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Austin Gisriel | July 17th still echoes in Bedford

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Most people in Southwest Virginia know that the National D-Day Memorial is located in Bedford because of the sacrifice of its native sons. Most of the Bedford Boys were in Company A of the 116th Infantry Regiment, and as fate would have it, Company A was one of the first to land on Normandy. Of the 30 or so citizen/soldiers from Bedford, 19 lay dead by the end of June 6. Bedford’s wartime population was only 3,200, and the cold math renders a startling result: Largely as a result of D-Day, Bedford lost a greater proportion of its population during World War II than did any other community in America. 

The town of Bedford itself is less than a mile from the memorial, which sits just off the Route 460 Bypass. To bypass Bedford, however, is to bypass a different kind of memorial. Many of Bedford’s buildings that stood during WWII still stand, though their use has changed. Those now-empty factories that turned out war materiel still sit, literally on the other side of the railroad tracks. And residents may still glimpse the mountain laurel and azalea blooming in the spring, high on the Peaks of Otter, just as they did in the spring of 1944. If Normandy had its Omaha Beach and Vierville Draw, then so, too, did Bedford have its Hampton Looms and Green’s Drugstore and the Presbyterian Church: places where wives and sweethearts, children and siblings, mothers and fathers prayed and hoped; and where too many ultimately mourned. These are places where great battles were fought as well, but here the enemy was uncertainty, fear, and grief.

These places are marked not with plaques, but with memories. As with radioactivity, the anxiety and anguish of those who waited on the home front seems to have a half-life that prevents it from ever completely disappearing. It’s as if the very brick and mortar of the buildings themselves absorbed the disquietude of the summer of 1944, and its echo is heard and felt by anyone who knows enough to listen.

A large ceremony commemorating the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landing was held this past June 6th, of course, at the D-Day Memorial. It would be most appropriate for Bedford’s citizens—and every other American as well—to take a moment and think of the families and sweethearts who were going about their daily business 65 years ago today, waiting and hoping. For it was on this day that the first nine telegrams arrived in Bedford, ending the wait and destroying the hope of the past 6 weeks. In the days and weeks to come, the other families would receive the same terrible news.

Perhaps the Bedford experience is best summarized by lyrics from a Bing Crosby song that must have haunted the citizens of this Virginia mountain town and every other city and hamlet in America that summer. On July 17, 1944, “I’ll Be Seeing You” was the #1 song in America:

I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places
That this heart of mine embraces all day through
In that small café, the park across the way
The children’s carousel, the chestnut trees, the wishing well
I’ll be seeing you in every lovely summer’s day
In everything that’s light and gay
I’ll always think of you that way

I’ll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I’ll be looking at the moon
But I’ll be seeing you.

 

 

I wasn’t there in Bedford in 1944. I wasn’t even born until 1957, and to me the men who fought WWII were simply my dad and his friends. These men were born 40 years old—or so it seemed—and they would always be 40 years old as far as my childish mind could reason. As I approached and surpassed 40 myself, however, I saw my father not only growing older; I also saw him for the first time as a young man. Now, I see them all as young men, and I see their fathers worried, but maintaining brave faces for the rest of the family. I see them as young men with their lives stretching out infinitely before them, as Life so appears to every generation of young people. . . .

Bedford, Virginia is a beautiful and vibrant town, full of new businesses and well maintained homes. It is also full of ghosts, but not the kind that frighten. These ghosts inspire, and we may see them all yet—soldiers, sweethearts, parents, all who sacrificed—in all the old places that were familiar to them, and we should give thanks that they sacrificed so many lovely summer days so that we may enjoy ours.

  

– Column by Austin Gisriel

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