Buddy's War #20- Interlude- Memorial Day

    ◆    75 Years Ago
    ◆    Memorial Day 1944

In 1944 Memorial Day was celebrated on May 30 as it had been for decades. (It became a Monday holiday in 1970.) It must have been a solemn day as many had already died- and everyone knew it would only get worse. It was only 8 days before D-Day.

Memorial Day (or Decoration Day) was, and is, a time to remember those who died in war. It was begun, as we know it today, after the Civil War and slowly was accepted across both north and south. It was the day to go to the cemetery and decorate the graves of the lost soldiers. It was a day to remember.

But in the midst of World War II, it was also a very real reminder of the cost the country was in the midst of paying. There was a debt being built that might live for many more decades and may never be able to be fully repaid.

John L. Sullivan was a Navy lieutenant during World War II. For Memorial Day 1944 he wrote this essay. The New York Times printed it on May 31, 1982, with the headline: “Memorial Day 1944: Looking Beyond Victory”. As I pause in my remembering thoughts of World War II, grateful that my Dad lived through the war, the essay is a haunting reminder across these past 75 years.

It began:

Recurrent in all our tributes to those who fall in battle is a dominant resolve that their sacrifice somehow shall bear fruit. How, we do not know, except in terms of generalities, even platitudes, about a bright new world which shall rise out of the desolation of war. This is our answer, and the only answer we have, to the wanton waste of blood and treasure which is the essence of war.

He continues:

For Victory alone is inconclusive. It decides the conflict, it ends the war, but of itself it settles no problems, establishes no principles. It is purely negative, for it brings us back where we started, and it was not for this that our comrades died.

His clear-eyed awareness of what was happening around him in the Pacific that year was filled with the pain of what he himself had no doubt witnessed. He knew that war doesn’t solve anything. It only, hopefully, sets the stage for something important and better. Victory is not the purpose of all this he says. Peace it the eventual purpose. But peace is not just the end of or the absence of war. It is the action of building a different and better world in the absence of conflict.

He concludes:

We are taking the first objective of this war, which is Victory. But our sights must be lifted higher. Beyond Victory lies Peace. Will it be the kind of Peace those men had in mind? It is for us to answer that question, all of us. If we answer it well and faithfully, if our voices and ideals help to make the Peace just as our weapons help to make the Victory, then in the years to come, years untroubled by the march of armies, we shall be able to say, in truth, that we have kept faith with those who died. We can do no less, and we can do no more.(-Link)

As Lincoln had said at Gettysburg almost 80 years earlier, it is for us the living to dedicate ourselves to the cause for which they gave their last full measure. It is for the living to build the peace. The war cannot do that. World War II did not do that. But it gave a place for that to happen.

Which is why I have been writing this blog and doing this research. It is about my Dad and his journey in war, but it is also about what happened as a result of that war- and how we may be losing the peace that built a different world. We may be losing the compassion that came at the end of the war to rebuild the countries of our enemies. We may be forgetting that these soldiers on one level or another believed that they were there to build a better world. Very few of them would have put it that way, of course. But to “keep the world safe for democracy” can be such a goal.

Today is another Memorial Day today. It is now 74 years since World War II ended. It did not end war. There are many more graves of many more young men and women in all corners of the world as well as in cemeteries around the United States. Maybe we can raise our voices and live our ideals in order to “make the Peace just as our weapons help to make the Victory.” It is in these actions of ours that our debt for their sacrifice will be redeemed.

Remembering Who We Have Been

World War II. The last great war where the future of the world was truly at stake. It was a war where...

• Numbers were beyond staggering.
• Destructiveness was beyond catastrophic.
• Death was beyond horrific.
• Inhumanity reigned as ideology ran rampant all over the globe-
• Germany and Italy; Japan and the Soviet Union.

It was probably the only time in world history where everything was literally up for grabs. The use of technology and human evil may have never been so widespread and dangerous

Seventy-five years will soon have passed.
Most soldiers are gone and memories are fading.

• Would we have believed that swastikas would again be flying- this time in the streets of the United States?

• Would we have guessed that white supremacy, as an ideology, would be in vogue among some?

• Would we have thought that the nation that helped rebuild its enemies from the ground up would be turning inward and away from compassion for the hurting and the refugee?

Seventy-five years will soon have passed. Memories only last so long. What was for me the greatest and most important of wars has been lost to shadows. Its message and clarion call for hope is now a fading echo. We have now had seventy-five years of more wars with often uncertain objectives and misleading leadership. We have become cynical. The citizen soldiers and bands of brothers of World War II are now too many generations behind us. We, their children, are now older than many of them were ever able to be. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren have little comprehension of the immense sacrifice our nation was willing to take.

We must never forget…

• That one of the brightest and most civilized of nations could descend in a few short years into monstrous and hateful acts…
• That the dehumanizing of other humans led to the most widespread mass slaughter in history…
• That the last great free nations on earth at the time, the United States and Great Britain, rallied in the face of the unthinkable…
• That the only free superpower of its day sent it citizens thousands of miles to rescue those who were trapped in evil…
• That these men and women returned home and gave us freedom and opportunity beyond any that average citizens had ever been able to access.

On this Memorial Day when we in this country are in conflict and uncertainty and division in ways very seldom before experienced, let us not forget what we have done and what we have stood for.

