![]() "My mother just cried and cried," their sister, Lucille Hoback Boggess, who was a teenager at the time, said in a 2019 interview. The next day they got a telegram saying that Raymond was missing. ![]() On Sunday, July 16, 1944, the Hobacks, who had seven children, received a telegram as they were preparing for church. A sculpture at the memorial, "Death on Shore," which depicts a fallen soldier on the beach with a Bible beside him, was inspired by the account. The Hobacks' Bible has been a crucial part of the story. The community's tragedy led to the building of the memorial, which opened in 2001, and a best-selling book, "The Bedford Boys," by historian Alex Kershaw in 2003. "It was like a black veil dropped over the community," Cheek-Messier, the memorial's president, said an old veteran told her. "Bedford suffered the Nation's highest known per capita D-Day loss," the memorial says on its website. Twenty of the Americans came from the town and county of Bedford, about 170 miles southwest of Washington. The Hoback brothers were among 2,500 Americans and 1,900 other allied service members who were killed on the beaches of Normandy during the invasion of Nazi-occupied France in World War II. Long, the memorial's director of education, said in an email. It is roughly five inches by eight inches and covered with black imitation leather on paper, John D. The Bible is in excellent condition, perhaps because it was enclosed in an assault vest Raymond and other soldiers wore, said Art Beltrone, an appraiser from Keswick, Va., who has examined the Bible. ![]() In a 2019 interview, Lucille Hoback Boggess said her mother felt that the two brothers had gone off to war together and should rest near each other. "For us in the community, and for us as citizens of this country, really, this is a reminder of those sacrifices that were given that day, and what those families endured," she said.īedford Hoback is buried at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial, not far from the beach. "For the family it was their tangible connection to Raymond for all those years, because they never recovered his body." ![]() "To know that they entrust this to us means so much," said memorial president April Cheek-Messier. ![]()
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