Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 29, 1994 TAG: 9404290134
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: MONETA LENGTH: Medium
The history lesson at Staunton River High School on Thursday was a blast.
A blast of World War II-era gunfire, that is.
"We want our kids to understand vicariously what went on," principal Robert Ashwell said. "The sacrifice, the pain, people went through."
And you can't get much more vicarious than a burst of semiautomatic gunfire at close range.
So Thursday, Ashwell and some of his fellow educators brought in a small arsenal of World War II-era guns and fired them in front of about 100 students who gathered in the outfield of the school's baseball diamond.
It was, to be sure, an unusual show-and-tell, one that required a county sheriff's deputy to be on hand to supervise the proceedings.
But for Ashwell, it was a way to bring to life an important chapter in American history - one in which Bedford County played an especially painful role.
June 6 marks the 50th anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of France that broke the Nazis' iron grip on Europe. Army units whose rosters were filled with men from Bedford County stormed the beach in the first wave and suffered grievous losses; 19 Bedford men died that day on "Bloody Omaha."
Or, as American studies teacher Glenn Ayers somberly intoned to the students Thursday: "Our soldiers from Bedford went ashore at 6:36 a.m. By 6:45, most of them were dead or wounded. By 7 o'clock, the company was inert, leaderless, reduced to a small survival party, and you'll see the kind of firepower that caused it."
Ashwell, a Bedford County native who had relatives who survived the carnage on the Normandy beach, grew up listening to their stories as he sat on the front stoop of a country store in Huddleston.
"You'd see these guys in late middle age, which is what they were when I was a child, and when these guys would talk about their exploits and experiences, you'd see the years shed off of them," he said. "Even as a kid, when I heard them ... I knew I was listening to a part of history."
And there's one line he remembers most. It was the way one of his relatives described the sound of the guns at D-Day. "He described it as a constant roar, like 100,000 thunderstorms."
Thursday, Ashwell tried to give some of his students - plus visiting contingents from Staunton River Middle School and cross-county rival Liberty High School - a sense of what that would have been like.
Ashwell brought in an M1 carbine, like the kind used by many American soldiers during the invasion. German teacher Kyle Remppies contributed a British Enfield and a Belgian FN49 - the latter of which featured the same 8mm Mauser action that the German soldiers used.
For a target, Ashwell stacked up some old railroad ties and lined up a row of water-filled milk jugs. "These have the same density as the human body," he announced.
Then, the shooting started.
First, Ashwell squeezed off a shot from an ordinary .22 he uses for squirrel hunting.
The thunderclap from that rifle was enough to make eighth-grader Leiben Patrick gasp.
Next, Ashwell and Remppies progressively increased their firepower, until finally Remppies squeezed off a semi-automatic round that splintered the crossties and shredded the milk jugs into tiny bits of plastic.
The students watched, slack-jawed and silent. "You need to look at this," Ashwell declared, holding the remains of one mangled milk jug. "This it what it did to you. Kind of sobering isn't it?"
The students nodded in agreement.
Ashwell clearly found his mark, with both his carbine and his class.
As they headed back to class, the students talked quietly among themselves about what they'd just witnessed - and imagined what a previous generation of Bedford kids had gone through on the invasion beaches.
"I admire the people that went in there," said eighth-grader Erin Lynch. "I don't see how those people can live with all the memories, all the friends they lost."
by CNB