Those Who Have Borne the Battle (21 page)

The marines and other veterans groups and political leaders managed to overcome various national and Washington arts groups who resisted such a memorial. Felix de Weldon's statue went up in Arlington. Despite the nearly 6,000 marines who died on Iwo Jima, some 29 percent of all the marines killed in the war, Bodnar points out there are no names on this statue, and there is no “hint there was tremendous loss of life.” Instead, the memorial names the major battles in Marine Corps history and the “uncommon valor” the marines displayed at Iwo Jima.

One of the speakers at the 1954 dedication of the Marine Corps Memorial pointed across the Potomac to the monuments there. He said that there in this statue were reminders of six “small-town boys” whose heroic act was a tribute to the strength of ordinary Americans when the heritage of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln is threatened. “Beneath this towering monument, on which a fleeting moment snatched from real life has been preserved in bronze, the ordinary man stands small and humble. The heroes, in their hour of greatness, quite fittingly loom like giants.”
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Many communities put up granite markers with the names of those who
had served in the war and a special recognition for those who had died. There were no GI Joe statues to compete for park space.

The National World War II Memorial was dedicated in 2004—too late for many of the war's veterans to see it. It occupies an honored place on the National Mall and is traditional, even magisterial, in its scale and design. A theme engraved in marble intones: “Americans came to Liberate, not to conquer, to restore freedom and to end tyranny.” The memorial celebrates battles and victories and features a wall with 4,000 gold stars to symbolize the 400,000 who died in the war. The inscription reads, “Here we mark the price of Freedom.”

As was the case after World War I, the United States did proceed with plans to have permanent military cemeteries overseas. There were 288 temporary cemeteries at the end of the war. The American Battle Monuments Commission decided that there would be no permanent cemeteries in Germany or Japan because they had been enemies during the war. On the other hand, an Italian cemetery was appropriate because Italy had joined the Allies before the end of the war.

There were finally fourteen permanent overseas cemeteries, ten in Europe. There was one in North Africa, in Tunisia, which was then a French colony. Three Pacific cemeteries were in the Philippines, Hawaii, and Alaska. There was no permanent cemetery on Iwo Jima, Okinawa, or other major Pacific battle sites. The commission believed they were too remote for families to visit. The American Legion agreed: these places were “desolate,” they were subject to “extremely hazardous forces of nature,” and finally they were just too far from “civilization.”
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Perhaps the most prominent of these overseas cemeteries is the one on the Normandy coast at Colleville-sur-Mer, above Omaha Beach. Following an extremely difficult battle in June 1944 along the shore and on the bluffs, thousands of Americans were killed within sound of the sea. In this immaculate cemetery marked by white crosses and Stars of David rest 9,387 American military dead. Another 1,557 names are inscribed on the Wall of the Missing. It is a place of peace and tranquillity, reflecting pools, with grand open structures of limestone and granite and marble, bounded by the green grounds and the slope to the beach below. It is marked with a bronze statue, not of a warrior but of a soaring figure
evoking the memory of those who died too young—”The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves.” Colleville-sur-Mer is a solemn place of memory, one that whispers of sacrifice more than it shouts of heroism. The sacrifices are indelibly marked, if abstracted into anonymity by the scale and the quiet grandeur of the grounds.

Following the war, many people, including veterans and families of deceased servicemen, believed that permanent graves near the comrades with whom they served would be most appropriate. Many, of course, wanted the remains to be brought back for burial at “home” either in a private cemetery or in a US military cemetery. In October 1947 some 400,000 people gathered in New York for a parade and a ceremony in Central Park, greeting the first ship from Europe with war dead. There were 6,200 coffins on this ship. One of these was randomly selected to be placed on a caisson and paraded to Central Park. A reporter who watched the unloading of this first coffin wrote that “women who saw this wept openly and men turned away.”
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Presumably, they turned to weep as well. In 1958 there was an unknown soldier from World War II, along with one from the Korean War, placed at Arlington National Cemetery alongside the World War I unknown.

The American Battle Monuments Commission was typically insensitive to Jewish concerns. The chapels at the military cemeteries were marked largely with Christian symbolism. The unknown graves—some 10,000 of them—were originally marked by a Star of David or a Christian cross based on the known proportion of Jewish and Christian dead in that campaign. Under pressure, though, in 1949 the commission ruled that all unknown graves would be marked by a cross so that no unknown Christian remains would need to rest under a Star of David.

 

 

As far as I know, it was Tom Brokaw who first used the phrase
the greatest generation
to describe the World War II generation. He covered this remarkable group at the fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries of the Normandy landing, and he wrote a book filled with rich interviews and memories of the war years.
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This was the generation that had endured the Depression, had fought and won the war, and had gone on to have a profound
impact on every area of American life. As with Tom Brokaw, I remember them as my father's generation and also attest to their accomplishments. In describing them as the
greatest
, I would prefer using Studs Terkel's qualifying quotation marks. Or perhaps simply remembering them for what they surely were, a great generation.

I have a historian's caution about superlatives. Simply looking at American history, I am struck by the enduring contributions of the Revolutionary War generation and the remarkable sacrifices of the Civil War generation. Each went on to alter American society fundamentally following their wars. Those who fought at Normandy and Iwo Jima and a score of other places, in the air above them and the seas around them, were clearly remarkable in their dedication and their sacrifice. It is impossible to compare them with those who fought at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, the Chosin Reservoir, or Khe Sanh—or in the hills of Kandahar Province in Afghanistan, for that matter—in terms of assessing the “greatest” courage. Let us simply recognize the sacrifice and courage that marked each—and still does.

