Band of Neighbors

The Bedford Boys
One American Town's Ultimate D-Day Sacrifice
by Alex Kershaw
Da Capo, 274 pp., $25 TWO HUNDRED MILES southwest of Washington, D.C.--through Charlottesville, just past Lynchburg--lies Bedford County, Virginia. Bordered by the Blue Ridge Mountains, the James River, and Smith Mountain Lake, Bedford covers 764 square miles of the Virginia Piedmont. The county seat, a small town originally named Liberty in 1782, was renamed Bedford in 1870. On June 6, 2001, President George W. Bush dedicated the National D-Day Memorial, built on eighty-eight acres in Bedford County. It is a proper venue.

Only around 3,000 people lived in the town of Bedford in the 1930s, and the Depression had struck the primarily farming community hard. Few farmers earned more than $1,000 per year; women worked long hours at the two small clothing mills in the town for $10 per week; the poorest families gathered spillage from Norfolk & Western coal cars that rumbled through the county. Cash was scarce and precious.

One source of funds was the Virginia National Guard, the 116th Infantry Regiment, part of the 29th Infantry Division. The 29th, composed of Guard units from Maryland and Virginia, was accordingly called "The Blue and the Gray," and had served with distinction in France in World War I. During the 1930s, almost 100 young men from the town and county of Bedford joined the Guard. Service entailed two weeks of summer training at Manassas or, for the lucky, at Virginia Beach, and a one day a week drill at the small Bedford armory. The pay was a dollar a day, $14 for the summer, $1 a week for the drill.

Most of the boys from Bedford, including three sets of brothers--named Hoback, Stevens, and Powers--were assigned to Company A of the 1st Battalion of the 116th Infantry. And it was within Company A that the young men trained together over the years. As a non-Virginian replacement later remembered, "They all knew each other as old friends from home."

In February 1941, with World War II underway in Europe, the 116th Infantry was mobilized, and the men from Bedford were issued new uniforms bearing the patch of the 29th Division. They were told they would be released from active service in one year. But when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, that one year became the duration of the war in Europe. On October 4, 1942, the 116th Infantry arrived in England. Twenty months of training followed. By June 1944, Taylor N. Fellers of Bedford had risen to captain and the command of the 193 men of Company A. His friend from home, Ray Nance, was one of his lieutenants. Thirty-eight men from the town of Bedford remained in Company A.

Operation Overlord, the plan for D-Day, June 6, 1944, called for Company A, as part of the assault by the 29th Division, to be the first unit to land on "Dog Green," about 500 yards wide, and the western-most section of Omaha Beach. They were to cross 400 yards of beach, charge up a gully between 150-foot high cliffs, and secure the town of Vierville-sur-Mer, 600 yards inland. In addition to fortifications on the cliffs and barbed wire entanglements on the beach, the Germans had built a concrete gun emplacement at water level defending the gully. This emplacement contained mortars, armor-piercing cannon, and MG-42 machine guns, which fired a thousand rounds a minute. Naval gunfire and bombing was supposed to destroy these defenses. They failed to do so.

At 12:30 A.M. on June 6, Company A boarded a British freighter, the Empire Javelin, and headed for France. Captain Fellers had checked himself out from a hospital the night before, because, he told Ray Nance aboard the ship, "I want to go in with my friends. If I don't and something happens to those boys, I'll never be able to go back to Bedford again." That morning he also told Nance, after reviewing photos of the defenses at Dog Green, "Ray, we'll all be killed."

At 4:00 A.M., twelve miles off the Normandy coast, Company A loaded into six landing craft, each boat carrying thirty men. Captain Fellers was in the lead boat, number 910. At 6:30 A.M., precisely on schedule, Company A landed on Dog Green. Ten minutes later, 250 yards from the cliffs, Fellers and eighteen others from the town of Bedford were among the dead.

Landing boat 911, which carried five Bedford boys, had been damaged and sunk on the way in. Rescued and landing several days later, three of these five were killed, on June 9, July 10, and July 11. Of the three sets of brothers, both Hobacks were killed as they landed on D-Day; on June 11, Roy Stevens found the makeshift grave of his twin brother, Ray; and Clyde Powers likewise found his brother, Jack. Both Ray and Jack had perished on the beach with Captain Fellers. Twenty-two of the thirty-eight men from the town of Bedford had died in France.

The telegrams started arriving in Bedford on July 17, 1944. The operator watched horrified as names and more names kept filling the ticker tape. The sheriff, a doctor, a taxicab driver, the drug-store owner, a minister, and other townsmen volunteered to deliver them. Later came the letters from the War Department expressing regret for the sacrifice "for home and country." But like all soldiers in all times, the boys from Bedford also died for their friends.

Alex Kershaw is a journalist, screenwriter, and author of the fine biography, "Jack London," and of the forthcoming "Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa." He performed extensive archival research, especially in Bedford, and interviewed veterans, notably Ray Nance, who, though severely wounded, survived the landing and the war.

Kershaw relates the background of most of the Bedford boys, dead and alive, traces their arduous training and relationships in England, and follows their stories and those of their families, often tragic, following the war. His is a worthy addition to the history of D-Day, and a memorial to the small Virginia town that suffered the greatest per capita loss of World War II.

James W. Haley Jr. is a judge in Virginia and recently presided in the Circuit Court of Bedford County.