The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (8 page)

More often than not, Roy Stevens walked ahead of the company beside Captain Fellers. “Fellers and I would get up on the line in a hike, just the two of us up front together.” For hours on end, out of earshot, they would joke, needle each other, and reminisce. “I’d ask Fellers about the old days back home, and kid him about what a tough kid he was, and get him going. We would talk all the way, sometimes for twenty-five miles. At night, he’d sometimes say it was as ‘black as midnight’s ass-hole.’ He just loved saying that. He didn’t waste his words. When he told you something, he meant it.”
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It was not all “yomp” and hard slog. Many evenings, the Bedford boys strolled down winding lanes to nearby pubs where they shared news from home and drank “bitter.” “We called it beer,” recalled Earl New-comb, “but we didn’t know exactly what it was—it didn’t taste like beer I’d been used to. But we consumed it all the same.”
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The few hours sat supping warm pints beside roaring fires would be among the men’s fondest memories of Britain. Weldon Rosazza, Glen-wood “Dickie” Overstreet, and other sociable Bedford boys were soon copying the Brits, treating the lounge of their “locals,” Ivybridge’s “The Sportsman’s Arms” and “The King’s Arms,” as a home away from home where they would tuck into good “pub grub,” play darts, gossip, read the “funnies” in
Stars and Stripes
, and listen to American jazz on the radio.
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Liquor, or “spirits” as the Brits called it, was strictly rationed. What little could be found was drunk within an hour of opening. Around seven, the landlady would cry out: “No more spirits tonight, gentlemen.”
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Corporal Weldon Rosazza, twenty-two, was the neatest and perhaps the most cosmopolitan of the Bedford boys, having lived for a while in Washington, D.C., as a boy. “He was very charming, outgoing, and he had the prettiest dimples,” recalled his cousin, Ellen Quarles. “He hated them and hated to be teased about them.”
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Rosazza had joined the National Guard upon graduating from Bedford High School. His father, Calisto, had worked as a mechanic at Bedford’s People’s Garage. His grandfather had emigrated from the small Piedmont town of Rosazza in Italy in the 1890s.

Twenty-two-year-old Dickie Overstreet, one of eleven children, had labored since he was a small boy for his father who owned a farm just outside Bedford. He and his family had somehow got by in the worst years of the Depression through supplying vegetables and meat to Dickie’s aunt, who owned the Dutch Inn, a boardinghouse in Bedford. “We were very, very poor,” recalled sister Beulah Witt. “My parents were very upset when Dickie went away. He was essential to running the farm. When he left, my father, Wilton, who was a carpenter, went to work in the shipyards in Newport News to keep us all.”
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Just before nine o’clock every evening, silence descended in Ivy-bridge’s pubs as everyone sat and waited for the BBC news on the wireless. The reports were mostly uplifting. On the Russian front, the Germans were in retreat after suffering a devastating defeat at Stalingrad. In Africa, the Axis had been routed, losing 349,206 in dead and prisoners. Now the Allies were working their way up the jagged spine of Italy. Throughout England, General Bernard Montgomery was worshipped with almost the same fervor as Churchill.

The 1st Division, after a shaky start, had proved their mettle, decisively answering the snide British accusation that the GI was an inferior soldier to the Tommy. After the capture of Oran in Algeria, “The Big Red One” had fought its way across Tunisia, defeating Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps, and then spearheaded the invasion of Sicily. They would shortly return to England to prepare for an invasion of France. As for the 29th Division, it was now dubbed by other GIs, somewhat derisively, as “En-gland’s Own.” All but a few dozen of its 15,000 troops had yet to see combat and the division was still the only army based in Britain.
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After closing time at 10 P.M., the Bedford boys would trudge back to their barracks where some would write and read letters—there was precious little time in the day to one’s self. Through letters from relatives, they learned that wartime Bedford was now very different from the small town they’d left in early 1942.

Shortages were starting to be felt and by Saturday nights most shelves in grocery stores were bare. Lines were common outside many stores because there were too few employees waiting on customers. Butter was rationed at four ounces a week; Tuesdays and Fridays were designated national “meatless days.” Kitchen fat was saved to be processed into explosives. To men’s delight, women’s hems rose, in some cases as far as the knee, in a patriotic fashion craze aimed at saving material for uniforms.

