The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (4 page)

That November, Company A again played war, this time in North Carolina. The entire 29th Division split into “Red” and “Blue” armies which chased each other through woods and frosted river valleys. The Bedford boys again joked and argued around campfires each evening about who had been killed or taken prisoner that day. To the fury of many a 29er, the outspoken broadcaster Walter Winchell claimed that the men of the “29th are hiding in the hills of North Carolina.”
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The military games stretched into early December. The Bedford boys were soon shivering in sleeping bags and cursing army life as never before. When December 7 arrived, they were slogging through North Carolina mud and ice. A bitter wind blew. Their destination was a tented camp at A. P. Hill in Virginia. They would then take trucks back to Fort Meade, where they expected to be discharged and sent home early in the New Year.

As the men trudged along with upturned collars, rubbing their hands together to keep warm and talking about finally getting out of the goddamned army and back to their families and jobs, orders suddenly came along the line that they were to stand down. There was astonishing news. Men quickly gathered around radio sets. That morning, the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

Waves of torpedo-bombers and fighters had killed more than 2,500 American citizens and wounded another thousand. Six of the U.S.’s greatest battleships had been irreparably damaged or sunk:
West Virginia
,
Tennessee
,
Arizona
,
Nevada
,
Oklahoma
, and
California
. In a matter of minutes, an estimated half of the United States’ naval power had been lost. Nearby Hickam Field airbase had been peppered with bombs. The Air Corps lost all but sixteen of its bombers. America had never before been attacked so viciously and effectively.

In Bedford, people also learned of the attack on their radios. Lucille Hoback, twelve-year-old sister of the Hoback brothers, returned from church that Sunday morning and listened to reports with her parents, a sister, and another brother. “Everybody was very worried because we thought it meant the boys would be sent off to war,” she recalled. “That day, my father never left the radio. In the coming days, there was a rush of local men eager to sign up.”
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At Camp A. P. Hill, the Bedford boys reacted with a mixture of shock, outrage, and anger. Roy Stevens, his brother Ray, and Lucille’s brother Bedford Hoback went to see a Gene Autry western that night at a cinema in nearby South Hill, Virginia. Another news flash on the bombing interrupted the movie. The men went to a local bar and started drinking. Bedford described the Schofield Barracks that had been bombed in Hawaii—he had been stationed there in 1936. They ordered more beers, growing angrier with every sip. “I didn’t even know where Pearl Harbor was,” recalled Roy Stevens, “but we had those beers and we got right mad. Man, we were so confident—we were going to wup them and still be home for Christmas.”
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The day after Pearl Harbor, Company A boarded trucks bound for Fort Meade. During the trip, the caravan stopped so that the men could stretch their legs and have a smoke. Second Lieutenant Ray Nance and several other officers gathered in a ditch below pine trees, out of the biting wind.

A few yards from Nance, the 116th’s regimental chaplain set up a portable radio and tuned it to a news station. On a carpet of pine-needles, Nance and his fellow officers soon sat transfixed as they listened to President Roosevelt make what would become perhaps the most famous speech of his Presidency. Dressed in a formal morning suit, Roosevelt stood alone at the rostrum in the House of Representatives and opened a black notebook. The entire Congress then stood in unison and gave him the first joint ovation since 1932.

Roosevelt gripped the rostrum.

“Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked. . . . Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces—with the unbounding determination of our people—we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.”
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The chaplain turned off the radio. Company A clambered back onto trucks. They were “in for the duration.” The buck a day had saved them from poverty. Now it had bought a ticket to the frontlines. As the trucks neared their camp for the night, the Bedford boys did not sing or joke as usual. “We kept our feelings to ourselves,” recalled Nance. “There wasn’t much to say. The president had laid it on the line. We were going to war.”
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I
T WAS AFTER DARK ON
December 8 when the trucks unloaded at Fort Meade. Company A formed up and then marched into the garrison. Extra sentries had been posted around supply dumps and outside the gates: America was now on high alert. In their barracks that night, the Bedford boys wondered what would happen to them next. Would they be shipped out West, bound for the Pacific? Would they be allowed home for Christmas before going to war?

