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On 6 June 1944, Bettie Wilkes lost her husband, Master Sergeant John Wilkes, one of 20 “Bedford Boys” killed on D Day.
Not long after 9/11, I interviewed Bettie for my book, The Bedford Boys: One Small Town’s Ultimate D Day Sacrifice, published in 2003. Several years later, I returned to Bedford, Virginia, and spoke to her once more.
Bettie and John Wilkes were married in 1941. By June 1944, Wilkes was a muscle-bound, tough Master Sergeant in A Company of the 116th Infantry Regiment. Within minutes of landing on Omaha Beach, Wilkes and more than half of A Company had been slaughtered – suffering the highest fatalities of any Allied unit on D Day. The opening minutes of Saving Private Ryan show this tragedy in vivid detail.
Bettie was an utterly gracious woman, a deeply proud Virginian, and I will be forever grateful to her for her courage and honesty in sharing the tragic events of summer 1944 with me. I last met her, in Bedford, several months before she passed away, age 90, in 2014. Her husband’s grave is in Greenwood Cemetery in Bedford, Virginia.
As this year’s anniversary of D Day approached, I thought it would be appropriate to honor her and her husband, and indeed their generation, by telling her story in her own words:
“How did we find out that the boys were finally shipping out to England [in October 1942]? One of the boys must have gotten a phone call through to Bedford, and we got word of it. My friend Viola, whose husband Earl Parker served in Company A with my husband, called me and said, “Well, do you want to go to New York?” I replied, “Well, I guess so.” Her dad drove us to the station in Bedford.”
“We caught a train out the next week in the evening. It was crazy. But I had said I would see John any way I could. Of course, we couldn’t get a call through from our hotel in New York. We tried and tried. The next day we decided to try returning to Bedford.”
“I lived in Bedford with my sister Mildred. We shared an apartment, and she was very important to me. We worked together, and she was five years older than I. I was 21 when John was killed. When I learned about his death, I didn’t want to go back to work [at Belding Hemingway, which produced parachutes for the 101st Airborne Division and others].”
“After I received the telegram [on 17 July, six weeks after D Day], about a week later, my sister said, “I’m not going back to work until you go.” I guess that pushed me. I didn’t want her to lose her job because of me, and I didn’t want to lose mine either. Having something to do helped.”
“Viola Parker, who also lost her husband Earl on D Day, was close to me. We talked probably every night. Viola would always say about Earl, “when he comes back…” She wouldn’t accept that he had been lost. I just listened, not wanting to tell her he wasn’t coming back. She went to see [Lieutenant] Nance [who had been on Omaha Beach], and he told her Earl had been killed and then she finally accepted his death. She was trying to keep hope alive, and I didn’t want to take that away from her.”
“I was with Viola the night Danny [her daughter with Earl] was born in 1943. Her mother was over at the hospital and called me. Viola had taken a pencil and paper with her to the hospital. After giving birth, they brought her back to her room, and I was there. She soon started looking for a little drawer in the bedside table. She pulled out the paper and pencil and tried to sit up to write to Earl just a few hours after giving birth. We tried to get her to go back to sleep.”
“I went to Normandy for the 40th anniversary of D-Day in 1984. I met a medic, Cecil Breeden, who had landed in the first wave with my husband, John. We first met at Dulles airport while boarding a flight. He helped me with my luggage and asked where I was from. His eyes widened when I said I was from Bedford. In Normandy, he took me down to the beach and showed me where he had found John’s body. He said John hadn’t suffered—he was shot through the forehead.”
“I had John’s body brought back to Bedford in 1947. I felt better knowing he wanted to come home. There was some closure there; I had brought him home. His mother and father are buried right behind him now, and his sister too. When we saw the coffin, his father said to me, “I feel sure that’s him, don’t you?” I replied, “Oh yeah.” We could not be certain, as we weren’t allowed to open the coffin.”
“I still have John’s ring [over sixty years later]...the wedding ring. It’s in a necklace I wear. The photo shows me near a waterfall. It was a Sunday, on our honeymoon in 1941. I was eighteen.”
Bettie remarried after the war. In addition to her husband, John, eight Bedford Boys rest today in eternal peace at Greenwood Cemetery in Bedford. Eleven others from the small town, who died on June 6, are buried or commemorated on the Wall of the Missing at Colleville-sur-Mer American cemetery, overlooking the beach where they lost their lives.
