The Bedford Boys: One American Town’s Ultimate D-Day Sacrifice

By Alex Kershaw, author

Short review by Scott Lyons

If you could keep just one book on D-Day in your library, The Bedford Boys: One American Town’s Ultimate D-Day Sacrifice just might be the one. For those unfamiliar with this moving and tragic story, nineteen young men, all from tiny Bedford Virginia (1940 population 3,973), were killed while landing at Omaha Beach on 6 June 1944. The Bedford Boys is not a complete history of D-Day, but traces the steps of the young soldiers from America’s 1941 declaration of war to V-E Day in 1945.

Alex Kershaw brings to life the sounds and tears of rural America during wartime and the young men who went off to war together as soldiers in the U.S. Army’s 29^th Division. The Bedford Boys, a New York Times Bestseller, first published in 2003, nine years after Stephen Ambrose’s D-Day, the 1994 literary epic that helped spark renewed interest in the history of D-Day and World War II, offers Kershaw’s brilliant narrative opening the reader up to the lives and deaths of their young soldiers from Bedford.

Kershaw's masterful narrative shows the emotional struggle of family members, wives, and girlfriends left behind, who finally attempted to move on after learning the fates of their loved ones. The Bedford Boys will also appeal to those interested in America’s home front during the war. The author effectively illustrates home, farm, the workplace, family relationships, marriages, engagements, and more, of those touched by the War in Europe:

"Families grieved behind closed doors, sharing their pain with relatives and God. 'People didn’t feel like going out and doing things for a good while,' recalled Marie Powers, a junior at Bedford High School loved nothing more than jitterbugging in her saddle shoes to Glenn Miller tunes at dinner club dances. 'Most all the activities were discontinued. It was just such a sad time. It was terrible. But people loved one another, and people supported each other.'" [1]

The Bedford Boys is that book you will pick up and read a second and third time. Highly recommended.

Scott

[1] Alex Kershaw, The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2008), page 208.