And now from the Blue Ridge PBS Studios in Roanoke, virginia. It's the Virginians of Interest Podcast, with your hosts Brian Campbell and.

Carthen Curran. Hello, my name is Brian Campbell. Thank you for joining the Virginians of Interest Podcast. My friend Carthen Curran has a conflict and can't be with us today. Our guest today is John Long from the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford. We're very happy to have John. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you. It's great to be here. Appreciate the invitation. Tell us a little bit about yourself before we get into the memorial. Tell us about where you're from, where you went to school and how you came to work at the memorial.

I grew up in Roanoke, probably just about two or three miles from where we're sitting right now. I went to Patrick Henry High School, went to Roanoke College in Salem, graduated with a history degree and then to graduate school at the University of Virginia.

Great, great. And you said you're a history buff, which kind of makes sense. So you work in the history business because it's of interest to you Absolutely.

Always have been. I've always been very interested in history, and World War II in particular. My dad was a World War II veteran and I look back. You know when we were kids there were World War II veterans everywhere I were and you know it didn't occur to me to ask them questions and get to know a little bit more of their history and most of them are gone now and don't get that opportunity. But so it's great privilege to have known so many.

Yeah, that's a good segue into why we're here today. I'm a similar background. I'm from the Eastern part of the state, but my father was also a World War II veteran and I think that we all sort of took it for granted you know people of our generation that yeah, our parents were in a war and it was a big war apparently. And then I think the movie Saving Private Ryan began sort of awoke people to the idea that this was a really big war and a lot was at stake. So one of the reasons that we wanted to have you on today was we feel that while most Virginians are probably aware of why the National D-Day Memorial is in Bedford, some probably not. So we wanted to sort of engage in the entire story about you know where people came from in Virginia, why they were in the service and D-Day in particular why I guess it was the 29th Division. Is that correct?

Yes, 29th Division was one of the main infantry divisions, landing one of three on D-Day and then two paratrooper divisions.

Okay, Well, tell us a little bit about so, if you were a young man from Bedford, what you were? National Guard Unit, so it wasn't an active duty unit. So these were people who were, in essence, citizen soldiers, correct? Exactly?

exactly right they. Company A of the 116th Regiment was the National Guard Unit that headquartered in Bedford and it had a long history, still around today, still very active, but it wasn't the only one, of course. There was Company B in Lynchburg, company C in Charlottesville, company D here in Roanoke, but it was Company A that really made the history on D-Day with its losses and with the role that it played.

Well, that's a good segue. I talked earlier. I knew two members from Charlottesville. I presume must have been in that company, but Chevy Prophet and Carol Smith were no longer with us. But how did it? Was we're going to go now to June 4th, to that June 4th, june 6th, june 6th okay, because it was supposed to be the 5th, but then they got delayed by the weather, exactly right a big storm came through the channel.

Correct. So take us back to June 6th, and Company A in particular, where the greatest casualties were. Why were they so exposed to such great danger on that day?

Well, it's kind of ironic. One of the main reasons there were such great losses with Company A is because they landed where they were supposed to land, and they landed when they were supposed to land Almost no one else did. That meant all of the German defenses in that sector were pointed right at them and the results were devastated. In fact, of Company A, the first wave of landings, no one survived. Some of the later boats they did. And then there was one landing craft that sank in the channel and several of those men obviously survived, although they didn't actually get to France on D-Day. But for the ones who actually ran off of the ramps of their Higgins boats and threw the surf onto the beach, say they were just decimated by the fire.

Let's talk about that a little bit. So we said they didn't make it on time and the way they were supposed to make it there was a lot of. First of all, it was the largest invasion in modern time, maybe in history. So put that in context in terms of the size and scope and the planning of it, and then back to those fellows, in particular the fact that they happened to go right into the teeth of things. It sounds like to me, perhaps, that the chaos may have been an advantage to those landing later. Is that correct?

Well, to an extent it certainly was the chaos of. You mentioned the weather the day before. That was to the American or the Allied, I should say advantage as well, because the Germans were not expecting the invasion to take place on June 5th or 6th, simply because who would try an invasion in this kind of weather? So that was to our advantage, but even so it was. It's always very difficult to stage an amphibious assault because by definition you've got to get out of the water and up onto the land. And if I imagine if you went back to the Peloponnesian War, you would find out that this was just an incredibly difficult thing to do. You're so vulnerable in that transition from water to land. We had tried to minimize the risk as much as possible.

The landing craft, the iconic Higgins boats that you see in the movies, they were designed to get you as close to the beach as possible, to maximize your chance, because you can. You very seldom got to actually step off of the end of the ramp onto dry sand. That almost never happened, but you were at least close in and then you can quickly spread out, hopefully make it to cover. But you also have to remember on D-Day we're landing, the initial landings are happening at low tide. We did that to avoid the beach obstacles that were the Germans had placed there, and the obstacles would have torn the bottom out of the landing craft. They were mined very often. So we really had to land at low tide and clear those obstacles out before the later waves could come in.

