Off the Record: ; Memorial Day: Remembering the Silent Marchers

Summary

---

My father-in-law never talked much about his experiences as a boy, quite literally a boy, fighting in World War II. Most of the men who fought in that war didnt talk about it much. Those who came home just tried to pick up their lives and get on with living their lives. He was just a boy when he enlisted, and by the time he was what today we would call a legal adult, he had many missions in twin- engine B-25 bombers over Europe. Although I am a pilot, we never talked meaningfully about his flying experiences, except one time. We had journeyed from Sistersville to Parkersburg to see an antique WW II B-24 bomber, the four-engine plane somewhat similar to the one in which he had served. He was in his 60s by then, but, for a few moments, I saw him as the youth he had been. After he stood looking silently for a minute or two at the plane on the tarmac, its big radial engines still snapping as the metal cooled from the flight, he turned to me. He linked his two hands together by crossing his thumbs, his two index fingers pointed out straight while the others were folded under. Aiming those fingers which normally pounded the keys of his black typewriter at his weekly newspaper Adam quietly explained in detail how the guns in the upper turret could not be depressed so that they would sever the planes propellers during battle. His stiff, outstretched fingers swiveled to the left and right as he talked calmly about the directions from which the Nazi fighter planes would usually make a frontal attack on his bomber. His eyes scanned ahead, looking intently upward into a West Virginia blue sky where no enemy plane had ever flown. Then, as suddenly as it began, my lesson ended about how a young West Virginia boy at 20,000 feet over Italy would use a machine gun to fight Messerschmitts. Later, as we watched the bomber lumber off into the kind of painfully beautiful blue afternoon sky with which nature blesses us Mountaineers on rare occasions, he said something else: The brightest blue sky you can ever see is when you find yourself looking out at it through holes that have suddenly appeared in the side of your airplane, was his comment. I dont remember that we ever talked about that subject again. Most of them didnt, even though more Americans died during the air campaign against Hitlers Fortress Europe than were killed in all phases of the Vietnam War. And though Adam Kelly seldom talked about the war, one day he sat down at his typewriter at the Tyler Star News and wrote the following column:

The Legion of Forgotten Dead in Mist of Antiquity Sometimes on one of those late spring days when Memorial Day comes, you can almost see them, marching, marching onward, the legion of forgotten dead. In the soft stillness and solitude of a country graveyard in the evening hush, occasionally you can hear the muffled beat of a drum as the endless ranks of that forgotten legion slip by, file after file, in ghostly procession never ending. They materialize, these war dead whom we honor Memorial Day, somehow, when the eye wanders idly across old grave markers to halt a small obelisk with worn carving making the words almost indecipherable: Died Dec. 13, 1864. A rusted metal emblem droops over the ground. Once shiny and new, it then bore proudly the inscription of the Grand Army of the Republic. Once flowers were strewn upon it to honor this grave of a lad of 18 who marched so proudly away to war in 1863 and died so miserably in a Georgia prison camp just before Christmas. And now he keeps step with his comrades, forever, as the legion of the forgotten dead marches by. Hear the whispered cadence. On they come. The ranks are silent now. Those ragged fellows there at the front were at Valley Forge. See their bloody, bare feet, which left such grim footprints in the Pennsylvania snow. They died for freedom. And they march past. Dirty gray coats, butternut trousers, mingle now with the uniforms of blue in the still columns filing past. The passions which set men from north and south at each others throats are erased by the chill of death. All are still, now. Little remembered are Antietam, Shiloh, obscure place names made immortal because of the bravery of valiant opponents who died there, convinced that theirs was the only right. They step silently along, slouching, yet moving with deceptive swiftness. They march eternally, for they are the forgotten legion of the dead. Others move up. Quiet now, listen. Isnt that the chorus of Over There, so softly you can barely hear the words that...The Yanks are Coming? Seems you can hear them singing it softly as they step along...and we wont be back till its over, over there. These came back...In metal boxes did those legions of the forgotten dead return. Somehow it makes the march seem shorter if the men can sing. Any military man knows that, and so we hear the faint chorus as they move by with their round helmets and brown puttees, the wide-eyed innocence with which they approached the grim tasks of war erased by the stark reality of the Argonne and Soissons. Then, in a more sentimental age, a buddy never was killed in Flanders mud, young life cut short by an impersonal artillery shell fling into the air from miles distant. He had gone West or bought the farm. But no matter what the term employed, they did die, did American men by the thousands, in France to make the world safe for democracy. And so the silent ranks of the legion of the forgotten dead were swollen with those who march forever in World War I garb of drab khaki. These next uniforms seem more familiar. Isnt that a flight jacket? And those men arent keeping in step...Oh, that explains it. Army Air Corps. They should have flown by, but in the legion of the forgotten dead, all must walk in ghostly procession to their final encampment. Other place names recognized: Ploesti, Schweinfurt, Regensburg. Air Corps combat fliers remember. Red walks by, an apparition. Who now recalls a tiny Italian town named Roverto up there in the Brenner Pass, crouched in the waist of a B-25? What ghastly remembrance of things past is this which intrudes on a happy, carefree holiday with picnics and ball games and golf and fishing? Why think now about Red with body crumpled and his head sliced off from a final burst of flak from a German 88 far below? Reds mother put a little gold star in the front window of home, a little Pennsylvania town, and on Memorial Day the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars put a flag and flowers on his grave. Is this remembrance? Red marches on with the legion, the legion of the forgotten dead. With him in awesome numbers are the sailors from Pearl Harbor and Okinawa and all the vast expanse of the seas where death came so swiftly, with him the G.I.s whose blood made the cold gray ocean on the beach called Omaha dull, rusty red, who fell in Italy and France and Germany and nameless islands in the Pacific. They trudge along so quietly, now, the Marines who died in the sands of Iwo Jima and caves on Okinawa. There are many of them, so very, very many...see them march by. Finally they pass. No such euphemism as Going West for these. Their comrades said simply they got it. Red got it. All these got it. They are the legion of the forgotten dead. They are the reason that Stars and Stripes flies over the Capitol instead of a Nazi emblem of the Rising Sun. But who remembers now those frightening days of the 1940s? Here come others along. The numbers of the silent marchers are fewer now. Theres a group of Marines dragging sleds loaded with bodies of their comrades, frozen, grotesque caricatures of men, lashed in layers. They fell in Korea at a place called Chosin Reservoir, and the Marines vowed to fight their way out and take their dead with them. They did, and now they pull those sleds along in the ranks of the forgotten legion forever. There are G.I.s in the group from Pork Chop Hill and Pusan, those whose families received the ominous telegrams with the dread introduction, The War Department regrets to inform you...On they march. Theyre almost past, now. This last group of marchers is looking off to one side, somehow as if theyre unsure of their reception, hear the whispers from the Navy pilots and Marines and G.I.s from Vietnam. Theyre by, now, finally, all of them. And the legion of the forgotten dead has disappeared once more, shrouded in the mist of antiquity. The backbone of every American should stiffen in a salute on this day we call Memorial to the legion of the war dead of our country that forgotten army whose sacrifices mean that we live in freedom instead of dying as slaves. Is it too much to ask to remember them, honor them, on this one day, this legion of the forgotten dead who have died for America, and thus for you and me? March on, brave legions. For some remember...And solemnly resolve. Your march for freedom has not been in vain.

See the full content of this document

Extract

---

Off the Record: ; Memorial Day: Remembering the Silent Marchers

As I read it again today, Im reminded of another Wo...

See the full content of this document

---