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Decades, only relinquishing the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee when he was censured for an ethics violation. | |
| Former Congressman Charlie Wrangell, dead at the age of 94. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington, D.C. to across the country. | ||
| And coming up Tuesday morning, former New York Republican Congressman Chris Gibson discusses his new book, The Spirit of Philadelphia, and how American founding principles can revitalize bipartisanship and civic engagement. | ||
| And University of Virginia Center for Politics director Larry Sabato on the current political landscape as the political parties prepare for two key gubernatorial elections this fall and midterm elections next year. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal. | ||
| Join the conversation live at 7 Eastern Tuesday morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c-span.org. | ||
| In a nation divided, a rare moment of unity. | ||
| This fall, C-SPAN presents Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins. | ||
| In a town where partisan fighting prevails, one table, two leaders, one goal, to find common ground. | ||
| This fall, Ceasefire, on the network that doesn't take sides, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| Joining us now to discuss his new book is author Robert Edsel. | ||
| The book, Remember Us, American Sacrifice, Dutch Freedom, and a Forever Promise Forged in World War II. | ||
| Robert, thank you so much for being with us this morning. | ||
| Thank you, Tammy. | ||
| We wanted to start by asking you what drew you to this story. | ||
| It's a very heartfelt story, decades in the making. | ||
| Why did you want to tell it? | ||
| It's hard to imagine 80 years after World War II that there'd be a story that's a major story that we don't know about, but this is one. | ||
| We've sanitized, I think, the telling of World War II, a lot of wars. | ||
| Soldiers are killed and we move on to the next scene, but obviously someone had to deal with that body, with the identification, with the notification, and with the transformation of the lives as a result of the loss of someone that was loved. | ||
| And then we introduced this remarkable moment of humanity and grace when the Dutch found an answer to the question, a question that they asked, how do you thank your liberators when they're no longer alive to thank? | ||
| And it led to the grave adoption program, which for 80 years has honored all of the Americans that are here in the Netherlands, where I am. | ||
| I was at the cemetery yesterday for Memorial Day, and it's the most uplifting, inspirational story of World War II I've ever heard of. | ||
| And it really started Memorial Day of 2016. | ||
| You met a woman, Frida von Seyk. | ||
| Tell us about her. | ||
| Frida was 15 years old when the German tanks rolled past her home in the little town of here, right outside Maastricht. | ||
| And this is the area of the Netherlands where World War II and Western Europe began. | ||
| The German invasion of Western Europe had to cross through the Netherlands to get to France and Belgium. | ||
| She was 19 when the American tanks came and liberated her country. | ||
| And I knew of her from the Monuments Men and my work in telling that story because she had written a letter to Harvard in September 1945, knowing an American soldier, the one American monuments officer who was killed in combat, Walter Hutchhausen, who's buried here at the cemetery in the Netherlands. | ||
| And she wanted the university to see if they would share the name and address of Walter Hutchhausen's mother because she wanted to say, I walk five miles several times a week to put flowers on his grave and I'm taking care of it. | ||
| And the university responded, I knew that story of Uni Road Monuments men, but in 2015, I learned for the first time she was still alive. | ||
| And so I flew to England where she lived. | ||
| She married a British soldier after the war. | ||
| and spent three hours with her showing me photographs of the German tanks, the American tanks, the Americans that they knew. | ||
| She said, are you aware of the cemetery? | ||
| And I said, yes. | ||
| And she said, have you been there? | ||
| And I said, yes, I've been there several times. | ||
| So you know about the grave adoption program. | ||
| And I said, the what? | ||
| And she said, the grave adoption program. | ||
| And I said, I have no idea what you're talking about. | ||
| So I left there with no intention of going to write a book. | ||
| I just thought she's maybe the last person to have spoken to this American monuments man before he was killed. | ||
| I felt duty bound to go talk to her. | ||
| And I left there curious, embarrassed that I didn't know about the grave adoption program. | ||
| And that led me to do some general research just to find out about it. | ||
| And the more I learned, the more inspired I was that this is a big story and it's an important story, especially today that we should all know about. | ||
| And it's been a great, great pride of mine for the last privilege, the last nine years, to write this story and now share it with the public. | ||
| I want to share a quote you start the book with. | ||
| It says, beginning in 1947, the United States government offered to bring its 280,000 sons and daughter home for reburial. | ||
| Many families accepted the government's offer, but 39% did not since 1949, when the 2,800 or so remaining bodies at Mark Groten, that's the cemetery we're talking about, were reburied in the permanent layout. | ||
| The Netherlands American Cemetery has been their final home. | ||
| The walls of the missing, fronted by the beautiful cherry trees, are carved with the names of 1,700 more. | ||
| They are Americans, mostly young, many volunteers, who gave everything. | ||
| They rest here now through the rains of spring, the heat of summer, and the leaves of autumn, and the snow of winter. | ||
| Almost 10,000 stories, too many to tell. | ||
| Your book focuses on just a handful. | ||
| How did you choose which stories to tell? | ||
| And who are they? | ||
| Well, there's a reason it took eight years to figure out how to tell this story. | ||
| 17,800 boys, imagine that, 17,800 boys and a few women were buried at the cemetery at the end of World War II. | ||
| It was our largest World War II cemetery. | ||