But that also meant for the first waves the Bedford boys landing, some of the first men on the beach. They had hundreds of yards of beach to try to cross under German fire, which had been preset artillery, preset machine gun sweeps of fire. The Germans were ready, although they didn't know we were landing that day. They didn't know for certain we were landing in Normandy. It was one of the obvious places that we could land, and so they had spent years preparing the defenses for this invasion. And that's the teeth that these men are running into, and in a certain sense it's not all that surprising. There were great losses. It may be more surprising that there were survivors who accomplished the mission.

Yeah, let's go. I'm going to come back to this, but we're going to ultimately get into a lot more about Bedford. But it was called Operation Overlord, correct? So take us back in time a little bit. When did the planning for Operation Overlord begin, and why Normandy? And how did we keep it? Even though the Germans were prepared, they didn't know that we were going to land, when we landed and where they landed. So it was clearly a well-kept secret, in spite of the sheer size and scope of the thing. So take us back to the planning of Overlord.

Okay, I make the joke often that Winston Churchill ordered preparations for a cross-channel invasion 10 minutes after the Dunkirk evacuations, when they had been pushed out of the continent Immediately. It was clear to the British officials and remember, this is before the US is even in the war, this is 1940 and it was clear to the officials that If we're going to win this war we've got to cross that channel again. And nothing like that had been even thought of. It was just such an incredibly difficult operation to land on any beaches on the Channel Coast against the German defenses that would be in place by that time. No invasion across Channel had taken place really since 1066. So you know, nearly 900 years since someone had done this, and that, of course, was William the Conqueror going the opposite direction. I guess you could maybe make the argument Henry V crossed during the Hundred Years' War. For an actual invasion like this it was centuries since it had been done. The English Channel is a formidable obstacle for anything Today. Obviously things are a lot different with air power and such. But you know, when Churchill said let's figure out how to get back across the channel, a lot of people were saying well, how in the world would we do that. You know that's just such great losses are going to be involved in this. But they were working on it again before the United States is in the war.

Once the US enters the war, of course, with Pearl Harbor and then after Pearl Harbor, almost immediately the US set our priority as Europe first we're going to defeat Nazi Germany before we put our main priority into defeating Imperial Japan. Once that decision is made, the US is in the war. Then the US becomes part of the planning for what comes to be called Operation Overlord. I went through a few series of code names but the US begins planning for it. But everyone seemed to understand in 1942 and then again in 1943. It's beyond our capabilities right now. We've got to build up our forces. We've got to continue weakening the Germans. We've got to, you know, if nothing else, build all these landing craft and train all these men we're going to need, you know, develop an airborne doctrine that will allow this invasion to take place. And it's just going to take time. So some Americans, american commanders, really wanted the invasion to take place almost immediately, you know in 1942, if possible. But it just wasn't. So it gets delayed, gets delayed again. It's decided by 1944, this is the year we have to do this invasion.

And that makes a point about D-Day that I think a lot of people miss, and that is that this was the most anticipated act of the war. One reason why it has such a mystique to us today is because it had that mystique back then People were talking about D-Day, and even using the term D-Day, you know, months and months before the invasion actually takes place. Everyone knew this was going to happen, including the Germans. No one knew, other than the top brass on the Allied side. Of course, no one knew exactly when it would happen or exactly where we would land, but there was no mystery, there's really no secret to the question that we would land somewhere. We're crossing that channel someday. And again, everyone simply knew it. It was so anticipated.

The only event of World War II that would have matched it in terms of that anticipation would have been the invasion of Japan, which of course doesn't happen because the atomic bombs. But that's why D-Day, I think, has a mystique that other invasions don't. We invaded Sicily in 1943, but no one knew we were going to invade Sicily. We didn't have to invade Sicily. We invaded Okinawa in 1945. But as much as the Japanese were prepared for that and anticipated as a very likely scenario, there was no certainty to it and for the American public at home they had no idea where Okinawa was, but crossing the English Channel to France again. Everyone knew it was going to happen sometime.

Well, let's do one last thing on the planning and then we'll move back into the Bedford and D-Day Bedford-Boy's connection. I'm a friend of George Marshall. I'm an amateur historian. You're a real historian, Isn't the part of the story that Marshall? Obviously Dwight Eisenhower led on behalf of the Allied forces, but there was some question as to whether Marshall or Eisenhower were doing. The amateur historian and me said that Marshall was too needed in Washington, but he had really good political and communication skills. So Eisenhower ultimately ended up being the architect and the guy executing it. Is that correct?

