In Bedford, Virginia

Yesterday was the 75th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, which was a brilliant success, albeit a hard fought battle involving close to ten thousand casualties and over a thousand deaths for the Americans alone, and in retrospect, it was a close thing; many things could have gone wrong and changed the outcome perhaps.  In Bedford, Virginia, resides the National D-Day Memorial.

Why Bedford, a small out-of-the-way town in rural Virginia?  From Stephen Ambrose's book D-Day, p.328: "About 60% of the men of Company A came from one town, Bedford, VA: for Bedford, the first 15 minutes at Omaha was an unmitigated disaster.  ... all the Germans around the heavily defended Vierville draw concentrated their fire on Company A.  When the ramps on the Higgins boats dropped, the Germans just poured the machine-gun, artillery, and mortar fire on them.  It was slaughter.  Of the 200+ men of the company, only a couple of dozen survived, and virtually all of them were wounded."

Can you imagine the dreadful rumors that swept through this small, thighs-knit farming community in the days after the well-publicized lands in France?  Especially after the first few Western Union bicycle messengers pulled up in front of residences in town and delivered telegrams to the households, a sure sign of a death in the family or a missing-in-action notification during the war.

These heroes who never returned home again, the vast majority of the men who left that community for the war, most of them lost in the first hour  of the greatest military enterprise in world history that literally saved world civilization, are called the Bedford Boys.  Freedom involves great and noble sacrifice sometimes, far from home and loved ones.