The Bedford Boys: The Town That Lost Everything in Fifteen Minutes

The small Appalachian market town of Bedford, Virginia had a population of roughly 3,200 people in 1944. It was a town where everyone knew everyone — where the Western Union office was run by a woman named Elizabeth Teass, who had grown up with half the families in the county. It was the kind of town where the National Guard unit drew its roster almost entirely from the same streets, the same churches, the same high school graduating classes.

Company A of the 116th Infantry Regiment, 29th Infantry Division, was that unit. And on the morning of June 6, 1944, Company A was among the first waves to land at the Dog Green sector of Omaha Beach — the most heavily defended stretch of sand on the Normandy coast.

What Happened at Dog Green

Captain Taylor Fellers commanded Company A. He had grown up in Bedford. So had his men: Bedford Hoback and his brother Raymond, Frank Draper Jr., John Wilkes, Gordon White, John Earl Schenk, and the twin brothers Ray and Roy Stevens, who were so alike their own mother sometimes struggled to tell them apart.

The ramp dropped from their Higgins boat at approximately 6:36 a.m. The German MG42 machine guns at WN72 opened fire before the boat touched the sand. Captain Fellers was killed before he cleared the ramp. Many of his men died in the water. The sea turned red within seconds. Of the thirty-five men in the first wave from Company A, only a handful would survive the next quarter-hour.

By the time the firing slackened enough to count bodies, nineteen men from Bedford — from a town of 3,200 — were dead. The Stevens twins, Ray and Roy, both killed. Bedford Hoback, whose body was later identified only because his Bible could be found in his pocket, washed ashore with his name inscribed on the flyleaf. Raymond Hoback, his brother, died alongside him.

The Telegrams Keep Coming

Elizabeth Teass worked the telegraph at the local Elks National Home office. On July 17, 1944 — six weeks after D-Day — the first casualty telegram arrived. Then another. Then another. She knew the Hoback family. She knew the Stevens family. She had seen these boys grow up. Over the following days she would personally deliver notifications to families whose addresses she had known her entire working life.

The telegrams came faster than was psychologically survivable. Bertie Stevens, mother of the twins, received both telegrams in close succession. Two sons, one morning on one beach.

Private Harold Wilkes had been writing to his family until the last week of May. His final letter, written from England and postmarked May 28, said little about what was coming — the censors would not have allowed it — but mentioned that he hoped to be home before too long. His family received his death notification before his letter arrived.

The National D-Day Memorial

For nearly sixty years, the sacrifice of Bedford's sons was not widely known outside the community. Then, on June 6, 2001 — the 57th anniversary of D-Day — President George W. Bush dedicated the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia. The location was chosen specifically to honor the town's sacrifice.

The memorial stands on a hillside above the town where those boys grew up. It lists their names. It shows the bronze soldiers falling in surf that is, in the memorial's design, deliberately crimson.

Bedford, Virginia did not ask for history to remember it this way. But history found it anyway, at 6:36 on a Tuesday morning in June, in the cold water off a French beach called Dog Green.