That's essentially true, marshall. By all evidence now he is very duty driven, so he's going to do what he's commanded to do, of course, but there's a good bit of evidence that he would have preferred to be the supreme Allied commander for this invasion, simply because that's what his career was about.

He had been in the army for at that point and he was a logistics and training guy, I mean he was a guy that really brought us in to prepare us to go to war, and this was the culmination of all that preparation correct? Oh, absolutely.

It's really a shame that more people don't know the name George C Marshall. And even those who might know the name don't necessarily realize the impact that this man had. He really won the war in a lot of ways, and you know we give credit to Eisenhower, we give credit to MacArthur and even you know other generals like Patton get a lot of attention, and they should. I'm not saying they should be ignored or they're overrated, but Marshall is the man actually making all this happen from the training of infantry in the 1930s, the grooming of officers like Eisenhower and you know, building them up for the role they're going to play in a war that you know. Of course, at that point nobody knows what's going to happen, but it's, you know, increasingly likely through the 1930s. And then in the marshaling of forces, the decisions on allocation of resources, all these things that are done by Marshall and his staff really defy comparison in history. It's, he's a man who really should be more remembered.

I think he was the George Washington or our Tom. He was Cincinnati's sub, that generation. I mean I wasn't there a quote to for the Churchill and Eisenhower about that, how great Marshall was and they feared that in 50 years no one would know who was because of his stoic, because it was. He was the opposite of MacArthur. He was a guy that shunned the spotlight and he just viewed everything as part of his duty. Is that correct? He did very much. I don't know the quote specifically.

but he, he, yeah, this is my job, I'm going to do it, I'm going to make sure everyone under me does their job, and so I want. Historian described Marshall as terrifying. Yeah, if you're in front of Marshall and he's telling you to do something, you're at attention and you're going to do it, no matter what. But say it's just hard to underestimate the importance of Marshall for World War II. But then, and then also, of course, afterwards, as Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State, and Marshall.

He was Marshall planned. Yeah, he was certainly, as a matter of fact. This is for our listeners this is a bit of a pop culture reference, but in the movie, the saving private Ryan is about a five to six minute segment where it's early on where the other Ryan boys have been killed and and then ultimately they figure it out and they end up in George Marshall's office and there's the famous scene where he reads the letter to Mrs Bixby from Abraham Lincoln, right? So for those of you that aren't familiar with George Marshall, rewatch saving private Ryan and that the Mrs Bixby letter is George C Marshall. So right.

And that that is based on an actual happening after D-Day but very much overdramatized of what actually happened.

Well, imagine that Hollywood would overdramatize something so there was a soldier named Nyland, a paratrooper and from New York I believe, and he had lost two brothers in the war and another at that time was missing. Now he was found in a prisoner war camp and, you know, did survive the war, but at the time they thought that he was the last of four brothers and so the decision was made, not by Marshall himself but you know, somewhere in the chain of command, to go get Nyland and pull him out of the frontline duty, came back and completed his, you know, service in like a training camp or something, At a less risky Exactly, Whereas he's going to survive for his mother's benefit. Yeah, so I say it's an interesting story, but not as exciting as the movie.

Yeah Well, we'll give him that credit. Let's do a little time travel. Now You're going to take us back to Bedford County in 1944. So what's Bedford County like? And what's it like knowing that all these young men have gone off and we don't know what their fate is? So it's a bucolic place. How many? About 4500 people, you said.

In the town. The county was 20, 30,000 on the exact number, but still very small, very small town, feel. Not all of the Bedford boys as we know them, company A of the 116th, were from the town of Bedford. It was simply small, you know. Most of them lived outside of the town limits but the town was, you know, their town. That's where they, many of them, worked in the factories there. They had gone to school at the Bedford High School up on the hill. So you know it's certainly fair to call them the Bedford boys and associate them with the town, even though many of them lived a few miles away from that. And Bedford, as you said, is very rural, a lot of agriculture. It has also the many industries along the train tracks and that's where a lot of these Bedford boys had worked before the war. It's where a lot of their wives, sisters, girlfriends are working. You know, as maybe Rosie the Riveters is not exactly, you know, accurate, because they weren't necessarily riveting anything, but they were, you know, doing wartime work along the, in those factories along the railroad tracks. And the town was very proud of their Bedford boys of Company A who had gone into the war. They knew they were in England because they began letters, you know, saying somewhere in England and mailing letters to them in England. They knew they were there. They did not know that they would be in the first wave of the invasion. They knew an invasion was coming because everyone did. But you know what units are involved. Who knows at that point when are they landing? Who knows? That's all top secret. But they know our boys are ready to fight and they're going to get into it, if not on the first day of the invasion, soon afterwards. So a lot of apprehension going on.

