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Seventy-five thousand Americans had been listed as missing or captured during the European campaign; thousands still were not accounted for at war’s end, leaving their loved ones with the particular anguish of uncertainty. “Darling, come to me in a dream tonight and tell me that you’re alive and safe,” Myra A. Strachner had written from the Bronx on April 18, after Private First Class Bernie Staller went missing. “Please! I know you want to tell me.” Private Staller’s secret eventually would out: he had been killed by German artillery a month earlier, at age nineteen. For others, the mystery endured. An estimated 25,000 GIs lay in isolated graves around the Continent, many of them hidden or lost.
No sooner had the ink dried on the surrender documents than mobile teams fanned across Europe to seek the dead and missing, including 14,000 Americans believed killed in air crashes behind enemy lines and others who had died in German prison hospitals. Similar searches began from the Arctic Circle to Cape Town, from the Azores to Iran. Graves Registration units labored to confirm the identities of more than 250,000 American dead in 450 cemeteries scattered across 86 countries, two-thirds of them in Europe or the Mediterranean. For an estimated 44,000 lost at sea, nothing could be done.
Within weeks, 700 bodies were disinterred in Czechoslovakia. Hundreds more emerged from scattered graves in eastern Germany, where the Soviets grudgingly permitted three American recovery squads to roam the countryside. Thirteen hundred sets of American remains were unearthed in the Low Countries, many from MARKET GARDEN polders. Millions of land mines made tromping around the Hürtgen Forest and the Siegfried Line perilous, but a nine-month hunt through western Germany would find 6,220 Americans on battlefields large and small. In three years, European fields, forests, orchards, and cellars would yield 16,548 isolated GI dead; over the subsequent decades they would continue to give up a skull here or a femur there.
Even as this search began, all twelve U.S. military cemeteries on German soil were emptied; no dead GI would knowingly be left in the former Reich. By the thousands, and then by the tens of thousands, the dead were reinterred at thirty-eight temporary sites, mostly in France, of which ten eventually became permanent American cemeteries. The solicitude accorded them could be seen at the Ninth Army cemetery in Margraten, where on May 30, 1945, Memorial Day, Dutch citizens gathered flowers from sixty villages and spread them like a brilliant quilt across seventeen thousand graves.
The power of a well-wrought grave was beyond measure. Patricia O’Malley, who was a year old when her father, Major Richard James O’Malley, a battalion commander in the 12th Infantry, was killed by a sniper in Normandy, later wrote of seeing his headstone for the first time in the cemetery at Colleville, above Omaha Beach.
I cried for the joy of being there and the sadness of my father’s death. I cried for all the times I needed a father and never had one. I cried for all the words I had wanted to say and wanted to hear but had not. I cried and cried.
In 1947, the next of kin of 270,000 identifiable American dead buried overseas would submit Quartermaster General Form 345 to choose whether they wanted their soldier brought back to the United States or left interred with comrades abroad. More than 60 percent of the dead worldwide would return home, at an average cost to the government of $564.50 per body, an unprecedented repatriation that only an affluent, victorious nation could afford. In Europe the exhumations began that July: every grave was opened by hand, and the remains sprinkled with an embalming compound of formaldehyde, aluminum chloride, plaster of Paris, wood powder, and clay. Wrapped in a blanket, each body was then laid on a pillow in a metal casket lined with rayon satin.
Labor strikes in the United States caused a shortage of casket steel, and repatriation was further delayed by a dearth of licensed embalmers, although government representatives made recruiting visits to mortician schools around the country. In warehouses at Cherbourg, Cardiff, and elsewhere the dead accumulated. Finally the Joseph V. Connolly, the first of twenty-one ghost ships to sail from Europe, steamed down the Scheldt with 5,060 dead soldiers in her hold. Thirty thousand Belgians bade them adieu from the Antwerp docks, while pledging to look after the 61,000 Americans who would remain in those ten European cemeteries, “as if,” one man vowed, “their tombs were our children’s.”
On Saturday, October 27, the Connolly berthed in New York. Stevedores winched the caskets from the ship two at a time in specially designed slings. Most then traveled by rail in a great diaspora across the republic for burial in their hometowns. Among those waiting was Henry A. Wright, a widower who lived on a farm in southwestern Missouri, near Springfield. One by one his dead sons arrived at the local train station: Sergeant Frank H. Wright, killed on Christmas Eve 1944 in the Bulge; then Private Harold B. Wright, who had died of his wounds in a German prison camp on February 3, 1945; and finally Private Elton E. Wright, killed in Germany on April 25, two weeks before the war ended. Gray and stooped, the elder Wright watched as the caskets were carried into the rustic bedroom where each boy had been born. Neighbors kept vigil overnight, carpeting the floor with roses, and in the morning they bore the brothers to Hilltop Cemetery for burial side by side by side beneath an iron sky.