| That's the size of a town, a city. | ||
| Those kind of numbers numb us. | ||
| I needed to find a handful of people to tell the story through their lives. | ||
| And I picked, I wanted to show the diversity of the country. | ||
| I wanted to remind people we were a country of immigrants. | ||
| We are a country of immigrants. | ||
| We always will be. | ||
| That's a good thing. | ||
| We work together to achieve an incredibly noble outcome. | ||
| I chose a professional soldier, Robert Cole, who was with 101st Airborne, who received the Medal of Honor for his heroic efforts during the D-Day landings. | ||
| I chose two boys who were twins, who had never spent a day apart, that the Army Air Force allowed to pilot and co-pilot the same airplane in 1943. | ||
| Seems crazy, but it was allowed to happen. | ||
| I chose a chaplain who wanted to be near the front lines with his boys. | ||
| He felt like I can't do any good talking to them before they leaved for combat, and then I'm not there with them. | ||
| And he was able to transfer and become a paratrooper himself to be there on the front lines when they dropped into the Netherlands in March 1945. | ||
| I introduce a gravedigger, a story that we don't know about in our movies and films and books about World War II, because I want people to know about the car wreck elements of war. | ||
| I want them to know about how horrible the war is and what happens to a soldier when he's killed on the field of battle. | ||
| We don't tell that. | ||
| I mean, we cut to the next scene. | ||
| But I wanted to not only follow what happens to the body, where do they take it? | ||
| How do they process it? | ||
| How do we know for sure that person is the person that they say it is? | ||
| How did the notification happen to the families? | ||
| How did they deal with this worst possible news a family or a young spouse could ever receive? | ||
| And how then did the adoption program come into being? | ||
| That was a really important part of the story and a poignant aspect because we chose to assign that job to black quartermaster troops that we were more comfortable handing a shovel to than a gun. | ||
| And it was a horrible, horrible task. | ||
| Under gruesome weather conditions, there was no wood out there, no coffins. | ||
| These boys were buried in bed sacks, so they had to be touching the bodies or parts of bodies all day long every day. | ||
| If they were lucky, they dug one grave a day. | ||
| So these are some of the characters through whom I tell the story. | ||
| And today at the cemetery, there's someone from every single state in the United States. | ||
| There's not a community in America that doesn't have a connection to this story. | ||
| And I wanted that to be reflected in the characters that I chose. | ||
| Our guest is Robert Edsel, author of the new book, Remember Us: American Sacrifice, Dutch Freedom, and a Forever Promise Forged in World War II. | ||
| If you have a question or comment for him, you can start calling in now. | ||
| The lines for the segment are regional. | ||
| If you're in the Eastern or Central time zone, it's 202-748-8000. | ||
| If you're in the Mountain or Pacific, it's 202-748-8001. | ||
| And we also have the line set aside for military and military families. | ||
| Again, that is for those who are active duty, retired, or veterans. | ||
| We actually already have a call ready for you. | ||
| We'll start with Alan in Brooklyn, New York. | ||
| Good morning, Alan. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Thank you so much. | ||
| This ties in well with the last guest because that was a discussion about how we were able to muster the will to oppose aggression through alliances. | ||
| And I had asked in my earlier potential question whether the readiness of a country to oppose aggression depends on the readiness of all of its people to serve, and the possible effect at the end of our draft without any corresponding national service requirements, 50 years later, might have weakened America's readiness to oppose aggression and increased the likelihood of future aggression, the kind we have now in Ukraine with Russia. | ||
| And your story seems to tie in directly with that, because the readiness of people to volunteer or to serve as draftees depends upon the honor that their country and other countries involved in the effort put on their sacrifice through acts of kindness, like these People taking care of the grave sites. | ||
| We have now not just a population not ready to respond as broadly to these needs or these threats, but we also have a generation of leaders in Congress now who have been raised in a world without the draft and many of whom have never served as volunteers or as draftees. | ||
| Do you see a tie-in between the honor we've given these soldiers from World War II and the lack of respect that this country and some of its leaders are showing toward current or potential draftees or enlistees in the level of new violence or aggression that we're experiencing in the world? | ||
| Can we really deter that without having a population, not just a military, that's ready to sacrifice and confident they will be honored if they die? | ||
| Alan, if you write me at robert at robertetzel.com, I'm happy to answer that question, but that's a political question in nature. | ||
| And on this Memorial Day, when we're honoring, in particular, the 10,000 men and women that are buried at the Netherlands American Cemetery and our more than 100,000 men and women that are buried at cemeteries in Europe, not to mention all of the heroes from recent conflicts that are buried in the United States, I'm not going to get into a political question about something because I don't want to see sullied the memory and legacy of these men and women. | ||
| And I don't want to confuse the issue with the challenge at hand today, which for us is not only making people aware about this high watermark for humanity of what the Dutch have done in honoring our American men and women, but they only have the contact information. | ||
| These 10,000 adopters only have the contact information for 20% of the American families because at the end of the war, the United States government refused to provide the adopters with the names and addresses of the other 80% of Americans. | ||
| So we've created a website called foreverpromise.org. | ||