A lot of, you know, concern Bedford, incidentally, and it's worth mentioning. Actually two facts I want to kind of because there's some misconceptions at this point. One is that company A of the 116th Regiment, 29th Division, were all Bedford boys. No, it began as the colonel of these National Guardsmen from Bedford, but by 1944, you know they've been in a draft now for four years and so there were many men from all over the country in company A because they'd been drafted into it, the core of the National Guards. Several of the officers, a lot of the very competent non-commissioned officers, were Bedford boys, but you know they also meant from Wisconsin and Texas and wherever else in company A. So not all of company A's losses were from Bedford. On D-Day, company A loses over a hundred men, 19 of them were from Bedford. So you know, I say that because I sometimes get a sense that people are not giving enough respect to, you know, a man from Georgia in company A. Yeah, these Bedford boys get all the attention.

And the other point I want to make about Bedford in the war is that that's not the whole story for Bedford either. While obviously we celebrate the Bedford boys, we herald them and their great achievements, if you look at Bedford's record, they are losing men in World War II in every theater of war, in every branch of the service. The first man from Bedford killed in the war actually died before the war on the Reuben James, a destroyer that had been sunk in the Atlantic had a man who's arguably from Batatadi not him lived back and forth between Bedford and Batatadi but he was, you know, six weeks before Pearl Harbor he had already given his life for his country and then, as I say, men dying right up to the end in the Pacific. So it's not just the Bedford boys that need to be honored in locality, that's true everywhere else. You know here in Roanoke, if you go to Richmond, wherever you know there's going to be some D-Day fatalities. But there's also going to be some men killed on Iwo Jima. That need to be remembered.

Yeah Well, take us back. That's an interesting fact. So letters were coming in from England, so let's pretend you're part of this 29th Division. How did? And they thought they were going to go and they got delayed because of weather. So they're, they're bivouacked or they're currently preparing to go on an invasion, although the average, you know, infantryman doesn't know. He just knows he's going somewhere.

Exactly.

What happens if it's early in the morning of the invasion? At what point did? And then they were put on troopships, and then put on Higgins boats. I mean, walk me through. What would have the young man of that generation been like when he would have been the night before that they were put on these troopships? In other words, how did they? What was the last 24 hours of their life? Like a priority invasion? Yep.

Well, actually I'll go back a couple of days before that. In late May the invasion force was put into marshaling areas that were very tightly controlled. They were basically fenced in because the last thing Eisenhower wanted was anyone you know sneaking out of camp, going to a bar, getting drunk and blabbing a little bit too much. So they were put into what what they called sausages, because on a map the enclosures you know kind of shaped like sausages and they were put in there. They were then given their mission briefings. They were allowed to study, like maps and sand tables, models of the coast, told what landmarks to look for, where they're going to land, what they could expect when they get off the beach, what this village was like. So by you know, late May most of them have a sense that of where they're going to land. They may not know much French geography but they've, they've seen models of the coast. They're kept there in total secrecy. They're not allowed to write home. So for many of them their last letters home were written just before they go into these sausages and typically they're not allowed, because of censorship, to say anything particularly. But if you read some of these last letters you get a sense that they know it's coming and we're going to be apart. So they sort of veiled references to you know, we're going to be very busy in the next few days, you know. But nothing they can't say. We're getting ready to invade France. Obviously. That's where they also get their, their last equipment.

They've trained for this in the 29th division. They've trained for this for a couple of years, you know. Some of the other divisions may be a little bit less, but there was. You know, they were ready for it, they were physically fit, they were mentally trained for it, they were excellent marksmen. If they weren't excellent marksmen they probably had been, you know, shuttled out of these frontline units before D along, before D name. So they're there in their sausages and then I guess it kind of depends on what unit.

So somewhere around June 3rd or so they are put onto trucks or trains or you know some transportation and taken to ports where they are loaded onto big troop transports. Now, on the troop transports there were the landing craft, you know, typically hanging by davits off of the deck, and that's what they're going to get into. So they then they go out to the, the marshaling area. They call it Piccadilly Circus, sort of jokingly on the maps in the English Channel and this is where the ships are going to wait, and, very proud, just the ballet involved in getting all of the ships, some 5000 naval vessels, moving in the right direction in the English Channel without running into each other. That was quite a bit of coordination. That's often overlooked as well, but they didn't have what they expected, because then the storm comes.

As we've already said, there's a big storm that lays the invasion. So these men picture these, your farmers from Bedford. They are on the ship in the middle of a pretty significant storm. You can imagine how seasick they are just from from all of this and given a delay, now selling again depends on what unit you're in. Some of the, you know, troop vessels go back to the port and so they they weather the storm, actually moored to a port somewhere. But many of them just stay in the English Channel in the middle of the storm, waiting for the weather, to see if the weather is going to clear.

