Reflections on Ray Nance and the Bedford Boys

On a day remarkably like the one that had forever defined him — cool and gusty, spitting rain — Ray Nance was buried in Bedford’s Oakwood Cemetery.

D-Day weather, Bill McIntosh called it.

The ceremony lowered a window shade on the Bedford Boys legend. True, the exploits of National Guard Company A, 116th Infantry, on June 6, 1944, will live in history, but it will no longer be living history. Nearly 65 years after 19 of its members were cut down by a blizzard of bullets from hidden assailants they never saw, the company has been reunited.

Nance watched them die all around him on that stretch of beach, his own blood seeping onto the hard sand from several wounds. He survived that day, and went back to Bedford to marry his high school sweetheart, have children and grandchildren, deliver mail, tell stories and simultaneously try to forget.

Of course, there was no forgetting the pivotal military action of the 20th century, and year-by- year the number of Bedford Boys left to re-create the horror diminished, shifting more responsibility to the remainder. By this year, there was only Ray Nance, who grew accustomed to hearing the whispers: “There goes the last Bedford Boy.”

It must have been strange for him, as if he was somehow being asked to live forever so the Bedford Boys would always remain real.

But Ray Nance wasn’t really a Bedford Boy back in 1944, anyway. He was a Bedford Man.

Bill McIntosh of the National D-Day Foundation said Wednesday that when Nance began training, he was "quite a bit older than most of the other guys. He was second in command.”

As such, Nance wasn’t really part of the fun-loving, British nurse-chasing, practical joke-playing heart of the group, the kids who managed to find time to win an international military baseball title while also practicing over and over how they would scale the brutal cliffs of Normandy.

Most of them never made it to those cliffs, and the scenario they faced on that June 6 is worth contemplating for a sober moment or two. Because this was an amphibious landing, there was no retreat, only the roiling to their rear. The choice was between breakers or bullets, and they quickly became targets in a shooting gallery.

It was luck that brought the survivors through, and only luck. Ray Nance alluded to that often in later years.

I had several relatives like Ray Nance, country boys on my mother’s side who spent their lives in the same small North Carolina towns except for their World War II service. One of them, my cousin Charles Black, suffered a broken back when his ship struck a mine off the Normandy coast on D-Day plus one. He died three weeks ago, finally pain free.

Yet it was often this rural background, with its Depression-era toughness and sense of self-reliance, that made good soldiers of the Ray Nances. And it bothers McIntosh when the Bedford guardsmen are depicted as hicks who were thrown into the fray wide-eyed and unprepared.

“They were very well trained in what they had to do,” McIntosh said. “They may have been from a small town, but they were very competent.”

Ray Nance called them, “The best soldiers I ever knew.”

No doubt they all said the same about him.