The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice Read Online Free PDF Page B

when he left. He didn’t know what he was getting into.” 38 Gearing was the only officer from Company A who had not been killed or wounded. Of the five officers in Nance’s berth on the Empire Javelin that morning, only Nance and Gearing were still alive.
    At 7 P.M., Ray Nance spotted another familiar figure—General Ger-hardt, commander of the 29th Division. He looked as immaculate and confident as ever as he came ashore, his shiny twin revolvers at his waist. By nightfall, Gerhardt would have set up a command post in a quarry near the Vierville draw.
    For Hal Baumgarten, the battle was not yet over. Towards evening, he had penetrated all the way to the top of the bluffs and was headed towards a village to the west of Vierville called Maissey le Grand. As Baumgarten crawled along a road he tripped a “castrator mine.” A bullet shot through his foot.
    “When I turned [my] shoe over, blood poured out like water from a pitcher,” recalled Baumgarten. “Using my first aid kit, I powdered with sulfa and dressed my foot, which had a clean hole through it.” 39 Suddenly, Baumgarten came under heavy shellfire. He tore off the dressing and crammed his foot back into his boot and jumped into the cover of a hedgerow. He stayed there with seven other GIs until darkness fell and then took off across the road to find fresh cover. The German shelling had gotten more accurate—Baumgarten suspected they’d been observed.
    As Baumgarten and his group moved forward, an MG-42 opened up, hitting every man. “I was shot through my left lip and lost part of my right upper jaw, teeth and gums.” Nearby, one of the men shouted: “Help me, Jesus!” The others moaned in pain. Baumgarten drifted into a “hallucinatory dream state”:
I pictured a box of goodies from my mother that I was opening back in Camp D-1. The homemade cookies, cake, and salami were shared with my Company A buddies. They were cooking the green mold covered salami (result of the long shipping time from the States), stuck on their bayonets over an open fire. 40
    Back on Dog Beach, Thomas Valance—one of the few survivors from Master Sergeant John Wilkes’s boat—watched darkness fall around 11 P.M. He had been placed on a stretcher in a clearing surrounded by barbed wire. Sometime after dark, litter-bearers moved him onto a LST loaded with wounded and emergency medical equipment. He was headed back to England. After three months in various hospitals, he would return to Normandy and then fight on through Germany before going back to America in December 1945.
    “I’ve wondered over the years about one thing,” Valance wrote on Veteran’s Day 1987, “and that is why we, in A Company of the 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry, 29th Division, were chosen to be the American equivalent of stormtroopers. Was it because we had such potential? We had no combat [experience], and the other troops that were around and with us in the invasion, such as the 1st Division, were highly trained. Or was it simply because we were considered expendable?” 41
    Finally, the longest day drew to a close. There had been an estimated 2,500 casualties on Omaha, and less than a tenth of that number on Utah, the other American beach. Total casualties—dead and wounded—for the entire Allied invasion forces approached 10,000, a loss of 10 percent given that just over 100,000 men were now in Normandy, and far less than the 25 percent that Allied generals had predicted for infantrymen. 42
    All along the bluffs and hedgerows that had cost so many lives, the 116th Infantry dug in for the night. Most men had not slept in well over two days. Many barely had the strength to scoop out shallow foxholes. “We started to dig a foxhole,” recalled one private, “but the ground was rock hard and we were both totally exhausted by the time the hole was about three inches deep. Finally, standing there in the dark, aware that it was useless to continue, my sergeant said, ‘Fuck it. Let’s just get down