And on June 5th, the day that the invasion was supposed to take place, while the storm is still going on, eisenhower meets with his officers and, more importantly, meets with his meteorology team and they advise it looks like a clearing front will be moving up the channel about dawn, and conditions won't be perfect by any means, but they should be passable. We can get our landing craft in, we can launch our planes, we can drop our paratroopers, and so we can the invasion can happen. And that's when the date is set for June 6th. There's some some question have exactly the the order was.

Eisenhower listened to all these reports and then he gave an order that was something along the lines of okay, we'll go. But no one knows exact wording because everyone, as soon as he says that they're they're off to do their job, make sure that all the pieces are falling into place. But then Eisenhower himself gave like six different versions of what he said to launch the invasion. But it's also interesting to look at Eisenhower from his point of view when he says that on June 5th, okay, we'll go. At that point he's done for the invasion. There's nothing else he can do except smoke too much, drink too much coffee, worry a lot, pace back and forth, but there's really nothing he can do to change the outcome of the invasion. At that point, you know, the lowliest private on Omaha Beach has more say in the outcome of the of the invasion than Eisenhower does.

Wasn't there a famous conversation to between Marshall and Eisenhower and it's relatively brief and I think Marshall's wife said that wasn't a very long conversation and he said something like I've done it, but it's in God's hands now, or something meaning that there's nothing else to talk about. We've done all the planning.

Another interesting thing is that Eisenhower had the authority. He didn't have to check with Marshall and he didn't have to check with Roosevelt to launch the invasion or delay the invasion 24 hours. It was all him and he knew it. He knew that this was, you know, all on him. If it fails and it could have easily failed, and then you know we think of this great triumph of D-Day may have been the worst defeat in American history. If you know, just a few things go differently and Eisenhower understands, you know this may be the end of my career because if, if he has to withdraw the troops and he's prepared for that he has in his pocket a note to release to the press that says the landings have failed, I've withdrawn the troops and I take full responsibility. And taking full responsibility in that capacity means his career is over. There's no president Eisenhower. There's an Eisenhower interstate system. There's simply a general that's remembered, as you know, a guy that seems so capable that he can get the job done.

Correct. Let's go back to Buchalic, bedford, in 1944. And I'll use one more reference to the great movie Saving Private Ryan, that scene I talked about, where the mother is washing dishes at her window and she sees the staff car for the army pull up and the chaplain and the notification team and she falls to her knees on that porch. It's almost moving to even talk about. That's the way generally we still do it today to some degree that's the notification teams when someone has been killed in action. There were so many killed in Bedford. I mean, did it take a day or two for the information to get back and how was the information relayed? Was it similar to the movie or was it handled differently, knowing that so many people had died for our country from one particular geographic area?

It was done by Western Union Telegram throughout the country, throughout the war, and so if you're a Western Union Telegram delivery boy, I mean people.

You know, yeah, they did not want to see you right exactly now, and the word comes in slowly, over a few days, by, you know, mid-july. People have a sense that the 116th and the company a had been in the invasion and had been very Start of very first, but no one yet knew what the losses were. And then Not all of the telegrams arrive on the same day. That's a misconception. A lot of people had, that's all 19 of them, it's actually 20 because there's one man in company f from Bedford also killed. But there's a lot misconception that you know, all of them came at the same time and they really did. They came over several days. But there was one day in particular, one Tuesday morning in July, when it's you know, something like eight or nine of them all came in Back to back and at that point the telegraph operator is a lady by the name of Elizabeth tease. She shows just just Overwhelmed by this and was able to get the sheriff and some other people to take the telegrams around. Because you know, everyone knew these people, they knew these families and and and have them delivered, and one in particular, one family in particular, that's, you know, kind of emblematic of this, this grief that suddenly hits you were the Hobaks, and the Hobaks in Bedford Owned a farm just about five miles out of the town and, and you know, pretty well known.

They had actually three sons in the service, but two of them were in the hundred and sixteenth and, as it turns out, both of them killed on D-Day brothers who died. They're on Omaha Beach and the telegram is delivered that one of them I can't remember which one that was Raymond or Bedford or the two brothers, but telegrams delivered Notifying the family that he had been killed in action. And then, within a day, a second telegram Is delivered notifying that the other brother was missing in action and he had been killed. But it hadn't been confirmed yet. And so they got that preliminary thing and you can imagine what this does for that family. It was just devastating. One of their sisters is still living. I'd privileged to get to know her over the past few years and she would tell About how it's. Just like the.

The joy went out of the family. At that point everything stopped. There were no more summer picnics, there were no more joyous family dinners, at least for years. There were no more your trips to to Bedford Lake to go swimming. It was it all just stopped because of what had happened to their brothers, and, as it turns out instantly, raymond, who was missing in action, was. His body was never Recovered, or, if it was recovered, it was never identified, and so he's on the walls of the missing in Bedford, or in Normandy rather, and Bedford. His brother, who's obviously named after the county Bedford, bedford, was killed outright. His body was recovered and buried in Normandy. After the war, when families had the opportunity to bring their loved ones home for burial, the family decided to leave them together. Although there was no marked grave for Raymond, we want Bedford nearby him, and so he is still there in the Normandy American cemetery.

