In less than a week, the 80th anniversary of what came to be known as D-Day will be upon us — and then will pass on by us as time always does.
The Allied landings on the Normandy beaches occupy a pivotal place in the history of the world, but they occupy a place in Virginia history as well. Coming ashore that June 6 morning 80 years ago were men who had signed up years before for the Virginia National Guard but had since been called up to the regular Army — and were now in the first waves assigned to break the Nazi hold on occupied Europe.
We know the story of A Company from Bedford County well — the Germans raked its landing boats with machine-gun fire as soon as the ramps came down. In one of A Company’s landing boats, all the men were killed. “Within 7-10 minutes after the ramps had dropped,” the official military account reported, “’A’ had become inert, leaderless and almost incapable of action.”
Bedford County, it is said, suffered the highest per capita loss of any place in the country — 19 men died that day. Four others from the county died later in the Normandy campaign. This is why the National D-Day Memorial is in Bedford. If you haven’t been there, you should.
The story of A Company has been told many times — there’s the book “The Bedford Boys” by Alex Kershaw, as wel as the movie “Saving Private Ryan.” As many times as it’s been told, it can never be told enough.
Bedford, though, wasn’t the only Virginia community whose sons were being shot at on Omaha Beach that morning. There were units from across Southside and up and down both sides of the Blue Ridge — from Emporia to South Hill to Chase City to Farmville to Martinsville, then up through Lynchburg and Charlottesville on the eastern slopes of the mountains, Roanoke, Staunton, Harrisonburg and Winchester to the west.
They were all there, some in the first wave, some right behind, many of them with steep losses of their own. In D Company from Roanoke, “only half the men reached the beach.” H Company from Martinsville suffered “heavy casualties as its soldiers struggled through the flooding surf.” G Company from Farmville “was all but neutralized.”
When I Company from Winchester came ashore just an hour after the first wave, “there were so many bodies on the beach that they could not determine if any of them were from their unit.” By design, the Allies had landed an hour after low tide — the goal had been for the receding water to reveal the obstacles Germans had erected on the beach and give Allied demolition teams time to destroy them. That also meant that soon after the first men got ashore, the tide was rising again, with a gruesome effect. “The dead washed up to where they lay and then washed back again,” B Company from Lynchburg reported.
While the Bedford story is well-known, the stories of these other units are not so famous. Today, we try to make up for that.
In the days, weeks and months after D-Day, the U.S. military interviewed survivors and collected “after-action reports” for as many units as it could. These reports are as close as we can come to contemporaneous firsthand accounts of the men who were there — and who survived.
We have collected these accounts into a special report that we are publishing today. In the spirit of passing the torch from one generation to the next — and to bring these reports to life — we asked Virginia’s governor and two U.S. senators to read portions of those accounts. Glenn Youngkin, Tim Kaine and Mark Warner all agreed. To honor the men from Bedford, we turned to students from the county’s three public high schools to read part of the after-action report for A Company.
I hope you find these after-action reports as moving as I did.
The title “after-action report” may sound bureaucratic, but the descriptions you’ll find in these are as dramatic as any novel. In a few cases, they are painful to imagine, even with the distance of eight decades.
The account for A Company from Bedford describes a lieutenant who was shot in the throat as he jumped off the landing craft into the water. He made it to shore, where he flopped down into the sand. Seeing other Bedford men, he rose up — still bleeding — to give an order. By rising, he made himself a target. The soldier next to him saw German machine gun bullets “cleave him from head to pelvis.”
Some of these accounts are not for the faint of heart, but keep in mind that all these things happened — to people who are now distant from us in time but who lived in the same places we do today. They saw sunsets over the same mountains we do today, but the sunrise they saw over overcast Normandy that morning was their last.
In many of these accounts, the men involved are named — some readers may find a relative cited. In some cases, they participated in acts of bravery that families may not have heard about. The account for L Company from Staunton tells of men whose uniforms got caught in wire obstacles and were shot to death. That makes the act attributed to a 17-year-old named J.O. Davies all the more remarkable. Davies was moving forward toward higher ground, “but hearing a yell from Sgt Albert Shrift, he turned and saw that the latter had hung up on a beach obstacle, his assault jacket being caught. Davies went back over the beach and cut him loose.” The youngster Davies shows up several times in that report, each time performing some act under fire. Did Davies’ family ever hear about this? I wonder.
The report for D Company from Roanoke describes a landing boat that went down 200 yards from shore. The water was only waist-deep so the men tried to walk the rest of the way, even though they were already under fire. “Pvt. John W. Smead was struck in the helmet by a rifle bullet, and knocked unconscious by the helmet,” the report said. “Pfc. Richard Gomez carried Smead in to the shore.” Did Smead’s family ever find out how Gomez saved him from drowning? Did Gomez’s family ever learn he had saved a man at Normandy?
This being war, not every story has a happy ending. Capt. Lawrence Madill from E Company out of Chase City was wounded on the way to the beach. He kept going. “He found that Pfc. Walter Masterly was the only remaining man of the mortar squad and though he had the mortar he had no ammunition,” the report said. “Masterly volunteered to go back on the beach and salvage some ammunition but the Captain told him to set up his gun while he went for the ammunition.” Madill retrieved the ammo but on his way back was hit twice and went down. His last words were to call out an order: “Senior non com, take the men off the beach.”
In this week’s West of the Capital:
I write a free weekly political newsletter, West of the Capital, that goes out every Friday afternoon at 3 p.m. You can sign up here:
This week I’ll look at:
- The latest news from the Bob Good-John McGuire primary for the 5th District Republican nomination.
- Republican Senate candidate Hung Cao, who previously said it didn’t make sense to drive to Abingdon for a campaign forum, now says it doesn’t make sense to drive to Hampton Roads for one, either.
- What the Roanoke College Poll says about Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
- The latest early voting numbers.
