D-Day

It is easy to get caught up in the drama of war. Books about generals and admirals fill the military bookshelves. Biography, autobiography and memoir are favorite genres savored by students of war. Books on individual battles and campaigns are a mainstay of military history. In recent years a new angle on telling the story of war has emerged, combining some of the best features of each type of popular military history writing with insights from the home front. This new approach to an old subject shows the real costs of war as families are shattered and the ripple effects of battle influence generations.

Several fascinating studies of the impact of war on particular communities have provided new understanding of the far-reaching cultural consequences of combat. I have read two books which deal with the effects of one battle on a community. The first concerned Bury, a town of 50,000 in England, which suffered the agony of losing 2,000 of its men in the Campaign for the Dardanelles at Gallipoli in the First World War (known then by some as ‘the war to end all wars’). It is a heartrending book about the unromantic true price of war, still felt in 1992 when the book was written. There were no families in Bury untouched by the carnage of that battle. (Hell’s Foundations: A Social History of the Town of Bury in the Aftermath of the Gallipoli Campaign, by Geoffrey Moorehouse).

With the recent commemoration of the Normandy Invasion on June 6th, 1944, I was reminded of another of those books that tells the story of a town in war. The Bedford Boys: One American Town’s Ultimate D-Day Sacrifice, by Alex Kershaw, examines the effects of a single day’s battle several thousand miles from a Virginia town, population, 3,000. As members of Company A, 116th Regiment of the 29th Division, the Bedford boys boarded their British LCAs and went ashore in the first wave of attacks on Omaha Beach on D-Day. The author tracks each Bedford man as much as is possible in reconstructing the chaos of that day. As the lights went out in their hometown on the night of June 6th, nineteen sons of Bedford were dead in the surf and sand of the French coast. Day after day passed as the families of the men who fought on June 6th prayed and waited to hear the news of their loved ones. On July 6th, notices started to trickle into Bedford about the men killed on D-Day.

Alex Kershaw captures the grief and disbelief as family after family were notified of the death of their husbands, fathers, and sons. No other town in America suffered such a one day loss in World War II. Today, the National D-Day Memorial stands as a reminder of the sacrifice and valor of all the men who fought on that day. Appropriately, it is located in Bedford, Virginia. You can learn more on their website at www.dday.org.

Bill Potter