A few days later, Captain Taylor N. Fellers returned from a two-week officer training course in Georgia. The only career military man among the Bedford contingent, Fellers announced that Christmas furloughs would be granted, though they would be short.

A tough disciplinarian and fiercely ambitious, Fellers had worked hard to command his fellow Virginians’ respect. The oldest child of a well-to-do family, “a real tall and lanky country boy through and through,”
¹
he knew the men he commanded more intimately than did any other officer in the 116th Infantry. He had grown up with them. He also knew that Bedford would be looking to him to bring its boys home.

“A lot was expected of Taylor,” recalled his younger sister, Bertie Woodford. “He was always very serious even as a boy and had a very competitive spirit. He was all soldier—everybody thought he would go a long, long way.”
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Nicknamed “Tail Feathers” by fellow sprinters on his high school track team, Taylor was one of six children and had joined the local highway department straight out of high school, eventually becoming a foreman. Bertie, ten years his junior, remembered Taylor doting on her and a sister, Janie, who had polio and was forced to wear braces. He paid for piano lessons for Bertie, ferried her to Sunday school at the local Nazareth Methodist Church, wrote to her regularly, and showered her with gifts at Christmas and birthdays. “He was the oldest in the family and we all looked up to him,” remembered Bertie. “He just felt like he had to take care of us.”
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In 1932, Fellers joined the National Guard. He was promoted to sergeant in 1935 and then took military correspondence courses to qualify for officer training. His job on the highways paid better than most in Bedford County in the Depression and he was able to buy a Buick coupe, a notable status symbol in rural Virginia at that time. In the late-thirties, he joined Mason Lodge No. 245 in nearby Forest, Virginia.

In early 1940, Taylor converted a schoolhouse in his birthplace, Cifax, ten miles from Bedford, into a home, and soon after moved in with his bride, a striking blonde named Naomi Newman. He jokingly told his family, after returning from officer’s training school in Georgia, that one day he would live like a true Southern gentleman, buy a farm, “and get a black woman from Georgia to cook all his meals.”
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His father, Peter Anson Fellers, and mother, Annie Elizabeth Leftwich-Fellers, were immensely proud when they read in the
Bedford Bulletin
that their eldest son would command Company A.

Back in Bedford County, in the weeks after Pearl Harbor, Fellers’s young wife waited nervously to hear from her husband. Several other wives of Bedford men, who shared coffee and gossip in Green’s drugstore on Main Street, were also set on squeezing whatever joy they could from what might be their last Christmas together. Eighteen-year-old Bettie Wilkes had, on August 10, 1941, married Master Sergeant John Wilkes of Company A. When she heard about Pearl Harbor, she vowed to see John whenever and however she could before he was posted overseas. If he couldn’t come to her, she would go to him.

John Wilkes had grown up on a 149-acre farm nine miles south of Bedford, one of eight children. His father, Leo D. Wilkes, a plainspoken man with a strict moral code, worked as a coal miner in North Fork, West Virginia. He would send money and return to the farm whenever he could, but he was much missed by John and his siblings. “Daddy said he didn’t want any of his boys going down a mine,” recalled Dorothy Wilkes Goode, one of John’s sisters. “That’s why he brought us up on a farm. . . . John was all boy. He played ball, protected me, helped my mother with the cows and the two mules we owned.”
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Money was scarce but the Wilkeses never “went hungry or cold.” Their farmhouse was a joyous place, often filled with music. “My Daddy used to say he married my mother because she loved music. We had a record player, and then, when electricity came, a radio, and always there would be something playing. Momma had a banjo, a guitar and a piano. She’d play them all, and John loved dancing to tunes like “Beer Barrel Polka.” He was just a natural.”
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After leaving high school at sixteen, John worked part-time mining feldspar on a local farm. He joined the National Guard to make a few extra dollars and quickly proved himself as tough a soldier as Company A had ever seen. Because of his trustworthiness and immense self-discipline, both inherited from his father, he was quickly promoted to master sergeant. He wanted things done by the book, the army way, or not at all. As with Taylor Fellers, he detested any kind of slacking or insubordination; the men he inspected each morning were careful not to cross him.

