Boys of Bedford: A Town Recalls Its D-Day Heroes

Long gone are the boys of Bedford, gone these 50 years, lost in the roiling English Channel and on the sands of Omaha, cut down by German pillboxes and artillery shells that blew men and machines and whole boats out of the water.

Gone a half century now, these were the Gold Stars of Bedford, the young men who would never marry their sweethearts or raise families, who would not return to the farm, who would never gather Saturdays at Green’s Drug Store and dazzle the younger boys with stories of heroism on D-day, June 6, 1944.

These men--19 sons of Bedford killed on D-day alone, the largest proportion of casualties for any community in the nation--lie under great oak trees at the town cemetery and under white crosses on the fields of Normandy. For one of them, Raymond Hoback, all that was found was his Bible, tossing in the surf, scooped up by another soldier trudging onward into France.

John Wilkes would never again drive down Main Street in his tan station wagon with the wood siding, ferrying his buddies and their dates to picnics out on Smith Mountain Lake. Elaine Coffey and Bedford Hoback, engaged to be married after the war, would never move into their little farm home.

Ray Stevens would not shake his brother’s hand in France, and Earl Parker would never ever see his baby daughter.

Such a high price for one small town. In 1944, Bedford had just 3,400 residents, and only one taxi driver, one undertaker and one sheriff. It fell to them to deliver the telegrams, driving past the farm fields rich in summer grain, the hillsides covered with loblolly and hardwoods, the clay foothills at the break of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

They went to the Deane home and the Schenk home and the Reynolds home, and stopped twice at the Hobacks; they lost two sons.

Today, their names are engraved in granite on a memorial on the lawn of the Bedford County Courthouse. The granite was carved out of a Vierville-sur-Mer cave where the men of Company A, 116th Infantry, the “blue and grey” 29th Division, landed on Normandy.

There will be a modest courthouse ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary, as there have been at other times, because even after all these years, the grief is still borne by their loved ones in this still small town of widows and children.

Saddest among them, perhaps, was Frank P. Draper Sr., so overcome with sorrow that he built a large stone monument atop his son’s grave in Bedford. For Frank Jr., “Juney” as he called him, the father poured out his broken heart on that marble sarcophagus:

“We loved you Juney, dearly loved you, but God loved you best.”

But even that did not cool the grief. One cold January day 20 years ago, Frank Sr. shot himself to death. He now lies buried next to the son he gave to France.

There had been happier times. Bedford back then was known by its motto, the “World’s Best Little Town.”

Local news that first week of June, 1944, was like most of small town America. County Home and Demonstration agents were giving poultry culling lessons. The school board was reorganizing. The Tobacco Growers Assn., big in this part of southwest Virginia, was planning a courthouse meeting later in the week.

And 40 local businesses put out a full-page ad in the Bedford Democrat calling for readers to support the war effort and “Buy Your Invasion Bonds.”

“There’s a day coming when the enemy will be licked, beaten, whipped to a fare-thee-well; every last vestige of fight knocked out of him,” the ad proclaimed. “And there’s a day coming when every mother’s son of us will want to stand up and yell, to cheer ourselves hoarse over the greatest victory in history.”

Then came the day when Elizabeth Teass, working the Western Union machine at Green’s Drug Store, was suddenly inundated with wires that began “The Secretary of War regrets to inform you. . . . “

This was on a Sunday morning in July, six weeks after Bedford families were not only not getting any more letters from their soldiers fighting in Europe, but their own letters to the men were being sent back unopened. Something was wrong.

“Green’s used to be a happy drugstore,” Teass said about the local hangout, a combination drugstore-diner. “It was a lively affair. Everybody was happy there.

“But on this particular morning, Roanoke wired that they had casualties to give us and then they started coming. There was a crowd gathering around, and after the wires had been delivered it was affecting everybody.

“Everybody now was coming down to the drugstore and when it was over, this was a calm, blue Bedford. This was a blue town. So many young men killed.”

