The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-Day Sacrifice

Dear Mother, I know your worries. This is an awful fight. To lose my only twin brother and suffer the rest of my life. Now fellas, take my warning. Believe it from start to end. If you ever have a twin brother, don't go to battle with him. (3)

The historical facts are legendary--on 6 June 1944, the Soldiers of Company A, 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry Regiment, 29th Division were in the first wave of allied troops to hit Omaha Beach in Normandy. (4) Thirty-four of the Soldiers assigned to Company A were from the rural town of Bedford, Virginia. (5) By day's end, nineteen of these brave men died storming the beach; (6) another three died in the days that followed. (7) Alex Kershaw's The Bedford Boys" is a written memorial to these boys from Bedford and the people they left behind.

The Bedford Boys is a worthy read. Kershaw uses powerful, personal observations from and about the people of Bedford to give a new twist to the very well-documented history of D-Day. These moving interviews separate Kershaw's work from other D-Day oral histories, such as Stephen Ambrose's D-Day (8) and Russell Miller's Nothing Less Than Victory. (9) This review outlines the story of Company A, discusses the book's strengths and weaknesses, and concludes by recommending The Bedford Boys to the reader.

Kershaw paints a vivid picture of life in Bedford prior to the war. Bedford was a small, rural town of three thousand, located near Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. In the 1930s, money was short so many joined Company A for the "dollar-a day" they received while training to help supplement their primary income, (l0) Those serving with Company A did not see this reserve duty as combat training, but instead, looked at their training time as a chance to "play soldier" with their friends. (11) Kershaw portrays the peace time nature of the Company A's pre-war training (12) and provides insight into the anticipation the men and their families felt when it became clear that Company A would be called into federal duty. (13) The Bedford Boys explains how the focus of training changed once the unit was activated before Company A headed overseas. Upon arrival in England, the training continued for eighteen long months. (14) The men grew frustrated as they spent their first eighteen months training in England, while other units headed off to war. (15)

These long months of training were a prelude to D-Day. Kershaw's interviews with Roy Stevens, Ray Nance, Bob Slaughter and other D-Day survivors provide a terrifying, yet awe-inspiring, image of the hours leading up to D-Day, as the landing crafts headed away from their ships and hit the fateful shores of Omaha Beach. (16) The survivors describe the carnage at Dog Green that took the lives of nineteen of Bedford's sons. (17) The interviews tell the tale of the seemingly needless deaths caused by Soldiers overloaded with gear and of the horror of watching a fellow soldier drown. (18) Kershaw relates the heroics of men such as medic Cecil Breeden (19) and Brigadier General Norman Cota (20) as the assault progresses. Perhaps the most moving portion of the book's D-Day section is Roy Stevens's description of scraping the mud from a dog tag on a temporary grave a week after D-Day and seeing his twin brother's name emerge underneath. (21) Through his many hours of interviews with Stevens, Kershaw does an excellent job of describing the survivor's guilt Stevens felt that day and which followed him throughout his life. (22) The personal accounts from surviving veterans, describing the wounds they suffered and their memories of watching their friends die, make the book worth reading.

Kershaw does not let the reader forget that war causes significant stresses on the home front as well. On 6 June 1944, radio accounts informed Bedford's citizens that the invasion of France had begun. (23) For the next several weeks, the news reports informed the people of Bedford that the cost of the invasion was high, but told nothing specific about Company A. (24) Apprehension began to build when some letters sent to their Soldiers were returned home in early July. (25)

On 17 July 1944, life in Bedford changed forever when the local telegraph operator turned on her machine and saw the words, "[w]e have casualties," print across the paper. (26) Prior to this day, there was normally about one telegram a week announcing a Bedford war death. (27) As the machine printed telegraph after telegraph, it became clear "that something terrible had happened to Company A." (28) In all, nine telegrams came that fateful day. (29)

Kershaw shares the heart-wrenching stories of families being notified about the deaths of so many of Bedford's sons, fathers, and husbands. There was no common reaction to the news, although the local paper assisted many in sharing their grief by publishing letters and memorials to the fallen Soldiers in the days and weeks that followed. A good example is a poem written by Mrs. J.S. Hoback, who lost her sons Bedford and Raymond on D-Day:

