Friends and the Battle

First Lieutenant Ray Nance lay flat on his Stomach, his body blanketed with a gritty veneer of sand, his hands blackened by oil from drowning ships.

His blue eyes scanned Omaha beach. No holes for cover. No one out front. No one wading in from behind.

Mortar shells hissed overhead, striking their targets of metal and flesh with a thunder that pulsed through the beach like an earthquake. Bullets sputtering from German machine guns stitched a bloody pattern in the sand. Bodies of the dead bobbed in the surf.

"Talk about feeling all alone," Nance, now, recalled from the quiet of his brick home just south of town. "It was terrible. It's still very hard to talk about it."

As he inched his way up the beach, Nance didn't know that one-third of his force was out of commission. Company A struck the beach at 6:30 a.m. on June 6, 1944. Just half -hour later, most of Nance's friends, and Capt. Taylor Fellers, his cousin and commanding officer, lay dead. One landing craft capsized several hundred yards offshore, too far to assault the beach. One man drowned. A second boat took a direct hit from an artillery shell, killing all 32 men on board.

Before the day was over, more than 90 percent of the men in Company A were dead or wounded. Twenty-one of about 35 Bedford soldiers in the unit were killed, more deaths per capita than any other comparable community in the nation, according to the U.S Department of Defense. The military put men from the same hometown in the same unit to keep morale high. The plan backfired badly. By the climax of the Normandy invasion for the 116th Infantry, the fall of St.Lo in July, a total of 23 Bedford men would die in France.

The landing was timed to coincide with low tide, so soldiers could see mined, and lethal obstructions normally under water. Thousands upon thousands of infantrymen, including Nance, packed into 1,500 boxy lauding craft called Higgins boats. Sunshine burned off early morning fog that had shrouded the beach, but wind kicked up heavy waves that made most of the troops violently seasick. The soldiers, each burdened with more than 70 pounds of wet battle gear, plunged waist to neck-deep into the surf and struggled ashore.

Nance burst out of his landing craft assault boat (LCA), splashing into chest-deep water.

"I think that's what saved me," Nance, a retied rural postal carrier, said years later. They were waiting for us. The minute the ramp went down, they opened up. We must have been torn up pretty badly. a good many men were killed on the ramp."

A shaken Nance saw many of his best friends, "we were like family" die.

Running ahead of him on the beach, Pfc. John Reynolds went down on his knees, bringing his rifle up as though he was searching for something, then fell forward, dead.

"It was here that the heaviest fire came down on us," Nance recalled in notes he penned later, while recuperating from wounds in a British hospital. "A bullet passed through my pack and clothing, cutting the strap on my binocular case. We were caught in very heavy machine gun fire." J. D Clifton made it as far as the cliffs before he screamed into his pack radio that he had been hit. He also died. Heavy sniper fire cut down John Wilkes and John Schenk at the water line.

The object was to get up to the high water mark and off the beach in one piece. Nance dropped to his stomach a lifesaving decision and started crawling.

"A B Company section came in from the right," Nance said. They dropped the ramp and the men came off in water up to their knees. But they went down, melted right down into the surf. They (members of Germany's battle-hardened 352nd Division) zeroed in on the boat.

"It took me until 11 a.m. to reach the bank...you can't imagine the sight of all the bodies, lying close together. The water was full of them. I knew what happened then."

Nance led Company A after Fellers was killed. He was wounded three times that day. Shrapnel sliced through the skin of his left thumb and I struck his foot.

The men of Company A had trained three years for a mission they volunteered for.

"We Bedford boys," Nance recall, "we competed to be in the first wave. We wanted to be there. We wanted to be the first on the beach."

Fellers, the commander, skipped out of an Army hospital to make the landing with his men. He had written home earlier that "I'm beginning to think it's hard to beat a Bedford boy as a soldier."

Nance reached the high water mark, and a German pillbox lay no more than 100 yards ahead. He could see bullets march up the beach toward him. One of them sliced between his pack, which contained a quarter of a pound of TNT, and his jacket, but the bullet did not strike his skin.

By this time, the soldier and his few comrades left felt like sitting ducks that had been abandoned by the world. At Omaha, right in the center of the entire front, soldiers of the 1st and 29th divisions had walked right into heavy German gunfire. From the outset, Operation Overlord, which pooled the fighting strength of 156,000 allied soldiers, was a tough military proposition.

There were only four exits in the cliffs above the beach, and they were all well covered by German guns. Finally, more soldiers rushed ashore to bolster those trapped on the beach, but not before 5,000 men lost their lives.

Hope for Nance came in the person of an anonymous Navy medic who bound his wounds.

"I wonder where he came from?" Nance asks to this day. "I was wet, dirty, and my hands were black and greasy from all the oil in the water. But he was clean and dry. I knew he was from the Navy, because he wore green coveralls. As he squatted beside me, he said, ‘this is worse than Salerno (another battle in Italy)’. He was there. I didn't see him touch anyone near me. Then he left. Others I asked later said they never saw him. I know he was real. He helped Me."

After the deadly maelstrom of D-Day. Nance's life took a turn for the better. He came home to Bedford in the fall of 1944, and promptly wed his sweetheart, Alpha, an Army nurse with whom he'd gone to school at the old Moneta High. Their union has been an enduring one. The Nances, who have a son and two daughters, as well as numerous grandchildren, celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in November 1994. "We began to write after he went overseas," Mrs. Nance said. "He asked me to wait for him, and I did."