Opinion | On Veterans Day, This Is the Lonely, Terrible Sorrow We Must Never Forget
By Jonathan Darman
Mr. Darman, a journalist and historian, is the author of “Becoming FDR.”
Eighty-one years ago this week, men from the advancing U.S. Army stood in a rain-soaked farm field in Margraten, the Netherlands, and established a cemetery. Over the winter and spring that followed, the bloody final months of World War II in Europe transformed that quiet stretch of land into a huge American cemetery, its soil turned over with thousands of fresh graves.
The fields at Margraten would become one of 14 permanent overseas military cemeteries set aside for America’s World War II dead that the U.S. government maintains in perpetuity. These beautiful, haunting places were dedicated by still-grieving Americans in the years that followed the war, remembering its awful costs and praying for a lasting peace.
There are fewer and fewer people still alive who lived through World War II. Margraten and the other cemeteries serve as reminders of the sacrifices that Americans made to free Europe. And, at a time when many Americans want to retreat from our responsibilities to the rest of the world, they offer us a warning.
The American service members buried in the soil of Europe grew up in a country where many respectable politicians claimed America had no business preserving peace on the European continent or promoting freedom in the world. There was no NATO, no United Nations, no American-led global order.
When you stoop down on European soil to read an American soldier’s name on a grave, you see how policies sold as “America First” can lead to unthinkable suffering and loss.
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Travel through Europe today and you’ll see the war-forged American-European partnership embedded everywhere — in gleaming embassies and in hulking military bases, in ubiquitous English-language ads and in the YouTube clips streaming on teenagers’ phones. But nowhere does the tie between the people on both sides of the Atlantic feel more intimate as in the World War II cemeteries.
Approximately 8,300 graves are at Margraten, one of a handful of out-of-the-way cemeteries for America’s war dead near the German borders of France, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands. Many of the service members buried in these places died in the western Allies’ assault on Germany and its forces in late 1944 and early 1945.
On the late summer day that I visited, the cemetery was bustling with visitors — grandparents holding the hands of little children, vacationers in bike shorts, 20-somethings with tattoos. From their hushed, respectful voices, I gathered that most of these people were Dutch.
Margraten lies in the southern part of the Limburg region of the Netherlands, where American troops were billeted in the final months of the European war and where the role of the United States in liberating the country from Nazi occupation is fondly recalled. The Dutch people have long taken pride in the grave adoption here. In a tradition that stretches back to the first Memorial Day after the war, every service member honored in the cemetery has a Dutch adopter who brings flowers and visits his or her place of memorial. Some even correspond with the deceased’s family in the United States.
This has always been an essential task of the World War II cemeteries — shrinking the distance across an ocean through the memory of shared sacrifice.
Following the conclusion of hostilities in 1945, the U.S. government announced that, as it had after World War I, it would create permanent overseas cemeteries for the dead. The families of service members whose remains had been recovered overseas had a choice: Their loved ones could be repatriated to the United States or buried beside other Americans in their theater of battle.
In each of the World War II cemeteries, rippling rows of identical white marble crosses and Stars of David mark the final resting place of Americans killed. Each bears an inscription that includes the person’s name, rank, unit, home state and date of death. Some say simply: “Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God.”
Walking through these rows of graves, you feel the sorrow the war visited on every corner of American society. A service member from Oregon lies next to one from Pennsylvania who lies next to one from Arkansas. Dumas is next to Ulander, next to Giudice, next to Smith.
But in their beauty, ambition and scale, the cemeteries have also always sent a message to Europeans, a reminder of the costs Americans were willing to pay to ensure the cause of liberty in the world. These cemeteries would be permanent and so too, they seemed to suggest, would be America’s interest in Europe’s affairs.
It is a message that many Europeans took to heart. At the visitors’ center at the Margraten, I was told that the large crowd in the cemetery that day was typical. The vast majority of visitors are Europeans. When I flipped through the guest book, I saw most of the entries were people from the Netherlands, Belgium and other Northern European countries. Many had written the same message: “Thanks, U.S.A.”
Reading these words, I felt a pang of regret: If only more Americans could see this place.
It is now more than ever, after all, that America needs the message of its World War II cemeteries. On a Veterans Day when optimism about the American experiment can be hard to summon, they transport us back to a moment when America was an essential force for good.
In today’s Europe, the need for such a partner remains. At Margraten that August morning, I spoke with a Dutch woman who’d come to visit the cemetery with her young son. He was learning at school about “the problems in the world,” she explained. He’s a little bit nervous, she said, about what would happen “if the Russians come.” She gestured at the rows of graves all around her: “So it’s very important to see everything.”
Not far from where we were standing was Margraten’s “Statue of the Mourning Woman,” a large bronze cast sculpture by the American artist Joseph Kiselewski. It depicts an outsize female figure, a trio of doves at her side, gazing down on an obliterated tree. All she sees is what too many of us have forgotten: the lonely, terrible sorrow that comes in the wake of war.