Thanks for sharing that story. That's difficult to follow up from. I mean it's, it's an incredible. You did a really good job of describing that fairly vividly. So you said July, so this was in June 6th, so it was almost a month later when they were getting these notifications about six weeks actually, and that was that was typical.

It took a long time for word to travel back and forth, for Confirmations to be made of the army had a very precise, you know procedure to go through. If a man's been killed, to make sure his body is properly identified, his personal effects, right down to the change in his pockets, would have to be processed. So it was just time-consuming. Saving Private Ryan does get that wrong. Everything happens within a couple of days, and it really didn't. It would take typically about you know, five or six weeks for a family at home to get the notification.

So what did Bedford do over the next a couple of months? So were they just separate funerals, or was there ever any town or a county Memorialization of all this sacrifice made by one small place?

Well, there were. There were no funerals, of course, because all of the remains are at that point in In France, but there were memorial services. I know like one church in particular. I had lost two sons, I believe in In in the invasion in company a, and so they had a memorial service for the both of them. Families would have, of course, their own Private times of mourning as well as some public remembrances.

It was really about ten years before a full tribute was paid, and on the 10th anniversary in 1954, a Marker was unveiled at the Bedford courthouse that is still there Of listing the names of the men who had been killed Not just on D-Day but in in the invasion. So there were some, you know, non D-Day fatalities listed on that marker as well, and the general commanding general of the 29th Division during the war was invited in as the speaker. The the, the stone was brought in as quarried in Normandy, and so it was brought in and a plaque affixed to it, and it was unveiled by the only surviving child of any of the of the D-Day Bedford boys, or a few of them were married, but only one had had offspring, and that was Earl Parker, who died, and his daughter, danny never got to meet her father. He was. She was born after he had departed for England but she unveiled it and it was a great commemoration, I think was very cathartic for the town of Bedford, for the families involved, and it was the first D-Day Memorial in the country as far as I know.

The D-Day Memorial where I work, you know, comes much later but you know is within ten years that Bedford is commemorating what's you know their special place in, in having paid such a high cost. We often say of course Bedford had the highest per capita losses of any community in the United States on D-Day. In truth, no one has ever done the math to say that's absolutely correct. It just stands to reason and Bedford knew it and the Bedford you know continued to commemorate these men and Continues today.

Well, help me if there was an interesting. I remember I was stationed in Germany in 1984 when Ronald Reagan, on the 40th anniversary, makes the famous the boys of point-to-hoc, you know speech didn't that sort of revitalize our country because you know the other thing about World War, two people were. They were stoic, they didn't talk a lot about what happened, they just kind of came on back and it's part of their great expansion of our country. They went to school. They've got college degrees, some someone to get to jobs, but they got about with their lives. So there wasn't this, it seemed like to me. There was the Reagan thing in 84, the the sort of bringing it back to people's attention that these people were getting older and that we really needed to give them the recognition.

I think it was, and even more the 50th anniversary in 1994, but Every ten years there had been commemorations. As I say, bedford unveils its monument in 1954, 1964. There's a famous documentary done by Walter Cronkite interviewing Eisenhower in Normandy and which is still available on YouTube If anyone wants to watch. It's very interesting to get Eisenhower's perspective about. Now is, you know, former president Eisenhower in 1964, and then you know, for the 25th and then for the 30th, but it really is the 40th of 1984 that begins this process of reminding Americans what happened on June 6th 1944.

And you're correct, so many the veterans really didn't talk about it. They came home and For, I think, a number of reasons. One is a sense that I can't really explain it to anybody who wasn't there. If I get get together with some of my buddies, we have a Common ground, we can talk about what happened, but with my wife and kids, you know, I really can't open up in that sense. And the other sense, the other factor in it, I think, is that if you ask a D-Day veteran in, pick a year, 1974, 1979, ask them, you know what did you do?

Were you a hero? What's their answer? And ever look, gonna be. I said no, I was, I was no hero. If you want a hero, go visit the cemetery, you'll see the ones who really paid the price.

I did my duty. I had to be in the army, I was. I was, you know, probably drafted, because a lot of the the Bedford boys were national guardsmen before the war. But you know, most of the rest of these guys were probably drafted, a few enlistees and, and you know, we, we had to. So you know, I didn't do anything. I was in the army, but everyone was in the army. So you know, I'll I'll talk about heroes who maybe died at Pointe de Hocque, or I'll talk about my buddy who never made a back from that mission. But I'm not gonna talk about my, what I did, because there's nothing to talk about it's it's just, you know, routine that begins to change, though, I think, as people get older. I often make the joke that people appreciate history when they're old enough to remember some of it, and as by 1984, the men are, you know, still young and fit For the most part. But so they, they can feel the clock ticking and they understand that. You know, a lot of my buddies have gone on, and so this is the year that they began to say remember what we did, and having a World War II veteran as president assisted in that.

