THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, June 6, 1996 TAG: 9606060388
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY WENDY GROSSMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BEDFORD LENGTH: 92 lines
Melancholy hangs with the mountain mist over this Blue Ridge town of antique stores and historic homes, a leftover of a great and terrible morning 52 years ago today.
Twenty-three of the town's young men died on a storm-tossed Normandy beach that day, casualties in the largest air, land and sea invasion in history.
Thousands of American farmboys and factory workers, schoolboys and city kids fell around them. But Bedford, then a burg of 3,200 people, paid a steeper price for the D-Day victory than most American towns: the highest per-capita death toll in the invasion.
``The telegrams were just coming in,'' recalls Lucille Boggess, whose two older brothers were killed in the first wave of troops to wade ashore. ``If you didn't have a relative lost or wounded, you knew someone.''
The memory of that day, those telegrams, fuels the town's drive to build a memorial to its own dead - as well as more than 6,500 others who died that day, and the quarter-million troops, sailors and airmen who survived the fighting.
The Roanoke-based National D-Day Memorial Foundation, a group of veterans and volunteers, plans to build an $8 million, 10-acre memorial on a hilltop overlooking Bedford.
Divided into monuments depicting D-Day's planning, combat and casualties, the memorial would boast reflecting pools, statues of soldiers hitting the beach, a museum and a visitors center, anchored by a 44-foot stone arch emblazoned with ``Overlord,'' the invasion's code name.
``I think,'' Boggess says, ``it'll be a place we can all go and have our quiet moments, and reminisce and be alone.''
They waded ashore amid the smell of gunpowder and burning flesh, past their already dead friends, shells bursting overhead and machine-gun fire raking the sand before them.
Mines exploded. Tanks burned. Screams filled the air.
The 170 men of Company A, 116th Infantry Regiment - part of the only National Guard unit to land on Omaha Beach that day - were cut to ribbons. Ninety-one died. Only 15 escaped injury.
Of the 35 Bedford men in the company, 19 died in the first 15 minutes of fighting. Four others died in the hours that followed.
``There was dead laying everywhere,'' says Robert Sales of Madison Heights, Va., who watched many of his Bedford friends fall. ``Bodies floating in the water with the tide coming in, washing them everywhere.''
Burdened with 60-pound packs, unbalanced by the surf, slowed by loose sand, some of Company A's soldiers died even as they left their landing craft. Others were shot as they dashed, bayonets fixed, across 700 feet of open beach.
``My uniform was full of water, three times what it should have weighed,'' says Bob Slaughter, a squad leader who followed the Bedford soldiers ashore. ``I was stumbling and running and I accidentally shot my rifle on the way across the beach.
``I saw this one lone GI was struggling to get across the sand in ankle-deep water, having trouble running. The Germans shot him and he was screaming and asking for help. Our medic ran out and he got shot.''
When Slaughter crouched behind a sea wall to clean his rifle, he slipped off his jacket and saw that it was riddled with bullet holes.
We wanted to depict in the design itself, for the visitor to embrace, what confronted the soldier on that day,'' says Richard Burrow, the memorial foundation's executive director. ``It was very intimidating.''
Roy Stevens, one of Bedford's two living D-Day veterans, notes that the grief-stricken town built a small memorial after the invasion. The bronze plaque stands in the shade of a mammoth magnolia tree, in front of the red-brick courthouse.
It's rare that he isn't moved by the memory of his twin brother, Ray, who died that day, as he walks by, he says.
Not all veterans are gung-ho about building a larger monument, arguing that the money it would cost should be spent instead helping living veterans.
But Stevens backs plans for the larger memorial, predicting that the hilltop will serve as a reminder about ``what freedom meant to us, and that it doesn't come free: Somebody has to pay for it.''
The foundation's task is daunting: Created in 1989, the group has raised only a quarter of the memorial's price tag, although its leaders point out that the donations it has received came unsolicited from veterans.
Eager to finish the project while many D-Day veterans and the civilians who remember the day are living, the group is now gunning for a 1999 completion.
``We can't let people forget it,'' Slaughter says. ``Ten years ago, D-Day was all but forgotten. It took the 50th-anniversary commemorations to put it back on the front burner.'' ILLUSTRATION: ARTIST'S RENDERINGS
The memorial, which will cost $8 million, will mark the deaths of
the 23 Bedford men and more than 6,500 others who died in the June
6, 1944, invasion.
Plans for the 10-acre site include reflecting pools, a museum and a
visitors center. A 44-foot stone arch will be emblazoned with
``Overlord,'' the invasion's code name. by CNB