Memorial Day

I have constant reminders of the importance of military service where I live now, near a couple of military bases in Germany.  It's not just the military personnel I see on a weekly basis, but the nearness of the reminders of World War II.  In the small town where I live--Süsterseel--right on the border of the Netherlands, there is a monument to the war dead from both World Wars.  Just a week ago, as I drove through the countryside to Aachen, I saw the "dragon's teeth" that were used as fortifications in the Siegfried line, which Hitler had strengthened in reaction to the D-Day invasion (the anniversary of which is coming up soon, on June 6th).  Cows now graze along that line, but the teeth are harsh reminders of those terrible days.

The memories are strong here.  I was talking to Bernard (he attends the Anglican church on base that we also attend) who was living in Rotterdam as a child during WWII, and who remembers the bombing of that city and how he would run and hide under the tables.  "I made friends with an American pilot when it was all over," he said. "They were young pilots, maybe 17 or 18, with hardly any training. They were just told to fly and drop the bombs as close as they could get them to the targets."

A while ago when I asked around about antiques in the Tri-Border area, I was referred to a shop in Belgium, where the elderly woman who owns it will welcome any American who enters as her "liberators."  It's said she always knows who the Americans are as soon as they step into her shop.  She has never forgotten the freedom from oppression when the American Army came through the city of Tongeren.

Not far from there is the Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery, where almost 8,000 of American WWII soldiers are buried, most of them killed during the Battle of the Bulge and during the advance into Germany in 1945.  Across the border from where I live, about 40 minutes into the Netherlands, is the American Cemetery in the village of Margraten.

Even though I grew up in military family, the effect of military service on those other than my own family never really hit me until now.  I knew the sacrifices that my family had to make, the fears, the difficulties we had to go through, the worries. I am a history buff from way back, and can tell you who the movers and shakers were in WWII, and about the battles, the generals.

But the stories here, the stories of the every-day people who grew up in those years of terrible fear and oppression are very close, close enough to touch and to see. Here are the fortifications, there are the bombed-out ruins that are now overgrown by field flowers, and over there are the canals that once served as barriers to troops, now serving as a pond for ducks. The Dutch, just over the border, celebrate May 5th as Liberation Day, the day they were freed from Nazi occupation (they remember the Canadians most fondly for this, as the Canadians were the leading force of this effort), and have a two-minute moment of silence at 8 p.m. on that day. We went to a big choral concert celebration on that day in Heerlen, the Netherlands, and many speeches were made--in Dutch, so we didn't understand all the words!--but it was clear that much of it was about the oppression felt, and the joy of liberation afterward.

The presence of our military made a huge difference in these countries, in real, here-are-the-people-and-places terms. The people who were freed from Nazi oppression have never forgotten the joy and relief when the Allied Army came through, an army made up of soldiers as young as and younger than my own son, honed and fine-tuned to survive trials of war by the severe deprivation of the Great Depression into an army that liberated whole regions.

We in the U.S. are often isolated from this, from the good that our troops have done and do. We only know of the ones who come back, sometimes alive and whole, sometimes not. We hear in the news about how things go wrong, and not how they go right. I understand that after a few years, the enthusiasm for American involvement in WWII dissipated, and Americans believed we should have ended the war and compromised with Hitler and with Japan, even as rumors of the concentration camps began to creep into our news.  I wonder if, because of our isolation from the oppression that Europe and Asia were experiencing, we did not fully appreciate the good that our troops were doing there. 

I wonder if this is so today. I think it likely is.  It is difficult to travel to Dachau and Auschwitz from Seattle, Washington.  It is not difficult to travel there from where I live now (11 hour drive), or understand the real effect our military had in freeing those poor souls interred within.

I cannot express fully how immediate the history of WWII is here. The elders here still speak of it; they still relive that time, the horror and the joy. It still has its effect on culture and population. The celebrations we have of Memorial Day in the United States are pale shadows of what they have here, where real liberation from oppression occurred. Perhaps we should better remember Memorial Day, the sacrifices that have been made by our military personnel, and be glad that we in America have not had to suffer what others have had to suffer, and that there is more good done by our military abroad than we know.