Now go forward another 10 years, the 50th anniversary in 1994. And I believe that was really the watershed year, as a 50th anniversary often is, when people began to pay attention and when President Clinton was in Normandy and gave his speeches and participated in the events, it was again very much a cathartic experience for a lot of the veterans and for a lot of the survivors to go back and many of them did for the first time in 50 years to go back to France, meet the French people, meet French children that may have never been born if it hadn't been for what they had done, and receive the appreciation of the nation of France and, by the way, france very much appreciates what happened in World War II, in their liberation, they call it. And that was also a big watershed event for the National D-Day Memorial when the 50th anniversary, because one of the veterans chosen to accompany President Clinton on Omaha Beach and tell him about that day and explain some things to him was none other than Renaux's Bob Slaughter and after a couple years to fully tell his story as well. He was one of these veterans. He came back and he didn't talk about it because I didn't do anything. I did my duty. The heroes are still over there.

Bob raised his family, coached Little League, worked at the Renaux Times, but the war was behind him until he got into his older years and then he wanted to make sure that people remembered what had happened on June 6, 1944. So he and some like-minded buddies started a foundation, a National D-Day Memorial Foundation, to put a memorial to D-Day somewhere in the United States to commemorate what had happened on a national level, not just the local memorials like what was in Bedford, but something national. And he originally was planning it here in Renaux because that's where he was from but and initially was going slow. He told you. He caught a kind of the futile years where it was just a frustrating experience trying to raise the money to do anything.

And even a small memorial, this original vision, maybe an obelisk at a park somewhere. He liked the idea of Mill Mountain. So that was one of the early visions of a memorial National D-Day Memorial was that it would be on top of Mill Mountain. But not many people were paying much attention, it was going slow until the 50th anniversary really focused the attention of the nation on D-Day in ways that just weren't true the previous anniversaries. And it was soon after that, after Bob Slaughter's prominent role on the 50th anniversary, that the town of Bedford and the county of Bedford contacted him with an offer of land and with a very compelling argument we had the highest per capita losses of any community. You want a National D-Day Memorial, it should be in Bedford County. And so the offer was made and accepted. And that's when it's at that point 1994, that it becomes clear the original vision of maybe an obelisk somewhere could be much bigger and that it would be in Bedford, not in some museum somewhere hanging out along.

And there was state and federal help too, wasn't it? It was like a snowball. Once it caught up, it really caught up right back then.

There was state help, no federal money. Now there was a congressional legislation that designated Bob's project as the National D-Day Memorial, but that legislation stipulated there'd be no federal money that came with it. So there were some state grants along the way and of course there was a lot of private support. This is, you know, in the late 1990s still many World War II veterans around, many more than today, obviously they were getting to retirement age, often had some disposable money and so they were. You know, they were kicking in for it. There were grants and there was corporate support and things.

And then there were two very prominent, very large donors. One was Charles M Schultz, the cartoonist from Peanuts. He was not a D-Day veteran but he was a European veteran who came to Europe soon after D-Day, saw those beaches, saw the cemetery and he never forgot. He often he was one of the ones really keeping the memory alive, because every June 6th Snoopy would be shown, you know, charging through the surf to attack, and the caption would be not something funny, but you know to remember, or remembering D-Day or something like that. And then the other who made donations was Steven Spielberg, who gave a sizable donation after saving Private Ryan had hit the waves and saving Private Ryan really did an enormous amount to bring attention to D-Day as well.

Well, let me just say one last thing we're going to wrap up, and that was you mentioned earlier about the modesty of veterans, and there's another. To get back to Hollywood again, there was the band of brothers and Dick Winters.

Yes, and I'm going to try to say it without choking up because it's an emotional thing at the sort of end of the show he's telling his own story and his grandson says, grandpa, were you a hero? And he chokes up and he says no, but I served in the company of heroes. So there was this people did deflect any attention away from themselves, but they deflected, and I think some of it was just a sheer number of losses. There were. How many hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the war? I mean?

what was it? 300,000, 400,000 Americans killed in World War II On D-Day itself? 2,502 American names that we have identified. There's almost certainly more. In fact we're working on identifying some others to announce next year for the 80th anniversary. But still very heavy losses for a single day of combat.

That's a good point. I didn't realize it, but it's the 80th anniversary next year, so that's a good chance for us to go ahead and wrap up here. I'm going to go back. I haven't been in a while, but I'm going to come back. You said a lot has changed. One thing I remember when I was there 10 years ago was how poignant the water features were.

