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By JAY CONLEY
Now, it seems, that long-held statistic has come under a cloud of doubt. No one has proved it untrue. But so far, no one can prove that it is true. As part of a project to name every American and Allied soldier who died on the first day of the invasion, the nonprofit foundation that operates the memorial has been combing through military records. Along the way, it has been unable to verify that the Bedford-area death toll tops the nation. Foundation officials can't even tell where that story got started. "We've never been able to figure out who first came up with that," said Carol Tuckwiller, the foundation's director of Research and Archives since 2000. "I can't back that up." Foundation President William McIntosh said the per-capita attribution is a "part of the mythology of Central Virginia" that may be "as hard to disprove as it is to prove." "Is it absolutely true? Maybe it is and maybe it isn't," McIntosh said. Before coming to the foundation, Tuckwiller honed her research skills over 30 years as librarian of the Virginia Room at the Roanoke Public Library. In researching the names of the invasion's fatalities, which will eventually be listed on bronze plaques in the memorial's central plaza, Tuckwiller became intrigued about finding the initial reference of the Bedford community's status as having the nation's worst losses. She has looked through Army records, the Bedford City-County Museum's archives, read newspaper accounts and books written about D-Day, and talked to D-Day veterans. So far, she's come up dry. The claim may forever be cloaked in doubt because there is no way to precisely determine what the Bedford area's population was in 1944. Tuckwiller has verified that 19 Bedford-area soldiers - not 23 as has often been reported - died in the invasion's first wave. Some of those men were from the town of Bedford. Most had Bedford County addresses, she said. The per-capita claim used in news articles for decades refers to the men being from the town of Bedford, with a population of 3,400 in 1944. But because U.S. Census figures are only collected every 10 years, there may be no way to know the town's exact population at the time of the invasion. Tuckwiller agrees it would be more accurate to compare the Bedford-area death toll to Bedford County's population, which would include those people living in the town. According to U.S. Census information from the Weldon Cooper Center at the University of Virginia, Bedford County's population ranged from 29,687 in 1940 to 29,627 in 1950. The town's population ranged from 3,973 to 4,061 during the same 10-year period. Is there another community out there with a lower population that could have higher D-Day losses per capita? "I'd invite anyone with information to call me," Tuckwiller said, "if they can document it." There is no dispute of the commitment that the fallen Bedford-area soldiers made in the D-Day invasion. They were in A Company, 116th Regiment, 29th Division of the Virginia-Maryland National Guard that was activated into military service in 1941. Many of them had trained for years with D Company from Roanoke that was also part of the 116th Regiment. The 116th saw some of the heaviest fighting on Omaha Beach during the D-Day invasion. A Company was in the first wave of the assault. "They just were mowed down," said Bob Slaughter of Roanoke, a D-Day veteran who was in the third wave and who spearheaded the drive to build the D-Day memorial. Written accounts of the invasion, from Cornelius Ryan's "The Longest Day" to Stephen Ambrose's "D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II," describe the heavy casualties suffered by the town of Bedford, but none goes so far as to claim that it had the highest per-capita loss. It seems plausible, McIntosh said, that the Bedford area would have had the highest concentration of casualties because the 29th Division was the only National Guard division involved in the invasion's first day. The "myth" may have been started by an obscure researcher who visited Bedford in the 1980s, Slaughter said. He recalls that back then, a California man named Robert Rowe was in Bedford doing research for a book on combat units that participated in the first wave of World War II battles. Rowe told Slaughter that Bedford's death toll was the highest in the country. Roy Stevens, one of only two living members of A Company, said that is when he started hearing talk of the per-capita reference. But Slaughter said Rowe died years later from cancer and never finished the book. Tuckwiller has not found any military records that tabulated the number of D-Day casualties in relation to the community where they lived. "No one has ever been able to point me to a source," she said. That's because the military didn't keep records in that manner, McIntosh, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, said. "The military would have no mechanism for doing that," McIntosh said. "The military would have no interest in it at all." News researcher Belinda Harris and computer-assisted-reporting coordinator Ray Reed contributed to this report. On the Net: www.dday.org.
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