| I'll explain why maybe in a later question. | ||
| And it has a searchable database of all 10,000 men and four women that are buried at the cemetery here in Margrotten. | ||
| And we're asking people to go there, see if you have a relative that's buried there or know of someone that's buried there. | ||
| If there's a short questionnaire that pops up, it asks you, what's your relationship? | ||
| Are you aware there's a grave adoption program? | ||
| Are you in contact with your doctor? | ||
| If you're not, would you like to be? | ||
| And if so, will you give us permission, the Monuments Men and Women Foundation, to share your contact information with our colleagues in the Netherlands who run the Dutch Foundation for Adopting Graves so that they can put the Dutch adopter in contact with the American family of the relative they've watched over for 80 years? | ||
| Some of these families have unsent letters or photographs of the boy because he was in their home. | ||
| He lived in their barn or something. | ||
| They were there for three or four months waiting for weather to pass and start the spring offensive, but they don't have anyone to share it with. | ||
| And that's something we want to see changed. | ||
| So that's my focus right now, not to get into politics. | ||
| Again, I'm happy to answer your question if you want to write me personally. | ||
| And just so you have it, again, the website that Robert just mentioned is foreverpromise.org. | ||
| Robert, wanted to follow up. | ||
| You mentioned, or we talked a little bit about the length of time it has been since you started working on this project on this book. | ||
| How did you find the information and what were some of the challenges that you had in putting it all together? | ||
| Well, working in other languages is always a challenge. | ||
| Frida, who I became close friends with over the last eight years of her life, in fact, I delivered her eulogy two summers ago. | ||
| She shared with me information and she was quite fluent in English, so that made that easy. | ||
| The other woman, and I used Frida's, my friendship with Frida and my friendship with a lady named Emily Michels van Kesnick, Emily will say, who was a mother of 12, a Dutch mother of 12. | ||
| She had three children during the war. | ||
| She had eight before the war, one after. | ||
| I didn't know Emily personally. | ||
| She died in 1970, but her daughter, 92 years old, who was with me yesterday at the cemetery. | ||
| In fact, I had the daughters of Frida and Emily both with me at the cemetery. | ||
| It's the first time they'd met. | ||
| And Emily kept diaries all during the war, every day, practically writing in it, putting photographs, newspaper articles. | ||
| So she helped me from the grave. | ||
| And we had to translate all those documents. | ||
| That took more than a year just to translate all of the things into English. | ||
| And then, of course, reading it and trying to understand it. | ||
| And when you're trying to tell a story like this, it's a jigsaw puzzle. | ||
| Some of the pieces are easy. | ||
| You can tell where they fit together. | ||
| Other pieces seem to defy you from figuring out how they fit into the picture. | ||
| But eventually you do, you are able to sort it all out. | ||
| And Emily was a critical component because when the United States government and Army refused to provide the next of kin information, she wrote a letter to President Truman in 1945 and pleaded with him to help. | ||
| And when that didn't work, she got on an airplane in 1946 and flew to the United States. | ||
| She'd never even been on an airplane. | ||
| She traveled around for five weeks, meeting with different families that had lost a son, a husband, a brother during World War II. | ||
| Some of these families' losses had happened in some other country, not even the Netherlands, but she was someone to speak to. | ||
| She was someone to share their grief with. | ||
| And for five weeks, she met with these families, she met with these young war widows, and to all of them, she said the same thing. | ||
| Leave your boys with us. | ||
| We will watch over them like our own forever. | ||
| The forever promise. | ||
| Hence, the reason we named in our partnership with the Dutch Foundation, foreverpromise.org. | ||
| Let's finish 80 years later what they tried to finish then and have all these American families contact us. | ||
| We don't charge anybody for the effort. | ||
| We're just trying to finish doing a really good thing. | ||
| And in the process, it'd be a nice thing for we Americans to thank the Dutch for what they've done because this didn't happen in any other country to the extent that it's happened in the Netherlands. | ||
| Our guest is Robert Etzel, author of the new book, Remember Us. | ||
| We have him for another 30, 35 minutes or so, but wanted to let you note that at 9 o'clock in just about eight minutes or so, the house will be gabbling in for a brief pro forma session. | ||
| And we will be going to that again briefly when that happens. | ||
| Let's hear from Mary in St. Louis, Missouri, line for military family. | ||
| Good morning, Mary. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| I can't believe that this has turned on. | ||
| In 1943, my father's youngest brother, my uncle, was shot down over the Netherlands after the Schmeitfurt raid. | ||
| And his wife had agreed to allow him to be buried in the Netherlands Cemetery. | ||
| She and his sister went over in the late 1940s, and no other family member has been there since, except this a week from this Saturday on June the 7th, my husband and I will be visiting his grave. | ||
| And I'm so thankful for the book. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Well, you're going to have me crying now, which I do a lot every day. | ||
| And they're more tears of joy and gratitude than they are painful as your experience may be. | ||
| But you're going to find out. | ||
| It's going to be the most, maybe the most rewarding thing that you've ever had happen to you in your life, as well as other Americans that do this. | ||
|
unidentified
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There are 253 sons of Missouri who were buried at that cemetery. | |
| 2.5% of the American boys that are at that cemetery are from your state. | ||