There was the scene there where people were landing and there was an air-powered thing. So in other words, it was like bullets. You got the sense that you were actually there. So I thought, for what? It's not a grand, but it's a fairly manageable size of a thing. It just was still very poignant to me just walking up to it. I got the sense immediately that this was something a little different. Tell us about why people should make it a top priority to come visit you.

Well, it is a very effective memorial. It's very cathartic, certainly for the D-Day generation, and for many years we had a constant stream of D-Day veterans from all over the country, all over the world, really coming to see the memorial. Well, sadly, most of those are gone now. Every now and then we might still get a veteran come by. Now it's more their kids, but it's also more recent veterans who find it a very cathartic experience to come and walk our grounds. Maybe they were born long after World War II but they served in Iraq or served in Afghanistan. They understand that sense of being in a company of heroes and they find it a very moving experience very often.

You mentioned earlier, but real quick, you mentioned something on YouTube, but wasn't there a movie called the Bedford Boys too? Is that available? How would someone watch that? Is that also on YouTube?

There was a book Bedford Boys by Alex Kershaw that also did a lot to define what had happened. Our memorial was already open but really brought a lot of attention and is still very well regarded. Book, certainly and Alex has been a great supporter of the memorial for many years comes by every now and then and I was actually in Normandy with him. We had a tour last September, so almost a little over a year ago, so still a great supporter.

It's never been made into a movie. Maybe it will be someday, and then again, it's hard to make a D-Day movie in the shadow of Saving Private Ryan. Yeah, unless it's been done, it's been done Exactly. It's been hard to do it better than Saving Private Ryan did. But, yeah, I would certainly recommend the book, the Bedford Boys, to anyone. There have been some documentaries made and I can't tell you today how many of them are on YouTube, but there was one called Bedford, the Town they Left Behind. That's sort of very much the local story, interview with a lot of survivors as well as the families of men who were killed, and that's a very good source as well.

Terrific. Well, tell us as we finish up here, tell us about your hours, what days are you open, what the cost is for the admittance and so forth, so people can go ahead and get the schedule and make time to come see you.

Absolutely, we hope you certainly will. Right now, Fall is a great time to visit the National D-Day Memorial. We're open every day, 10 to 430s when we sell the last tickets, and in the winter we close on Mondays. And of course we have to be closed for inclement weather and major holidays. Christmas, Christmas Eve, New Year's Day will be closed, but most of the days we are open, giving tours continually, and we also are getting ready for this big 80th anniversary next June. That will be a spectacular in many ways, a last opportunity to say thank you. The 80th anniversary of something is in many ways the last anniversary, big anniversary, in which the participants are able to be there and receive the thanks. That was true of the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor a couple of years ago. So we can't tell you how many D-Day veterans or how many World War II veterans will be with us, because of course they're all pushing 100 years old. But we anticipate that at least some will be there and that we'll be able to point to them and say here are the heroes.

And you have a website in a social media, absolutely.

Our webpage is D-Dayorg and recently been upgraded, so it's very, very informative, very useful. We'll have a webpage on the 80th activities launching this fall, so keep a lookout for that. Of course, we have all Facebook, youtube, twitter, instagram I forget whichever one. It's not Twitter anymore, whatever it's called X. So we have all those and very informative. We also do a lecture series. We have our own podcast. That's on all the major podcast platforms.

What's the title of that? How would people find that Someone Talked?

You might be able to picture the World War II, the iconic World War II poster of the sailor in the water. Because someone talked, we got to use that title. And John McManus, one of the best known World War II historians working today, is our host and we interview a lot of the other major writers and historians about D-Day and books or about World War II. Really it's not limited to D-Day but yeah, it's well worth. It's one of the most fun things I do. So I love being part of the podcast and invite everyone to look it up and subscribe and then, as I say, make plans now to get to Bedford for the 80th anniversary.

We will have, of course, our big commemoration on June 6th. We will have a very interesting multimedia immersive light show on the 7th and the 8th which will turn the memorial itself into the backdrop of a big light show presentation. It's going to be very effective. We will have concerts. We will have a chapel service. We're a recreation World War II chapel service on Sunday after D-Day. So it's a whole weekend of activities to come by and to pay tribute and to just remember why this was so important, why we still live today in the shadow of what happened on June 6th 1944.

John, you're a terrific representative of the D-Day Memorial. Time has gone by rather quickly and you do a fine job of representing this very important cause. I hope our listeners will certainly get out to see you. I want to thank you for being with us today. Thank you for joining us today for the Virginians of Interest Podcast. We would like to thank our host, Blue Ridge PBS, for hosting us today. If you like what you hear today, please like and subscribe to this podcast.