Thus did the fallen return from Europe, 82,357 strong. As the dead came home, so too the things they carried. Two hundred miles north of the Wright farm, the Army Effects Bureau of the Kansas City Quartermaster Depot filled a large warehouse at 601 Hardesty Avenue, just below a majestic bend in the Missouri River. From a modest enterprise that had begun with half a dozen employees in February 1942, the Effects Bureau had expanded to more than a thousand workers, and by August 1945 they were handling sixty thousand shipments a month, each laden with the belongings of American dead from six continents.
Hour after hour, day after day, shipping containers were unloaded from rail freight cars onto a receiving dock and then hoisted by elevator to the depot’s tenth floor. Here with assembly-line efficiency the containers traveled by conveyor belt from station to station down to the seventh floor as inspectors pawed through the crates to extract classified documents, pornography, ammunition, and perhaps amorous letters from a girlfriend that would further grieve a grieving widow. The prevailing rule on Hardesty Avenue was said to be “Remove anything you would not want returned to your family if you were the soldier.” Workers used grinding stones and dentist drills to remove corrosion and blood from helmets and web gear; laundresses took pains to scrub bloodstains out of field jackets and uniform blouses. A detailed inventory was pinned to each repacked container before it was stacked in a storage bin. And all the while banks of typists in an adjacent room hammered out correspondence to the next of kin, up to seventy thousand letters a month, asking where the soldier’s last possessions should be sent.
Over the years, Effects Bureau inspectors had found tapestries, enemy swords, a German machine gun, an Italian accordion, a tobacco sack full of diamonds, walrus tusks, a shrunken head, a Japanese life raft. Among thousands of diaries also received in Kansas City was a small notebook that had belonged to Lieutenant Hershel G. Horton, a twenty-nine-year-old Army officer from Aurora, Illinois. Shot in the right leg and hip during a firefight with the Japanese in New Guinea, Horton had dragged himself into a grass shanty and, over the several days that it took for him to die, he had scribbled a final letter in the notebook. “My dear, sweet father, mother, and sister,” he wrote. “I lay here in this terrible place, wondering not why God has forsaken me, but rather why He is making me suffer.”
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This, the profoundest of all mysteries, would be left for the living to ponder. Soldiers who survived also would struggle to reconcile the greatest catastrophe in human history with what the philosopher and Army officer J. Glenn Gray called “the one great lyric passage in their lives.” The war’s intensity, camaraderie, and sense of high purpose left many with “a deplorable nostalgia,” in the phrase of A. J. Liebling. “The times were full of certainty,” Liebling later wrote. “I have seldom been sure I was ri
ght since.” An AAF crewman who completed fifty bomber missions observed, “Never did I feel so much alive. Never did the earth and all of the surroundings look so bright and sharp.” And a combat engineer mused, “What we had together was something awfully damned good, something I don’t think we’ll ever have again as long as we live.”
They had been annealed, touched with fire. “We are certainly no smaller men than our forefathers,” Gavin wrote his daughter. Alan Moorehead, who watched the scarlet calamity from beginning to end, believed that “here and there a man found greatness in himself.”
The anti-aircraft gunner in a raid and the boy in a landing barge really did feel at moments that the thing they were doing was a clear and definite good, the best they could do. And at those moments there was a surpassing satisfaction, a sense of exactly and entirely fulfilling one’s life.… This thing, the brief ennoblement, kept recurring again and again up to the end, and it refreshed and lighted the whole heroic and sordid story.
In Moorehead’s view, the soldier to whom this grace was granted became, “for a moment, a complete man, and he had his sublimity in him.” For those destined to outlive the war and die abed as old men half a century hence, the din of battle grew fainter without ever fading entirely. They knew, as Osmar White knew, that “the living have the cause of the dead in trust.” This too was part of the sublimity.
“No war is really over until the last veteran is dead,” a rifleman in the 26th Division would conclude. Of the 16,112,566 Americans in uniform during the Second World War, the number still living was expected to decline to one million by late 2014, and, a decade later, in 2024, to dip below a hundred thousand. By the year 2036, U.S. government demographers estimated, fewer than four hundred veterans would remain alive, less than half the strength of an infantry battalion.
Yet the war and all that the war contained—nobility, villainy, immeasurable sorrow—is certain to live on even after the last old soldier has gone to his grave. May the earth lie lightly on his bones.
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Unless specified, all photos are from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. Additional photos can be found at liberationtrilogy.com.
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The supreme commander of Allied forces in western Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, crossing the English Channel en route to Normandy from southern England on June 7, 1944. President Roosevelt chose Eisenhower to command Operation OVERLORD as “the best politician among the military men. He is a natural leader who can convince other men to follow him.”
An artillery unit bound for Normandy loads equipment into landing vessels in Brixham on the southwest coast of England, June 1, 1944. Seven thousand kinds of combat necessities, from surgical scissors to bazooka rockets, had to reach French beaches in the first four hours of the invasion.
The Allied military high command for Operation OVERLORD, during a meeting in London. Seated, from left to right: Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur W. Tedder; Eisenhower; General Bernard L. Montgomery. Standing, from left to right: Lieutenant General Omar N. Bradley; Admiral Sir Bertram H. Ramsay; Air Chief Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory; Lieutenant General Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff.