The debate over relative greatness is more than a historical parlor game, a word exercise. I would also suggest that this is a conversation with consequences. I have been interested in this book with the way we interpret and remember war. It is about more than personal recollections; it is about the way societies and cultures think about their past and about their legacy, which can indeed have consequences for subsequent understandings, choices, and behavior.

The deification of the World War II generation—or, more critically, the sanctification of their war—can influence the way Americans over the years following the war think of power and responsibility, think about the nature of war, and think about those who fight wars. This is not about simply setting the bar too high—that is usually a fine way to encourage accomplishment. But it is about setting the bar in a place where we fail properly to understand the lessons of World War II and the impact of that war on the world we have inherited. Many scholars of World War II have cautioned us about the way we remember.
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It is really the veterans who have carried the heaviest burden. They did move on with their lives, and many have lived lives of tremendous
accomplishment and continuing contributions. But many veterans have kept hidden the memories, to protect their families from knowing, to protect themselves from remembering. They succeeded, if at all, only in protecting others from knowing their experience. James Johns wrote about watching men leave the horrible battleground of Guadalcanal. “They were dirty, sick, ragged; their eyes looked as if they had been to hell and back. I remember wondering how they could ever be the same again. . . . Many of them never were. I don't suppose any of us ever were.”
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Of course, to the extent the hiding of memories worked, the harder it became for Americans to understand and to know, truly know, this war. It was not a glamorous war. It was savage and dirty, and sometimes those fighting it demonstrated uncommon courage and sometimes uncommon cruelty. It was a war.

William Manchester admitted more than forty years after the war that he declined to join a reunion in Okinawa because it would be jointly held with Japanese veterans. “There are too many graves between us, too much gore, too many memories of too many atrocities.” He had earlier agreed to meet with a Japanese veteran, now a businessman, when he was at a gathering on Guadalcanal:

One of Studs Terkel's interviewees talked about veterans with seriously disfigured bodies who were being treated in a Pasadena hospital. When these men would go out on the street, people would look away. Some even wrote letters to the local newspaper asking, “Why can't they be kept on their own ground and off the streets?” The interviewee, an army nurse, told Terkel, “It's only the glamour of war that appeals to people. They don't know real war.”
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L
ATE IN THE AFTERNOON of July 5, 1950, a young soldier huddled in a foxhole in the rain near Sojong in South Korea. His unit, the 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment of the 24th Division, had just arrived, reassigned from their occupation duty at Kumamoto in Japan. A North Korean tank approached, and when his bazooka team fired, the tank opened up with its machine gun. The young man, Private Kenneth Shadrick, was shot dead. His team withdrew, taking his body with them.

Shadrick was the first announced American serviceman killed in the Korean War. Journalist Marguerite Higgins was present when the team brought his body to a hut that the medics had occupied. She had been a front-line correspondent in World War II and had left her Tokyo office of the
New York Herald Tribune
to go with the troops to Korea. She wrote that the dead young soldier had a look of surprise on his face. “The prospect of death had probably seemed as unreal to Private Shadrick as the entire war still seemed to me. He was very young indeed—his fair hair and frail build made him look far less than his nineteen years.” The
medic standing there said simply, “What a place to die.” The
New York Times
would write, “He died, as doughboys usually die, in a pelting rain in a muddy foxhole.”

Back in Skin Fork, West Virginia, Shadrick's parents learned of their son's death that morning at breakfast when a neighbor rushed in, telling them he had heard it on the radio. Mrs. Shadrick was devastated by the death of one of her ten children and could not discuss it. Mr. Shadrick, who had worked in the coal mines for thirty-seven years, later talked to reporters and was described as “sad but resigned.” His son, he said, “was the best there was. Never caused us a mite of worry.” He had accepted his son's interest in joining the army at age seventeen and had signed the permissions for it. When asked what he thought about his young soldier's assignment to this conflict, he said simply, “He was fighting against some kind of government.” When a reporter asked if he knew where Korea was, he said that it was the place where his boy had been killed.
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Over the next three years, nearly thirty-seven thousand other American servicemen would die in Korea. At home, their families would deal with the same tragic shock of loss that the Shadricks confronted. Though neighbors would join them in mourning, the country at large often failed to recognize the scale and the cost of the Korean War. It was so soon after World War II. Americans were still building military cemeteries for that war, and the unknown soldier of World War II remained in a temporary grave overseas. World War II GIs were just graduating from college. Korea was so distant, and the conflict there so complicated. Even so, it would set a new pattern for American military engagement. The Korean War has often been described as the “forgotten war” in the United States. This is an accurate description—in fact, it was hardly known even when it was happening.

America's wars before Korea had largely been in direct response to an attack or alleged provocation. There had been a widespread, if often simplified, understanding that British impressment of American sailors and threats in the Northwest by their Indian allies led to the War of 1812, that Mexican troops crossing the Rio Grande provoked the Mexican War, that the attack on Fort Sumter prompted the Civil War, that the sinking of the battleship
Maine
in Havana Harbor touched off the Spanish-American
War, and that the attack on Pearl Harbor signaled the beginning of World War II.