found,” she said, “but just a couple of years ago one of the Bedford boys’ relatives sent me his dog tags. I don’t know how they were found. It’s a mystery. But I do know they have my mother’s name on them.”
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Danny also has a colorized photograph of a good-looking young man smiling happily and sporting a red and green plaid tie. A black and white photograph shows Earl wearing a kilt in Scotland in 1943, the year Danny was born.