1srelluc
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As the sun began to rise on June 6th, 1944, 180 men from Company A, 116th Infantry, 29th Division, landed in the first wave on Omaha Beach. They were greeted with furious machine-gun fire and relentless shelling. In minutes, Omaha was a bloodbath. Among the dead of Company A were boys from the small town of Bedford; three more would later be killed an appalling sacrifice from a tiny rural community.
Bedford paid a high price in World War II. In all, 35 young men from this small mountain town of just 3,000 people in 1944 were in the first wave to hit Omaha Beach on June 6th, 1944. The opening scene of the movie Saving Private Ryan reenacted this horrific battle.
Nineteen boys from Bedford died in the first few minutes of D-Day, and more died later. The young men who died were immortalized forever as "the Bedford Boys." None of them was regular Army. They were all soldiers in the local Virginia National Guard unit: Company A of the 116th Regiment of the 29th Division, a mobilized National Guard unit made up of citizen-soldiers who only the year before had been farmers, miners, mechanics, schoolteachers, and construction workers, and novices at combat.....Later in the campaign, four more boys from this small Virginia town died of gunshot wounds. Twenty-three native sons of Bedford died in less than a week.
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The National D-Day Memorial is in Bedford, Virginia.
National D-Day Memorial - Wikipedia