Eisenhower with paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division at Greenham Common in the Berkshire Downs, June 5, 1944. “The idea, the perfect idea,” Eisenhower advised, “is to keep moving.” The tall officer in the dark uniform is Commander Harry C. Butcher, Eisenhower’s naval aide.
American soldiers wade from a landing craft toward Omaha Beach and the bluffs beyond on the morning of June 6, 1944.
American and German dead await burial in a makeshift morgue behind Omaha Beach. The 4,700 U.S. casualties at Omaha, including wounded and missing, accounted for more than one-third of the Allied total on D-Day.
Reinforcements and artillery press inland from Omaha Beach two days after the initial invasion. Within a week of D-Day, more than 300,000 Allied troops and 2,000 tanks had arrived in France, but the beachhead remained pinched and crowded.
Montgomery, commander of Allied ground forces in Normandy, confers with war correspondents on June 15. Eisenhower considered him “a good man to serve under, a difficult man to serve with, and an impossible man to serve over.”
The remnants of Mulberry A off Omaha Beach after one of the worst June gales in eighty years. A senior American admiral denounced the artificial harbors emplaced off Normandy as “the greatest waste of manpower and steel and equipment . . . for any operation in World War II.”
Adolf Hitler examines wreckage in an undated German photo captured by the U.S. Army on the Western front. For the first and only time since the Germans overran Paris four years earlier, the Führer in mid-June of 1944 would return to France to confer with his commanders in Margival about the Allied invasion.
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, commander of Army Group B in France, seen in a 1940 photo that foreshadows his subsequent wounding four years later during a strafing attack by Allied fighter planes.
A German V-1 flying bomb plummets to earth above a London rooftop. More than ten thousand of the crude weapons were fired at Britain, killing or badly injuring 24,000 people; thousands more V-1s fell on Antwerp.
GIs from the 79th Infantry Division fighting in bocage terrain south of the Cotentin Peninsula in mid-July. Of these bitterly defended hedgerows, a soldier wrote, “Each one of them was a wall of fire, and the open fields between were plains of fire.”
Eisenhower and Bradley listen to Major General J. Lawton Collins, right, commander of the U.S. VII Corps, shortly after the capture of Cherbourg. Among the few officers in France with combat experience in the South Pacific, Collins was described by one admirer as “runty, cocky, confident, almost to the point of being a bore.”
General Karl-Wilhelm von Schlieben, commander of the German garrison at Cherbourg, shortly after his surrender on June 26. In his pocket was found a menu from a dinner honoring him a few weeks earlier, featuring lobster and champagne.
Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., seen in Ste.-Mère-Église on July 12, hours before he died of a coronary thrombosis. The 4th Infantry Division commander described him as “the most gallant soldier and finest gentleman I have ever known.”
Honorary pallbearers at Roosevelt’s funeral include Bradley and Lieutenant General George S. Patton at the head of the column on the left, and, on the right, Lieutenant General Courtney H. Hodges and Collins. (U.S. Army Military History Institute)
Field Marshal Walter Model took command of the retreating German armies in France in mid-August 1944. “Did you see those eyes?” Hitler once said of Model. “I wouldn’t want to serve under him.” (U.S. Army Military History Institute)
“A warring, roaring comet,” as one reporter described George Patton, the U.S. Third Army commander, seen here after his promotion to four-star general in 1945. (U.S. Army Military History Institute)
Photographer Robert Capa, left, and Ernest Hemingway, right, accredited as a correspondent for Collier’s magazine, with their Army driver in France shortly before the liberation of Paris.
Major General Jacques Philippe Leclerc, commander of the French 2nd Armored Division, on the Boulevard du Montparnasse in Paris on the day of liberation, August 25, 1944.
General Dietrich von Choltitz, commander of German forces in Paris, seen shortly after he formally surrendered the city late on the afternoon of August 25.
Sniper fire sends French citizens sprawling or fleeing in the Place de la Concorde on August 26. “It was like a field of wheat suddenly struck by a strong gust of wind,” wrote one witness.
General Charles de Gaulle continues singing a hymn in Notre Dame cathedral on August 26 despite gunfire reverberating through the nave during a thanksgiving service. “The most extraordinary example of courage I’ve ever seen,” a BBC reporter declared.
A French woman accused of collaboration with German occupiers is barbered on August 29. Others like her had swastikas painted on their breasts or placards h
ung around their necks that read, “I whored with the Boches.”
Parisians line the Champs-Élysées on August 29 to cheer the U.S. 28th Infantry Division, marching through Paris before taking up pursuit of the German army to the east.
Assault forces from the U.S. VI Corps file ashore near St.-Tropez in southern France during Operation DRAGOON on August 15, 1944.
Major General Lucian K. Truscott, Jr., shown here after his promotion to three-star general in October, commanded the U.S. VI Corps during the invasion of southern France and the subsequent pursuit up the Rhône River. This was Truscott’s third amphibious invasion of the war.
Lieutenant General Alexander M. Patch, Jr., commander of the U.S. Seventh Army in southern France, and his son, Captain Alexander M. “Mac” Patch III, shortly before the young officer’s death. (U.S. Military Academy)
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