“I knew John long before the war,” recalled Roy Stevens. “He used to play a lot of pool in town. . . . We also played poker, and he used to joke about how he was on furlough back in Bedford one time and got into a fight with a fellow called Sam Ruff. Sam was seventy pounds lighter than John, but he just happened to hit him right. ‘That little fella—he broke my nose!’ John would say and then laugh.”
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Bettie Wilkes saw a different man in John: deeply sensitive, romantic, and as passionate as she was about movies and bowling.
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They had met at a football game at her high school, the New London Academy, just outside Bedford. “John and I were probably typical of most young people growing up in the prewar America of the late 1930s,” she recalled. “[We] had not traveled far beyond the confines of the farm or village, but there were things like the jitterbug to be learned at local dances, songs like “Deep Purple” to be sung, money to be saved to see
Gone with the Wind
, a movie which was an unheard-of four hours long! A time to be envied in most respects, safe and carefree.”
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Christmas 1941 in Bedford was not carefree. The community crowded the town’s Methodist and Southern Baptist churches. A
Bedford
Bulletin
editorial advised: “This Christmas season is not a time to give way to forebodings and despair, but rather we should use the anniversary of the Prince of Peace as the most appropriate time in which to dedicate ourselves to the task of striving, with spirit, mind and body, toward bringing to the world the peace and justice he proclaimed two thousand years ago.”
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Special services were held in recognition of the county’s men in arms. After singing “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” congregations prayed, above all, for the safe return of their loved ones. Some parents were confident that the following Christmas the seventy-odd men in Company A from Bedford would be back home and the war over. Others now regretted the day their sons had joined the National Guard.

That Christmas was especially poignant for the parents of twenty-year- old Dickie Abbott, who lived above a beautiful old inn, “The Dutch,” in Bedford. In 1938, aged seventeen, Dickie had begged his father to sign papers allowing him to join the National Guard. Reluctantly, his father had done so. Three years later, with America at war, he now regretted the decision. The papers that had made his son so happy were now a possible death warrant.

Dickie Abbott typified his fellow citizen-soldiers from Bedford. He rode around town on horseback, rolled his own cigarettes from tobacco he grew himself, kept an elaborate scrapbook, and was utterly devoted to his large God-fearing family. There was nothing he enjoyed more than sitting down with them after a long day in the fields and feasting on fresh buttermilk, cornbread, and fried chicken.

Dickie had been raised mostly by his grandmother, Mrs. W. B. Abbott, and shared her infectious sense of humor. A joke was never far from his lips. “He was just a fun guy,” recalled his cousin Morris Scott. “He loved to laugh. You could tell him anything and he’d just laugh.”
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Before he returned to Fort Meade, he promised to write to his family and wanted them to send all their news as often as possible, especially about his grandmother.

For the married men in Company A that Christmas, time was suddenly painfully precious. Every moment with their young wives was to be savored. They made love knowing they might not see them again.

In 1940, twenty-six-year-old Sergeant Earl Parker had married nineteen- year-old Viola Shrader. The couple were eager to start a family as soon as possible. One of three brothers, all of whom would experience combat, Earl had worked at the Piedmont Label Company, which printed labels for canned goods, after graduating from Bedford High School. He had grown up on a 300-acre beef farm just outside Bedford.

Earl’s youngest brother, Billy, who would later become a German POW, recalled Earl’s great passions as a boy being baseball and hunting. Able to hit a dime at thirty-five yards with a .22 rifle, he was forced to take turns with his brothers when they hunted quail and rabbit together with a .410 gauge shotgun. “Every shot counted because bullets were expensive back then,” recalled Billy, who was hunting at age eighty-six. “Earl didn’t have any clear idea what he wanted to do other than get a job that paid money. Like everyone else he joined the guard for the dollar.”
¹²

All too quickly the day came for Earl Parker to leave his young wife and share a ride back to Fort Meade.