| So we're just asking people to, you know, you fiddle around on the internet, help us find these Americans and allow them to have this transcendent experience of being connected with the Dutch family that goes out there on the birth and death date of the boys on Veterans Day on Memorial Day. | ||
| The Dutch have turned this cemetery into a classroom. | ||
| They're out there with their kids and grandchildren all the time. | ||
| It's a place not filled with death, but with life and with youth. | ||
| And they drill into them. | ||
| You're able to say what you want to say and think what you want to think because of the freedoms that were paid for with the lives of these American boys and girls that are buried here. | ||
| They understand freedom's not free. | ||
| They don't take it for granted. | ||
| And it's inspiring and instructional and leaves me and those of us that work at the Monuments Men and Women Foundation asking, why the heck in the United States do we not have a grave adoption program? | ||
| And it's something that we're working on. | ||
| But we want to finish the job that needs to be finished over here first and help the Dutch help us. | ||
| Robert, you mentioned at the top it's been almost 80 years that this has been happening. | ||
| Take us back to when it first started. | ||
| How did civilians come to be caretakers for these graves? | ||
| Well, that's a great question. | ||
| And that was a huge part of what inspired me: trying to figure out the answer to that question. | ||
| It started organically. | ||
| A lot of the people like Frida knew an American soldier. | ||
| And when they found out they were dead, they were grief-stricken. | ||
| They felt like it was a loss of someone in their family. | ||
| They considered them their boys. | ||
| They went out and put flowers on the grave at the temporary cemetery. | ||
| And this was happening throughout the area, not just people in Bargroton or Moss Street, but the whole South Lindbergh Province region. | ||
| And then the cemetery started construction in October 1944. | ||
| Again, we don't tell during World War II, we don't talk about cemeteries because it's depressing. | ||
| And this would be a depressing story, too, if it ended that way, but it didn't. | ||
| The grave adoption program gives us a different ending to World War II than every other book and film that's been told. | ||
| And it's an inspiring ending. | ||
| In November, the cemetery received its first American soldiers. | ||
| An American soldier named Captain Lane was there paying respects to his cousin who was buried there, Captain Land from South Carolina. | ||
| And there was one civilian that was allowed out there at the cemetery, a guy named Joseph Van Laar, who was from Margroton. | ||
| And he was allowed out there because he spoke English fluently. | ||
| And Captain Lane said, I've got orders. | ||
| I've got to leave. | ||
| You'd be doing me a great honor if you'd watch over the grave of my cousin. | ||
| And Joseph Van Laar said, I will do more than that. | ||
| I will take care of him as if he was my own. | ||
| Indeed, I will adopt him. | ||
| Now, he meant adopt in a figurative sense. | ||
| And in January 1945, the mayor of Margrotten, a small town of 1,200 people then. | ||
| Today, it's just a small little town, but it's less than a mile from the cemetery. | ||
| The people of Margrot and the town council gathered, and they asked the question: well, how do we thank our liberators when they're not alive to thank? | ||
| Now, the war is still five months away from being finished, and they're already thinking about this. | ||
| The sense of gratitude is so great. | ||
| And they threw out ideas about parades and special masses. | ||
| And then Joseph Van Law said, I have an idea. | ||
| I've promised so many American soldiers I'll watch over their cousin or their buddy's graves. | ||
| I can't possibly do it all myself. | ||
| Maybe we could do that. | ||
| And the mayor of Margrotten, Mayor Ronkers, said, that's it. | ||
| That's what we're going to do. | ||
| By May 1945, they only had a couple hundred adopters. | ||
| And then Emily, who I mentioned earlier, the mother of 12, got involved because she said, every American soldier I look at, I see the face of one of my boys. | ||
| And she wrote President Trimman, that didn't go anywhere. | ||
| But in September, the mayors of these towns, Emily's husband in Maastrique, Mayor Ronkers and Margrotten and other towns, started receiving letters from the United States. | ||
| And the letters all pretty much said the same. | ||
| I'll give you an example. | ||
| A lady from Demopolis, Alabama wrote, and she said, I'm 26 years old. | ||
| My husband died on his 25th birthday a few weeks before the end of the war. | ||
| He was my whole life to me. | ||
| I would be beholden to you all the days of my life if you could take a photograph of his grave. | ||
| For American families, that was all they were going to get. | ||
| They couldn't go overseas. | ||
| There wasn't any modern communication system. | ||
| The mail service had only just then resumed. | ||
| So Emily went out there and took two of her young daughters. | ||
| You can see that photograph in the lower portion of the screen, lower left, lower right on the screen. | ||
| Those are her two daughters out there. | ||
| And she sent it to this lady in Alabama. | ||
| And the lady forwarded the letter and the photograph to Life magazine. | ||
| And they printed it. | ||
| And she said, I know there's a lot of other people suffering. | ||
| I know you want to know something about your boys. | ||
| There's this really nice lady named Emily in Maastricht. | ||
| I think if you'd publish her address, it would be a great help to Americans. | ||
| And they started sending letters by the thousands, all making the same request. | ||
| So this is where it started. | ||
| And then this effort, the resumption of mail service is what transformed it from something that was nice and noble, adopting the graves of dead boys, to something that was transformative. | ||
| And that was the Dutch adopter and the foundation realized the help needs to extend to reaching into the homes in America, into the families, and try and assuage their grief. | ||
| That's our task. | ||
| That's what we want to do. | ||
| And they've been doing it for 80 years. | ||
| We'll go to Linda in Missouri. | ||
| Good morning, Linda. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi, good morning. | |
