PHOTOGRAPH © KAREN PULFER FOCHT
In November, Lt. Robert Bedford attended a special Veterans Day ceremony at West Tennessee State Veterans Cemetery.
Wearing a black cap with “WORLD WAR II VETERAN” embroidered in gold, Robert “Bob” Bedford sits in his mid-century-modern home in Raleigh, facing windows offering a sweeping view of Lake Windermere. After fiddling with his hearing aid, he begins to tell his life story, struggling a bit because wartime explosions damaged his eardrums, a stroke seven years ago affected his speech, and when you’re 103 years old — almost certainly our city’s oldest veteran of the 1944 D-Day invasion — where do you even begin?
Born in 1919 in the Michigan resort town of Frankfort, Bedford planned to become a teacher, earning a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Michigan. When the war started, he decided to join the Navy, but the enlistment officer thought he was too short. With a twinkle in his eye — it soon becomes evident that Bedford has a keen sense of humor — “I put a book on my head,” he says, “and had them measure me again.” Just barely tall enough, the brand-new Navy cadet enrolled in officer candidacy school at Columbia University, emerging as an ensign assigned to Camp Bradford in Virginia for amphibious training.
The 22-year-old officer ferried trucks and jeeps across the English Channel to Utah Beach, one of the five landing sites along the heavily fortified coast of Normandy. Under relentless machine-gun fire from Germans entrenched atop the cliffs, Bedford remembers plucking wounded soldiers from the waves, carrying them to ships further offshore, and bringing more equipment to the beaches, all day long.
By May 1943, promoted to Navy lieutenant, he became boat officer of the USS Bellatrix, a troop transport that carried thousands of soldiers across the Atlantic to the northern coast of Africa. On June 9, he took part in the Mediterranean invasion of Sicily. During this ferocious air and sea battle, Bedford claims his main job was “just doing valet service.” What he means is that he helped troops, under heavy fire, clamber down rope ladders into smaller transport vessels, which took them ashore. Six weeks later, the invasion a success and the island reclaimed from the Axis powers, he returned to Camp Bradford.
The worst was yet to come. Along with 14,000 other U.S. troops, in November of that year, he boarded the Queen Elizabeth, the luxury liner converted to a troop transport, and crossed the ocean again, this time bound for various bases in England, where he received further training. But for what? Rumors persisted that an invasion of Europe was imminent, but Bedford wasn’t certain until a few days before June 6, 1944 — D-Day.
As the commander of an LCM (Landing Craft — Mechanized), the 22-year-old officer ferried trucks and jeeps across the English Channel to Utah Beach, one of the five landing sites along the heavily fortified coast of Normandy. Under relentless machine-gun fire from Germans entrenched atop the cliffs, Bedford remembers plucking wounded soldiers from the waves, carrying them to ships further offshore, and bringing more equipment to the beaches, all day long.
“I was never afraid,” he remembers. “We had a duty to do.” For this soldier, it was as simple as that.
Bedford continued LCM duty off the French coast for three months, before he was named gunnery officer of another transport ship, but the war ended before he saw further action. The battles at Sicily and Normandy claimed thousands of lives, but Bedford was one of the fortunate ones. Never seriously wounded, he survived a close call one evening while sleeping on the deck of his LCM. Summoned inside to a staff meeting, he returned to find his mattress sliced by a ragged piece of shrapnel. “If I had been there,” he realized, “that would have been in my belly.”
photograph courtesy robert bedford
Lt. Bedford during World War II
After the war, Bedford decided the Navy was enough for him. When asked how long he served, he laughs and says, “Long enough!”
Seeking a new career in peacetime, he enrolled at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. There he met Kenneth Kimbrough. After graduation, both men came to Memphis, opening Kimbrough Interior Design at 1400 Union, in a beautiful old home many Memphians remember fondly as the Hill Mansion. When developers bulldozed the property to make way for a Shoney’s, both gentlemen joined the long-established firm of E.C. Denaux, located a few blocks east on Union. The company attracted this city’s most exclusive clients, and Bedford and Kimbrough designed one of the first homes on Lake Windermere, moving into their new residence in 1951. There they lived, filling every room with painting, sculptures, and other artworks they collected during frequent travels around the world, until Kimbrough’s death in 1997.
Bedford remained at the home, assisted in the past 13 years by his caregiver, a former musician from Louisville, Kentucky, named Tom Bohn, whom he had met during a visit to Atlanta. The old soldier returned to Normandy in 2004 for the 60th anniversary of D-Day, and thanks to Forever Young, a national group headquartered in Memphis that organizes veterans’ reunions, has been back to Europe seven times. In November 2022, he participated in a Veterans Day celebration at West Tennessee Veterans Cemetery, where he was honored with a Tennessee flag that had flown over the state capitol, a “Centenarian Award,” and a specially minted coin from the Tennessee Department of Veterans Services, “issued to those outstanding people in our community who support our veterans.”
Looking back on a life that has lasted more than a century, Lieutenant Robert Bedford expresses few regrets. “I’ve traveled all over the world,” he says. “I’ve sailed on the Queen Elizabeth, and flown in the Concorde three times.” He lives in a house he designed himself, and has filled it with art treasures collected from around the globe. And most of all, even at age 103, he enjoys meals in Overton Square and Cooper-Young, where so many people here know him, greet him, and thank him for his service.