“I don’t know how you’d go shoot anybody,” Viola told Earl just before he left.

“If it’s me or them,” he shrugged, “I guess I’ll have to.’”

In bitterly cold weather, in the second week in January, Company A practiced anti-invasion procedures on Cape Henry in Virginia. Their goal was to ward off groups of 1st Division marauders pretending to be the enemy. “Digging gun emplacements in the frozen ground wasn’t easy,” recalled one of the defenders, “but wading ashore from landing crafts through icy surf was worse. Many ‘Leather Necks’ were paralyzed after hitting the icy water and had to be rescued. War is hell, real or otherwise.”
¹³
Ironically, three years later it would be the 1st and 29th Divisions who would join forces to invade Omaha Beach on D-Day.

In April 1942, while the Bedford boys tested new weapons and defended the Eastern seaboard, Britain and the United States set up joint planning staffs to coordinate operations against Nazi Germany. Their ultimate goal was a successful cross-channel invasion intended to defeat Hitler in the west. But such an operation, eventually codenamed Overlord, would be the greatest logistical challenge in military history and would not be feasible until, at the very earliest, summer 1943.

Whenever possible, the Bedford boys tried to get home, clubbing together to pay for gas if they were lucky enough to get a weekend pass and the loan of a car. Earl Parker often drove back with Company A’s clerk, Pride Wingfield, who owned a shiny 1938 Plymouth. Others paid “motor-mouth” Bedford Hoback a buck each way for a seat in his station wagon.

Nineteen-year-old mess sergeant Earl Newcomb usually came home with a friend from Roanoke. But when his friend couldn’t get a pass, he paid Bedford Hoback the buck without a word of complaint. That spring, he had gotten engaged to a feisty nineteen-year-old mother of three, Elva Miller.

Elva was a remarkably resilient and mature young woman, as were many of her working-class peers in Bedford. She had been brought up to work hard and make the best of even the most meager opportunities. Her father had set the example of how to muddle through come what may—he had turned his hand to anything to make a buck, selling cars and running a filling station to make ends meet in 1932 when the Depression was at its worst.

In 1935, Elva had joined the production line at Hampton Looms, the Bedford woolen mill, and she was married not long after. Then tragedy had struck. She was widowed in 1938 when her husband died in a car crash. Before meeting Earl, she struggled to bring up her three small children, Bill, Nancy, and Garland, on little more than her mill wages of $10 a week. While she was bent over a loom from 7 A.M. to 3 P.M. each day, her aunt cared for her children in Elva’s home, a five-room log cabin on the outskirts of town.

Earl Newcomb had joined the National Guard in 1934. The son of a farmer, he dreamed of working the land but was forced, like Elva’s father, to take any job he could find. After a period of unemployment, he was lucky to be accepted into the Civilian Conservation Corps, which ran a CCC camp for unemployed men, mostly from New York, at Fancy Farm in Kelso at the foot of the Peaks of Otter.

The Civilian Conservation Corps was one of the great achievements of President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Nicknamed “Roosevelt’s Tree Army,” the 500,000 young unemployed Americans who benefited from the program planted an estimated three billion trees by 1942 as well as preventing soil erosion on more than twenty million acres. The CCC also brought much needed revenue to Depression-era communities like Bedford where enrollees spent their money.

Earl Newcomb enrolled for two years, pocketing $30 a month and helping to build a road up into the mountains. He also learned to cook in the camp’s mess. On summer maneuvers with the National Guard, he also prepared meals, and this led to his eventually becoming Company A’s mess sergeant.

Elva’s and Earl’s wedding date was set for June 27, 1942. Unfortunately, Earl could not get a pass in time. But Bedford Hoback was due a pass that weekend and agreed to swap his for a later date. “Bedford was due to come home,” explained Elva. “But his brother Raymond didn’t have a pass. So Bedford told Earl to take his pass because he would wait until he could ride home in his car with Raymond. It would be cheaper that way.”
¹⁴
Sadly, neither Bedford nor Raymond made it home that summer: When Earl returned to Fort Meade from his honeymoon, he learned that Company A was moving out.