| Thank you, sir, for having this as one of your subjects today. | ||
| When we were, we took a vacation out to Grand Canyon, and it was the most pleasurable part of our month-long trip was all the people from the Netherlands and the Dutch and that we met out there. | ||
| And every time we spoke to those people, they talked so much about the honor and the privilege and their duty to take care of our soldiers that were left over there. | ||
| It was just, my husband served in Vietnam, and he's a historian. | ||
| He likes to read about everything. | ||
| But it was just one of the most memorable parts that we spent out there was visiting with these extremely passionate people. | ||
| It truly is an honor that they take as seriously as anything. | ||
| But I just wanted to let you know that that was what we felt and saw and heard from these people, the commitment that they have. | ||
| And thank you so much. | ||
| Well, thank you for the affirmation. | ||
| Thanks to your husband for his service to the nation, especially this weekend, we should say that. | ||
| And imagine in 1945, 80 years ago, 80 years ago, yesterday, there were 40,000 people from this province that has little towns, 40,000 people that walked to the cemetery for the Memorial Day, the first Memorial Day after the war. | ||
| 40,000 people walked, rode horses, came on carts, rode their bikes. | ||
| They didn't have any fuel, and most of them didn't have cars, but they stood out there for hours to pay respects to these American liberators. | ||
| The New York Times at the time said it was without precedent that a country would honor foreigners in this way. | ||
|
unidentified
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And I think that's still true today. | |
| Robert, I wanted to ask you, you had a book out in, I believe it was 2007, The Monuments Men. | ||
| It went on to become a movie. | ||
| Some people may be familiar with it. | ||
| That movie helped raise awareness of the story you were telling. | ||
| And you've had a couple callers today who know about this, who have heard about it. | ||
| Do you want to see the same thing happen with this story? | ||
| What would you like to see happen? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I don't write books for the sake of writing books. | ||
| I love doing the research. | ||
|
unidentified
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The writing's difficult. | |
| I'm a messenger. | ||
| I tell stories to people that are their story. | ||
| I'm interested in trying to change the world a little bit for the better. | ||
| The Monuments Men story was driven by my desire to see the United States thank these men and women that did what they did during World War II, because when they came home, it was the early 1950s, when they came home after returning four and a half million stolen works of art and cultural objects to the countries from which they'd been taken. | ||
| We were engaged in the Cold War, Korea was going on, and they just got lost in the fog of history. | ||
| It wasn't anybody's fault, but I wanted to see them honored. | ||
| We got that done in 2015 with the awarding of the Congressional Gold Medal to them. | ||
| And that was a joyous moment to be there with four of the monuments men and women and be able to speak in the halls of Congress to the hundreds of family members that were there to participate in that. | ||
| We were able to persuade the United States Army to reconstitute monuments officers. | ||
| That happened in 2020-21 with the creation of the Army Monuments Officer Training Program, which I spoke at the very first commencement ceremony for the new monuments officer. | ||
| So that's important that we have that today. | ||
| And I think globally, people understand protecting our shared cultural heritage is usually important. | ||
| So what's the higher calling of Remember Us? | ||
| The higher calling is this. | ||
| We should remember that for all of the bickering that's going on in the United States and other places around the world today, that freedom's always under attack. | ||
| If we're in war, we fight freedom. | ||
| We fight to preserve our freedom with bullets and weapons. | ||
| But freedom's under attack when we're not in war. | ||
| People or organizations trying to erode away freedoms. | ||
| We have to fight for them all the time. | ||
| That's part of the message. | ||
| But there's this transcendent thing that happened at the end of World War II in the Netherlands that didn't happen in the same way anywhere else. | ||
| The gratitude that was expressed, the decency of people. | ||
| In this case, they were Dutch. | ||
| And I think that's something we all need to know and be inspired by. | ||
| And the point that just one person can make a difference, it was the decency of each person here doing what they were able to do. | ||
| What a 19-year-old girl like Frida could do was different than what a 37-year-old wife of 11 or 12 at the time who was the wife of a mayor could do. | ||
| But everyone did what they were able to do. | ||
| And that's a hugely important story. | ||
| And then, of course, I think it's great that we always say we don't leave anyone on the field of battle. | ||
| But what happens? | ||
| What's the point if we forget about them? | ||
| So this is designed to make sure that we don't forget about them, that they live forever young and that their lives and their sacrifices mattered because I believe everyone, everybody wants to be remembered somehow, some way by somebody. | ||
| And the Dutch are making sure that these boys and the four women who are frozen in time, forever young, will always be remembered. | ||
| And they're the ones that are out there doing it. | ||
| And that's heartwarming to me. | ||
| So we have a mission to finish. | ||
| The foreverpromise.org is that mission. | ||
| We want to see all of the Dutch adopters, each one of them, have an American relative to be able to correspond with and get that percentage from 20%, where it is right now, to 100% through the foreverpromise.org effort. | ||
| And then there are 7,500 American boys that are in the United States who had adopters for the first three or four years that they were buried in the Netherlands until their families brought them home. | ||
| So there's much more to be done. | ||
| And I think it can, it's a pathway to engage our youth who are not learning about the cost of freedom in schools. | ||
