In February 1941, Company A of the 116th Regiment, Washington National Guard, left Bedford by train for what many believed would be a one-year assignment in the regular army, but by the end of that year the United States was at war and the young men from Bedford were committed for the duration. They were farmers, factory workers, baseball players, and hunters, most barely old enough to shave, and many had joined the National Guard for adventure and the thirty-dollar monthly stipend during the Depression, though war had seemed a remote possibility. Before long, the 29th Division was bound for war-torn England, while families at home endured rationing, wrote letters to missing loved ones, conducted scrap metal drives, and lived with the constant fear that their sons might be sent into battle. After D-Day, Bedford learned the cost of war in devastating fashion. On July 10, more than a month after the invasion, Bettie Wilkes was told that her husband, John Wilkes, had been killed in action, and a week later the news was confirmed. Nineteen men from Company A and one more Bedford man from Company F died on the beaches of Normandy, a loss of twenty young men that was the highest per capita suffered by any community in the United States. The National D-Day Memorial, standing on a hill a mile south of town, honors these men and all 4,413 Allied soldiers, sailors, and airmen who died in Normandy on June 6, 1944.