   Do not say my sons are dead;
   They only sleepest ...
   They loved each other, stayed together
   And with their comrades crossed together
   To that great beyond;
   So weep not, mothers,
   Your sons are happy and free ... (30)

Kershaw explains that many families, such as the Hobacks, remained outwardly stoic, but suffered greatly when outside the public eye. (31)

As the war comes to an end, Kershaw describes the difficulty that some families of the fallen had when they saw surviving Soldiers come back to Bedford. (32) Kershaw tells of the guilt that racked the few Company A men who survived D-Day and the difficulty this guilt caused many of them. (33) Company A's sole surviving officer, Ray Nance, would lie awake at night and ask himself what more he could have done to save the men under his command. (34) Another survivor quickly turned to alcohol to "tr[y] to forget, wash the memories away ... [b]ut [he couldn't]. As soon as that whiskey drie[d] out it all [came] right back." (35) The struggle of these survivors was not lost on their family members. As one survivor's sister explained "[p]eople say the men who died on the beach were the heroes. I think the heroes are the ones who came back and had to live with it for the rest of their lives." (36)

The survivors took pains to remember their fallen comrades in the years after coming home. Ray Nance, in particular, worked to ensure the sacrifice of Company A would not be forgotten. (37) In the 1948, Nance oversaw the re-formation of Company A, which had been disbanded after the war. (38) Ten years later, Nance was instrumental in getting a permanent monument to Bedford's fallen built in town. (39)

Kershaw concludes by fast forwarding fifty years and addressing the attention surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. Kershaw shares stories of the trips different groups of survivors have taken back to the beaches of Normandy and the memories these trips re-kindled. (40) Finally, he explains the successful effort to locate the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford as a means of honoring the sacrifice Bedford made on Omaha Beach. (41)

The main strength of The Bedford Boys is Kershaw's use of the personal accounts elicited during the course of his research for the book. Kershaw conducted over thirty interviews with the survivors and their families. (42) It is not the number of interviews that is impressive, but instead it is the impact the interviews had on these families that makes The Bedford Boys such a compelling read. The act of telling their stories to Kershaw affected the survivors deeply, causing some "eighty-year-old men" to cry as they relived their memories. (43) Kershaw's research touched these men and their families greatly. They sent Kershaw letters to assist him in his research, (44) shared clippings from their scrapbooks, (45) and provided copies of letters sent home during the war. (46)

The Bedford Boys is a relevant story today. The United States recently observed the third anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks; the country continues to regularly hear of the one thousand plus service members who have died in Iraq. The Bedford Boys gives the families involved a sense of how to cope with a tragic loss. As stop-loss policies and involuntary extensions on active duty are announced, the affected service members can look at the citizen soldiers from Bedford as an example of how to proudly serve their nations in a time of war. As policy makers and combatant commanders decide where and when to engage the enemy, they should consider The Bedford Boys in order to gain an appreciation for the human cost of war. In short, Kershaw's work is not simply a book of memories, but a relevant story with guidance that all can appreciate.

The Bedford Boys is not without flaws. One of the book's primary weaknesses is the scope of the project. While a group biography about the members of Company A provides Kershaw with a unique twist on D-Day, he does not fully take advantage of this opportunity to introduce enough of the boys from Bedford. Kershaw cuts many corners to provide his memorial to the people of Bedford in two hundred and forty pages of text. Although he does an excellent job of introducing the reader to his main characters, Kershaw often rattles off too many names in too little space. (47) This rapid fire name throwing is overwhelming and causes the reader to constantly flip back through the book to figure out who is who. As one critic explained in making a similar point, "[t]oo many men are as blurred in print as their faces are in the photo insert." (48)