| And they're not going to grow up anymore with World War II veterans or parents of the Depression era. | ||
| They're not going to learn like I did growing up in a World War II household where my father was a young Marine who fought in the Pacific in Saipan, Okinawa, Nagasaki. | ||
| They're not going to have that advantage. | ||
| And the schools aren't doing it. | ||
| So how upset can we be that Americans don't know what the cost of freedom is or that it's not free because there's no place for them to learn it? | ||
| This is a chance to learn from the Dutch and do something like that in the United States and teach our kids and get them engaged the way the Dutch are. | ||
| Let's talk with Melissa in Garland, Texas, Line for Military Family. | ||
| Good morning, Melissa. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Robert. | |
| I want to thank you immensely for your book. | ||
| I will be purchasing it after this call. | ||
| My grandfather is buried at that cemetery. | ||
| And I didn't get in contact with the family until 2015 after reading about this program in the Washington Post. | ||
| Now, I had been sending flowers at the grave for his birthday and on Memorial Day and on other holidays, but I didn't know about this program. | ||
| And then when I did finally get in touch with the family, I learned that they had been in touch with my grandmother, the first adopter. | ||
| And the family shared pictures to me that they had shared with my grandmother. | ||
| And you're right. | ||
| At the very beginning, the photo shows the mother with her child on her knees and the kids are on their knees praying at the cross. | ||
| And so it's immensely special to families to have that. | ||
| And then every year, it's three generations. | ||
| And then their children as well also go. | ||
| So there's, you know, all these generations of families that are going, and there's a waiting list to adopt the graves, too. | ||
| But it is sad that most families, as you said, 20%, were not aware of this. | ||
| And so I'm an editor at the Christian Post. | ||
| And so we also shared the story back in 2022 because there was a family that's also searching for their American family. | ||
| And one thing I wanted to ask you to share about is the Faces of Margraton program, where they have their requesting a photo from the American families of their soldier that they have adopted that is posted by the cross for a special event. | ||
| And I don't know if they do that yearly or every few years. | ||
| And I wanted to know if you could shed some light on that. | ||
| Yeah, Faces of Margraton is a great program. | ||
| It's just one more way the Dutch are finding a way to bring these men and women to life and preserve their memory. | ||
| So they've asked the families they're in contact with, which again is only 20%. | ||
| There's 80% of the families, the adopters, there are 100% of the graves and names on the walls of the missing that have an adopter. | ||
| There are only 20% of the families the Dutch have contact information for. | ||
| So we're looking for 80%. | ||
| You're from Texas. | ||
| I'm from Dallas. | ||
| There are 388 sons of Texas that are, or 398 rather, sons of Texas. | ||
| And one woman, one of the four women, are from Texas out there. | ||
| And 29 from my own city, from Dallas, eight from Fort Worth. | ||
| So the face of Margrotten is an important part, but they can't ask for photographs of the men and women that are buried out there from the family members if they're not in contact with the family. | ||
| So that's another reason that we're trying, this is the time. | ||
| We have the tools of technology. | ||
| Americans are a generous people. | ||
| They don't know about this. | ||
| I've met with so many people in Washington that run on about, well, we know all about our overseas cemeteries. | ||
| And I ask them when they're through talking, do you know about the Dutch grave adoption program? | ||
| And they say the same thing that I did. | ||
| I never heard of it. | ||
| So we can change that. | ||
| And Remember Us is a way to not only tell the story of these 12 American heroes that are buried there, very moving stories, threaded together. | ||
| These aren't individual stories unrelated to each other. | ||
| They're all connected. | ||
| But the stories converge at the cemetery or in and around that area. | ||
| And as I said, some make it through, some do not. | ||
| But you find out about what the real cost of war is and this transcendent moment that the Dutch have done and are continuing to do. | ||
| And here's the call to action for Americans. | ||
| Help us help the Dutch continue to honor our men and women that are over here, especially on this Memorial Day. | ||
| Use a little time. | ||
| Visit the foreverpromise.org website. | ||
| Buy the book, as I said. | ||
| Don't buy the book if you don't want to. | ||
| But that book, I believe, will leave every reader with an experience of honor and decency and feel proud to know that there are people like this in the world, that even in the most difficult, harsh circumstances, that the very best of mankind and womankind will surface. | ||
| And like a great fairy tale, you'll carry this story of decency and goodness around with you the rest of your years and have a chance to share it with people. | ||
| And I believe you'll feel better as a consequence. | ||
| Robert, your book not only puts information out there and is trying to find information to close some of these loops. | ||
| I wanted to note your author's note at the beginning of the book. | ||
| It says the photo on the front cover is of an American paratrooper from the 82nd Airborne Division playing with two Dutch children. | ||
| It's near a village on September 18th of 1944 after the commencement of Operation Market Garden. | ||
| What else can you tell us about this appeal to find this person? | ||
| Well, we have since learned that this is a fellow named Lieutenant Russell Brazelton, who was with the OSS. | ||
| And he was there right around Operation Market Garden, so September 1944. | ||
| We have identified the house in the background. | ||
| It's still there. | ||
| It looks exactly the same. | ||
| And we are in the process of sending a letter to the town near Nijmegen in the Netherlands, where the house is located with the address and making an appeal of the people there in that town to find us and tell us, number one, the names of these two children. | ||