Mrs. George P. Parker noted in a bimonthly report to Virginia authorities on morale in Bedford that “labor shortage is acute in rural areas. . . . Women and children are picking berries who have never been in a blackberry patch before. Huckleberries are being brought down from the mountains and are bringing unheard of prices but are in great demand . . . housewives are canning chickens and making sauerkraut.”

Driving for pleasure had been banned and in its place many couples, reported Parker, had started to play croquet. The townspeople were “calm but anxious about the conduct of the war on the homefront. Disgusted with John L. Lewis and his strikers; felt the president was too lenient with them, perhaps remembering his obligation to labor and not unminding of that vote in case of a fourth term for himself.”
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John L. Lewis was leader of the United Mine Workers and had ordered over half a million of his members back to work on May 20 twenty minutes before Roosevelt went on national radio to denounce a two-day strike that had threatened to bring war production to a standstill. Although Lewis called off the strike, he and other labor leaders were granted wage increases.

The underlying cause for Lewis’s militancy was a widespread resentment among blue-collar workers that they were not sharing in the soaring profits of corporations, for whom the war represented no less than a rejuvenation of American capitalism. Approximately seventy big companies controlled three-quarters of wartime production and in the textile industry, for example, profits had risen 100 percent each year. For the bosses at Hampton Looms and other Bedford factories, times had never been so good.

The Bedford boys also learned, through reports in
Life
magazine and
Stars and Stripes,
that while Bedford was adapting well to wartime conditions elsewhere in America there was precious little harmony. As the Bedford boys prepared to fight Adolf Hitler, in several cities racial tensions had boiled over. In June 1943 in Los Angeles, white GIs had attacked blacks wearing “zoot” suits, sparking riots that led to the military declaring the city a no-go area for all American servicemen until it had regained control of the streets. In Detroit that June, where 300,000 whites and blacks had migrated to work in war factories, thirty-five people were killed, 600 wounded, and thousands jailed in two days of rioting.

The most popular attraction for the Bedford boys other than the local pub was the American Red Cross’s Tidworth House, a magnificent mansion that actually adjoined the 29th Division’s barracks and had once belonged to the great British general, Wellington. The stately country home was now given over to entertaining the troops, and the Bedford boys attended weekly dances where, for the first time, many met English girls.

Many of these women belonged to the Land Army, responsible for Britain’s wartime agricultural production. “There were some robust women in that army,” recalled Lieutenant Ray Nance. “They’d pitch you over a fence if you stepped over the line.”
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Delicate or robust, they had all endured three years of strict rationing and bombing, and a well-paid Brylcreamed Yank was the ideal wartime boyfriend. “We had chewing gum, smart uniforms, American cigarettes, and money,” confirmed Roy Stevens. “We really were ‘over-paid, over-sexed and over here’ as the Tommies said.”
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Radio operator John Clifton was particularly successful with English women due to an unbeatable combination of Southern charm, penetrating brown eyes, courtesy of his Cherokee Indian ancestry, and a slim but muscular build. “He was a real Cassanova—he and Rosazza ran together,” recalled Stevens. “They knew how to get the girls. Some of the guys would go with them just to get their rejects. That little Rosazza, I bet he wasn’t more than five foot six. Clifton was a great guy, too, but he’d snatch your girlfriend from under your eyes all right.”
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At Bedford High School, “J. D.” had been a quiet, trustworthy pupil with a gentle spirit. His mother, Minnie Lee, was proud that he had ignored the taunts of anti-Semitic local boys when he had started to date Edith Bornstein, the Jewish daughter of a manager at the Hampton Looms. Edith’s delicate features and wonderful singing voice had captivated Clifton. But in England, according to letters home, he quickly found solace in the arms of an English girl he met at a dance and was soon engaged to her.

Raymond Hoback also fell in love with an English girl. His brother Bedford wrote to their sister, Mabel: “Ray is not married yet but is courting heavy. I saw him the other night with a little Jewish girl, right good looking.”
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Raymond later wrote to his parents about his new girlfriend.“My mother got terribly worried that he would stay on in Britain after the war and marry her,” recalled Lucille, his younger sister.