We must never forget who we are and what we can be. It is why they fought and died.

Never forget. Ever.

Memorial Day

You will never do anything in this world without courage.

It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.

— Aristotle

Remembering Why It Is Memorial Day

General Orders No. 11, Washington, D.C., May 5, 1868:

The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet church-yard in the land. In this observance no form of ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.

From an opinion piece in the Washington Post by a veteran:

It’s not Veterans Day. It’s not military appreciation day. Don’t thank me for my service. Please don’t thank me for my service. It’s take the time to pay homage to the men and women who died while wearing the cloth of this nation you’re so freely enjoying today, day.
-Link to Washington Post

Stop and remember this weekend.
It's not about summer and barbecues.

Memorial Day 2015

Having followed my Dad's 80th Medical Battalion/10th Armored Division during the past year, on this Memorial Day a special remembrance. The plaque at Arlington National Cemetery in honor of those who fought in the Battle of the Bulge.

Dedicated to the gallant and victorious men and women who participated in the Battle of the Bulge, World War II, 16 December 1944 through 25 January 1945 in Belgium and Luxembourg. The greatest battle ever fought by the United States Army. Presented by the veterans of the Battle of the Bulge on 16 December 1986.

[Sidenote: A number of posts on Facebook this year have noted that Memorial Day is not Veteran's Day- that Memorial Day is to remember those who died in (or as the result of) the wars. I appreciate that distinction.]

Memorial Day 2014

There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured with what is right in America.

-President Bill Clinton

Memorial Day 2013

Memorial Day.

Let us remember

and

work for peace so future generations

won't lose their best and brightest

and no other "greatest generation" will be

called on for anything but

peace.

Memorial Day Weekend Memory

He never talked about the war to me. I was probably too young at first. I was told later that he never talked about the war at all. It was a bad memory. I even remember hearing that he had bad dreams about it.

He was disabled from a brain tumor surgery on my 10th birthday. He was fine for a few years but then spent the last 18 months of his life in a Veterans's Hospital 80 miles from our home. His wife, my mom, had already died.

He died at age 59 when I was 16.

Everything I know, therefore, is hearsay. (Or maybe even heresy.)

For example, at one point I remember a story that he didn't want to go back into the service. he was actually a year too old. He had first been drafted in 1939 or so, then discharged after his time. But by 1944 things were tough. They needed him. He turned 39 in 1944. I remember his sister telling me that my mom and his family tried all kinds of ways to get him out. It didn't work and he was sent overseas. In an interesting sidelight, his Army ID which my brother still has and I have a scan of, his birth year is listed as 1906, not the actual year of 1905!

The story, as I have dug around, also has been changing. I have discovered I may have had information wrong. Sort of. Then again, maybe not.

I had known somehow or another that he had served at the Battle of the Bulge. (As a medical corpsman at that awful battle, it sure would explain the bad dreams and reluctance to talk about what he had seen.) In the way gossip and partial information works, I also thought he had been with the 10th Armored under Patton. But looking up the information from his gravestone on the Internet, that  may have been only half true. The Ninth Medical Battalion was assigned to the 9th Infantry, not the 10th Armored. Like the 10th Armored, the 9th Infantry WAS at the Battle of the Bulge.


But my Dad had trained at Camp (now Fort) Gordon, Georgia. That was a real memory. That's where he met my Mom and married her in May, 1944. The 10th Armored trained there, but it didn't look like the 9th Infantry did. Ah, but I found a personal reflection on the web from a veteran who was in the 9th as a replacement (like my Dad) AND had trained at Camp Gordon, probably about the time my Dad did.

Then last night I dug out some postcards Dad sent home from Europe the summer of 1945. His "return address" was Co. C, 80th Armored Medical Battalion. Which was part of- you guessed it- the 10th Armored.

(Unfortunately a major fire occurred in the military records in St. Louis back in 1973, destroying millions of records. Even though his information would now be archived- and open to the public- there isn't much there.)

I wish I knew more. Both about him, what he did, what the truth might be. A lot of memory is lost when death gets in the way. I will keep digging as best I can though.

And this weekend I will remember him as one of the soldiers of that "greatest generation", long gone now, and who would probably just ignore that remembrances.

Memorial Day 2012

World War II veteran at the flag raising at Target Field, May 11, 2012

True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic.

It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost,

but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.

--Arthur Ashe

An Ongoing Memory: Memorial Day

I've used this picture before, but it is one that continues to strike me as emblematic for Memorial Day.

A flag on a veteran's grave.

Memories and a memorial.

Memorial Day 2010

Memorial Day 2009

Vietnam War Memorial, Washington, DC
May, 1983 (scan from slide)

--cross posted with pmPilgrim photoBlog.

24/7 Liberty

Since it is Memorial Day, take a virtual trip to New York Harbor and see live picture (or archived pictures) of Lady Liberty herself via EarthCam.

Link here.

Memorial Day

--pmPilgrim Photo
(Cross posting with pmPilgrim photoBlog.)

At sunset along the Susquehanna River at Lock Haven, PA, the flag at half staff reminds us of the sacrifice of countless men and women who fought and died for our country. They answered the call of our nation.

Thank you.