| And more importantly, are either or both alive? | ||
| And I think there's a good chance that one or both of them are. | ||
| So it's just, you know, we have these threads and we have this responsibility in telling of history, one, to get the facts correct and two, to provide context. | ||
| I have a third objective, which is try and make the world a little bit better in our own way, to the extent that we can do that. | ||
| And the Forever Promise Project, foreverpromise.org, that's the way we're going to do it. | ||
| We're going to get them to 100% and have this place be what it always intended to be at the beginning, 100% connection between the Dutch and the Americans that are buried there. | ||
| And then use that, I hope, as a platform to consider how we can go about honoring the men and women that we, I mean, we had four army soldiers killed in Lithuania two months ago in an accident. | ||
| They should have had adopters right away, but we haven't thought about doing that. | ||
| And the Dutch have given us the template. | ||
| They've handed it to us. | ||
| And this is an opportunity to do something for our country and our men and women in uniform, past and present, that I think is a good thing to do and the right thing to do. | ||
| And there's no better day to talk about doing that than Memorial Day. | ||
| Let's talk with Anthony in Arizona, line for retired military. | ||
| Good morning, Anthony. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, teammates. | |
| Robert, I just recently completed a tour with the National World War II Museum travel, where we went through England and then there was a follow-on segment to go into Berlin. | ||
| It sure would be nice if your forever promise was listed with the National World War II Museum travel. | ||
| And on our first part of the tour, the first day when we had the authors from some of the associations that were affiliated with the World War II Museum, I mentioned to some of the traveler fellow travelers, you know, wars, wars never rest, only the warriors. | ||
| And not only is there no rest for the wars, but for the people who witness the wars and the aftermath. | ||
| And I'm so glad that you mentioned about the people who buried the warriors. | ||
| As a fellow warrior myself, I know that each and every day is a blessing, but it means nothing if you have given your all and somewhere in some part of the world lays a grave, marked or unmarked, and there is no one there to care for it. | ||
| So please get your forever promise on the World War II Museum travel brochure so that we can go there. | ||
| Because I learned from this tour, I would rather visit places where peace was signed instead of memorials. | ||
| But memorials are what got us there because that's why peace was signed to honor those forever promised. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you very much for that suggestion. | ||
| I used to be on the board of the National World War II Museum, but nothing would mean more than you writing them and making that suggestion yourself having gone on their tours. | ||
| Their tours are outstanding. | ||
| There are a lot of fine people there. | ||
| And I think in the course of time, we will be having tours like that. | ||
| But that would be great if you could do that. | ||
| More importantly, thank you for your military service on this Memorial Day. | ||
| Thank you for the sacrifice that you and your family have made. | ||
| Robert, you mentioned it, and then Anthony, our caller, just mentioned it. | ||
| But I wanted to read a passage from your book talking about what happens once a soldier dies on the field. | ||
| It says on September 11th, 1943, the same day Friendly Fire brought down 23 airborne transport planes. | ||
| War Department Circular 206 officially created the American Grave Registration Service, the GRS, a new organization under the command of the Quartermaster General, designated to standardize policies across all Army groups and theaters. | ||
| By D-Day, the GRS had refined procedures for quick retrieval, field identification, and burial. | ||
| That's why Normandy's cemeteries are so complete and close to battlefields. | ||
| Operation Overlord was, among many other things, a breakthrough in the practice, practical handling of combat deaths. | ||
| The process began when a platoon of GRS soldiers, between 12 and 20 men, set up collecting points just behind the front lines. | ||
| The objective, according to the GRS handbook, was to remove bodies quickly, but in the most considerate manner, so as to sustain the morale of the troops. | ||
| Combat units often took their own dead to the collecting point. | ||
| This was the most basic and heartfelt honor fallen soldiers received. | ||
| The devotion of friends, many of these men had been honored where they fell, like Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cole, wrapped in a parachute, the tool of his trade, by his heartbroken men. | ||
| The collecting point offered another opportunity for commemoration, especially if a grave registration officer was present for buddies to identify their friend's remains and provide the details of his death for GRS records. | ||
| This testimony was a solemn ritual, even in the midst of battle, to say his name and briefly recount his final moments as soldiers. | ||
| Goodbye. | ||
| Well, let me say, listeners, be proud. | ||
| Be proud to be an American. | ||
| This is a great country. | ||
| And when you read Remember Us, you will have tears reading the extent to which Americans, for years after the war, searched every square inch of Europe looking for any shred of an American that was missing, that had been shot down, that maybe fell into a well, parachuted into a creek, that was buried by some well-intended person and then ignored. | ||
| They went house to house. | ||
| They had advertisements in the papers. | ||
| They did everything humanly possible and then some to find anybody so that nobody would be left behind. | ||
| And that effort continues today at the Defense Department's Department of POW MIA accounting agency that's continuing to go to the cemeteries, the Netherlands in particular, and go into graves of unknown soldiers to extract DNA and see if they're able to use the cutting-edge science that they employ. | ||
| And we talk about that. | ||
| So that's an important thing. | ||