Bettie Wilkes learned from a passer-by downtown that her husband, John, who had dreamed of a military career, was killed. “Nothing has been the same since we lost all the men here,” she said.

Viola Parker lost her husband, Earl, and did not know how she would ever tell their 16-month-old daughter. So distraught, she spent the rest of the day indoors, dusting and redusting the furniture.

At the Hoback home, where the family was dressing for Sunday services at the Center Point Methodist Church, the news came that Bedford Hoback was dead. Soon their home was filled with parishioners from the church across the road, offering comfort.

The next morning, while the Hoback children were cranking home-made ice cream in the cellar for their grieving parents, they learned that another brother, Raymond, had also been killed.

Some time later, Raymond’s family Bible arrived in the mail, with a letter from Pvt. H.W. Crayton addressed from “Somewhere in France.” Crayton had plucked the Bible out of the water, convinced that Raymond was alive and probably had just dropped it in the surf.

“You have by now received a letter from your son saying he is well,” Crayton wrote. “I sincerely hope so.”

So sure was he that Raymond was safe, Crayton went on to describe the success of the invasion and the “peaceful and quiet” Normandy beachfront now that the German guns had been silenced.

“The birds have begun their daily practice,” he wrote, “all the flowers and trees are in bloom, and especially the poppies and tulips which are very beautiful at this time of the year.”

Unlike the Bible, Raymond’s body was never recovered.

“It was just too much for us,” recalled Lucille Hoback Boggess, a sister who was just 15 at the time. “My mother was never the same. She later suffered a stroke and lived another 10 years but she couldn’t speak or remember anything.

“It took all of the joy out of our family. No more family picnics. No more family get-togethers. And my mother never forgave the Germans. Once a German missionary came to our church, and she wouldn’t go see him. It was the first time she ever refused to go to church.”

The local newspaper eulogized the dead. In printing their names under the headline “These Bedford Men Will Not Return,” the Democrat said:

“The names of sons of neighbors living next door or on the adjoining farm may be found in this list. Or there may be the names of boys who sat next to some of the readers at school or lads who sold groceries over the counter at a local store.”

They were among 197 men in the company assault group on D-day. In all, 30 of them were from Bedford. They were assigned to several landing craft and then launched across the English Channel.

Roy Stevens, now 74, remembers speaking with his twin brother, Ray, before splitting up on the landing boats. They talked about home and Ray was shaking and he seemed convinced he wouldn’t make it. Ray suggested they shake hands goodby. “No,” Roy told him. “We’ll shake hands in France.”

Some days later, Roy was walking through a makeshift graveyard near the beach when he stumbled across his brother’s dog tags nailed to one of the crosses. “I saw several Bedford boys buried up there,” he said. “None of them made it.”

He also remembers Earl Parker staring at his little girl’s photograph the night before D-day, and his misgivings about the invasion. “If I could only see my baby daughter, I wouldn’t mind dying,” Parker told his buddies. He too perished on Normandy.

Capt. Taylor N. Fellers, before the war a state highway foreman in Bedford, skipped out of an Army hospital to make the landing. He had earlier written home about his men: “I’m beginning to think it’s hard to beat a Bedford boy as a soldier.”

At the beach, Fellers and his boat crew were hit by an artillery shell that, to Bob Slaughter, a soldier from nearby Roanoke, “looked like it made Capt. Fellers just evaporate into thin air.”

Ray Nance, one of the few who did return to Bedford, can still see John Reynolds running ahead of him up the beach. “He went down on his knees, and he brought his rifle up as if he were searching for something, and then he fell forward. He was dead.”

He can still hear J.D. Clifton screaming into his pack radio near the cliffs. “Suddenly he yelled that he’d been hit and he died.” And he can see John Wilkes and John Schenk taking heavy sniper fire near their boats, cut down at the waterline.

“You know,” Nance said, “us Bedford boys, we competed to be in the first wave. We wanted to be there. We wanted to be the first on the beach.

“We got our wish.”