Further exacerbating Kershaw's rapid fire name throwing is his tendency to waste precious pages on seemingly unimportant details. For example, he devotes an entire chapter to the ship ride across the Atlantic, yet provides little information about life on the home front for the families from the time of mobilization until the days following D-Day. In another part of the book, one learns more about the 116th Regimental baseball team, the "116 Yankees," (49) than one does about the 116th command structure during the training for the D-Day invasion. Similarly, Kershaw spends several pages discussing Eisenhower's decision to postpone the invasion of Normandy. (50) While this is an intriguing topic, this discussion simply did not fit with the flow of The Bedford Boys. Finally, near the end of the book, Kershaw detracts from his focus yet again when he describes the fraud investigation and subsequent bankruptcy of the National D-Day Foundation. (51) Readers would have been better served had Kershaw ignored these tangential issues and spent more time focusing on developing the personal histories of the Bedford boys.

Despite these flaws, The Bedford Boys is worth reading. Kershaw has written a fitting memorial for the men of Company A and their families. Sixty years have passed since D-Day, and World War II veterans are entering the final stages of their lives. Less than two hundred of the five thousand men who stormed the beach at Normandy with the 116th Regiment are alive today, (52) and "[s]oon no one will be left to tell what it was like to be on Omaha Beach." (53) Through The Bedford Boys, Bedford's story of D-Day, etched in the blood-spattered sand at Dog Green on Omaha Beach, will be preserved for future generations.

(1) ALEX KERSHAW, THE BEDFORD BOYS: ONE AMERICAN TOWN'S ULTIMATE D-DAY SACRIFICE (2003).

(2) U.S. Marine Corps. Written while assigned as a student, 53d Judge Advocate Officer Graduate Course, The Judge Advocate General's Legal Center and School, U.S. Army, Charlottesville, Virginia.

(3) KERSHAW, supra note 1, at 187 (quoting Roy Stevens in a poem he sent to his mother telling her that his twin brother had died on D-Day).

(4) See id. at 1.

(5) See id.

(6) See id. at 174.

(7) See id. at 208.

(8) STEPHEN AMBROSE, D-DAY JUNE 6, 1944: THE CLIMATIC BATTLE OF WORLD WAR II (1994).

(9) RUSSELL MILLER, NOTHING LESS THAN VICTORY--THE ORAL HISTORY OF D-DAY (1993).

(10) See KERSHAW, supra note 1, at 7.

(11) See id.

(12) See id. at 10.

(13) See id. at 17.

(14) See id. at 27.

(15) See id. at 79.

(16) See id. at 121-28.

(17) See id. at 129-37.

(18) See id. at 125.

(19) See id. at 152-54.

(20) See id. at 155.

(21) See id. at 174.

(22) See id. at 216-21.

(23) See id. at 165.

(24) See id. at 190.

(25) See id. at 191.

(26) See id. at 199.

(27) Id.

(28) Id.

(29) See id. at 205.

(30) Id. at 207.

(31) See id. at 208.

(32) See id. at 218.

(33) See id. at 215-18.

(34) See id. at 215.

(35) Id. at 216.

(36) Id. at 217.

(37) See id. at 225.

(38) See id. Company A's long heritage continues today. On 4 March 2004, the men from Company A, who had recently been called to active duty to deploy to the Persian Gulf, marched through Bedford to the National D-Day Memorial, in memory of their predecessors who died on Omaha Beach. See John Cramer, Bedford Bids Its Boys Farewell, ROANOKE TIMES (Va.), Mar. 4, 2004, at l.

(39) See KERSHAW, supra note 1, at 225.

(40) See id. at 230-31.

(41) See id. at 233-34.

(42) See id. at 243-62.

(43) See id. at 275.

(44) See id. at 9 n.6.

(45) See id. at 45 n.11.

(46) See id. at 46 n.15.

(47) For an example of a better World War II group biography, see HAROLD P. LEINBAUGHT & JOHN D. CAMPBELL, THE MEN OF COMPANY K: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A WORLD WAR 11 RIFLE COMPANY (1985).

(48) David P. Colley, The First Casualties, N.Y. TIMES, Nov. 2, 2003, at 24.

(49) KERSHAW, supra note 1, at 69-71.

(50) See id. at 112-17.

(51) See id. at 235.

(52) See id. at 236.

(53) Id.

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