John Reynolds, Company A’s runner, fell for an American, Kathleen Bradshaw, a nurse from Quinby in Virginia, who was working in a nearby hospital. According to relatives they were soon so in love that it seemed certain they would be married when they returned to Virginia after the war.

One of seven children, Reynolds, twenty-one, was remarkably close to his mother, Willie, whom he had begged to let him join the National Guard so he could be with his friends. “It was like they had a special bond with each other,” recalled sister Marguerite Cottrell. “She would spend a lot of Sunday afternoons just reading his letters over and over.”
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When war had broken out, Willie had bitterly regretted she had agreed to John’s joining the National Guard. As a runner, Reynolds was responsible for ferrying messages between Captain Fellers and battalion headquarters.

One night, Company A was invited to a dance organized by English women working in the fire service. “I was talking to a great girl,” recalled Roy Stevens, “and then Fellers comes on over, pulled rank on me, and takes her away! I tell you, he got the biggest kick in the world out of that! He laughed about it for a long time.”
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From their marches together, Stevens knew Fellers’s marriage was pretty much on the rocks. “Fellers and his wife had fallen out. Before we went overseas, I’d heard through the grapevine that they were about to separate. He called her the blonde bomber but otherwise never said too much about her—he’d just go out at night and have a ball.”
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Fellers also enjoyed a platonic relationship with a local widow, a Mrs. Lunscomb, who was soon mothering him and several other officers. “She kind of adopted him,” recalled Fellers’s younger sister, Bertie Woodford. “She lived on a farm and would fix Taylor hot meals. . . . Taylor said he couldn’t believe she had a barn right next to the house.”
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Back in Bedford County, where cleanliness was next to godliness, swine were kept much farther from the kitchen.

Within a year, Sergeant Clyde Powers would be considering marriage to a sweet-natured “rose” named Pam Roberts whom he met in Plymouth; Sergeant Roy Stevens would be dating a chirpy Liver-pudlian, Mickey Muriel Peake;
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and company clerk Pride Wingfield would be seeing Doreen, Mickey’s cousin. They shared cigarettes, taught their girls to jive and jitterbug, and tried to forget the war. The next dance, the next pub, the next forty-eight-hour pass were all that mattered.

When the Bedford boys ventured into towns and cities, they saw how fleeting life could be. Since 1939, there had been over 295,000 dead and injured in air raids. John Wilkes wrote Bettie: “It is very nice to know our homes and towns aren’t being bombed as they have over here.”
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Bombed-out streets and orphaned children, meager meals, and nightly blackouts were continual reminders of the suffering and sacrifice of wartime Britons. They worked, on average, fifty-hour weeks and subsisted on rations that would have been unimaginable back in Bedford. Most had forgotten what fresh eggs, real coffee, a sweetened cup of tea, or an orange tasted like. But three years of total war had not dented their resilience nor diminished their generosity. Many families boarding GIs saved rations to provide birthday cakes and other treats.

Passes in hand, some Bedford boys took their English dates to the grave of Pocahontas, the Indian princess from Virginia, who was buried at Winchester. Some visited another Virginian—Nancy Astor, Britain’s first female MP, who invited groups to tea and sandwiches. Astor had been born near Charlottesville, one of the 116th Infantry’s hometowns. Rumor had it she had lobbied the American high command so that the Virginia boys would stay in Britain as its principal army of defense, long after other Yanks had been sent into battle.

Others from Company A headed straight for the nearest train station, bound for London, specifically Piccadilly Circus. “That was where the ladies, or rather the women, hung out,” Roy Stevens explained.
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As often as not, the men were overcharged for everything they bought in London, and sometimes fleeced by canny English “gals” who could see a horny Yank coming a long way off, even in the blackout. Roy Stevens lost a month’s pay when his libido got the better of him and a buddy one night: “We met these two girls and were going to have a great time with them. They said: ‘You give us some money and we’ll get all of us a room.’ We handed them some money but didn’t see them again.”
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