| In our movies and our telling of World War II, you know, we were behind, we got attacked, we were behind, we caught up, we went over there, we fought, we won, we moved home, we moved on. | ||
| But for 400,000 Americans that would never go home and millions of family members whose lives would never be the same, there was no moving on. | ||
| And we tell that story. | ||
| We go into the family homes. | ||
| We then talk about the effort of the American Army to find every single boy that was out there or remnants. | ||
| And that continues even to this day. | ||
| It's a heartwarming aspect, and it shows how great this country of ours truly, truly is. | ||
| And it's something we should embrace rather than, you know, the bickering and disagreements and stuff. | ||
| Of course, things aren't perfect. | ||
| They never are going to be. | ||
| But there's no country in the world that does this for their soldiers. | ||
| I mean, the boys that the Russian boys that fall in Ukraine, they'll disintegrate in their uniforms because they're cannon fodder. | ||
| They don't matter, but they matter to Americans, and that's something I think we can feel very proud about. | ||
| Robert, the cemetery there has been holding ceremonies and services post or for Memorial Day since 1945. | ||
| What can you tell us about the preparations that went into the lead up for that first Memorial Day in 1945 there? | ||
| And then also what's happening today. | ||
| It's a perpetual Memorial Day at that ceremony. | ||
| So is there anything, I guess, even more special today? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, when I met Frida the first time, and then in the subsequent, the many years that we'd speak about things, she told me a story about the very first Memorial Day. | ||
| So her father was a, he mapped these caves that are here. | ||
| It's the second largest bat habitat in the world. | ||
| And these caves are actually, were used to smuggle Jews and down to Allied pilots. | ||
| And Frida's family did do that. | ||
| I write about that in the book. | ||
| They smuggled Jews and Allied pilots through these caves because there was one place called the Smuggler's Hole. | ||
| They could get them from the Netherlands into Belgium and then into a resistance network and get them out. | ||
| But he was consulted by the Army because he understood all the beautiful vegetation. | ||
| And the effort was to try and beautify the cemetery at the beginning, even though it was only a temporary cemetery for this first Memorial Day. | ||
| Well, of course, there was no grass out there. | ||
| There were just clods of mud everywhere. | ||
| Mud, mud, mud. | ||
| That's what they were dealing with all the time. | ||
| Rains, just horrific conditions. | ||
| But they mounded these graves. | ||
| In other words, they basically took like an old TV dinner tray upside down and created an elevated portion of the grave and then straightened all of the wooden crosses, which had dog tags nailed to them because they hadn't had time yet to stencil names on there. | ||
| One of the dog tags was in the mouth of the soldier, if there was a head. | ||
| The other dog tag was nailed to the cross or Star of David. | ||
| And they made it as pretty as they could. | ||
| By the second Memorial Day in 46, the grass that had been planted had taken. | ||
| There were starting to be grass that needed to be mowed. | ||
| The Army superintendency there at the cemetery had no lawnmowers. | ||
| Frida, 19 years old, 20 years old at that stage, told the superintendent, don't worry, I'm on this. | ||
| She went around to all of her neighbors and said, we need to borrow your lawnmowers. | ||
| Put a tag on it with your name, and we'll bring a truck by and collect them all. | ||
| They brought them all to their place and put them in a barn. | ||
| And when the cemetery superintendent came by, she said, I have a surprise for you. | ||
| She took him out and back and opened the doors of the barn. | ||
| And there were 20 or 30 lawnmowers that were used to mow the lawn. | ||
| He was speechless. | ||
| So it goes to, I mean, it's a beautiful story, but it underscores the point. | ||
| Everyone did what they were able to do. | ||
| Frida, she wasn't a powerful person. | ||
| She didn't know important people, but she was able to go ask friends, neighbors to borrow their lawnmowers and make the place as beautiful as they could. | ||
| So today, I was there yesterday all day long, giving interviews, meeting with, there were three veterans that were there. | ||
| One veteran I've known for several years. | ||
| He was 104. | ||
| What a force of nature. | ||
| The king of the Netherlands was there, the prime minister, ambassadors of different countries. | ||
| Our ambassador, Joe Poppolo, was not, he's not in position yet, but he will soon be there. | ||
| But his assistant, Mark Markelli, was there. | ||
| Just a fantastic group of people. | ||
| And then thousands, I don't even know how many thousands of people from this area that were there. | ||
| There was a flyover. | ||
| Wreaths were laid, but it was a beautiful, moving ceremony. | ||
| And one of our American generals delivered the remarks and informed and shared with everybody that a grandfather of his was buried there and he only recently found out about it. | ||
| And everyone in the family since him had been named after this fellow that was buried there. | ||
| There's so many touching stories we don't know about yet, but they're there to be uncovered. | ||
| They're there to be told. | ||
| And we need these 8,000 American families to come forward and make this connection. | ||
| Do this one thing for us. | ||
| And we'll do all the rest and gather these stories and gather photographs of the families and make sure that the mission's completed. | ||
| Robert Edsel is author of Remember Us, American Sacrifice, Dutch Freedom, and a Forever Promise Forged in World War II. | ||
| It is on sale now. | ||
| You can find out more about it as well as the programs Robert has talked about throughout this discussion at robertedsel.com. | ||
| Robert, thank you so much for your time this morning. | ||
| Foreverpromise.org for the connection to the Dutch adopters. | ||
| Thank you so much for your time, Robert. | ||
| We appreciate it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Tammy. | |
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