Memorial Day

(At the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery in Nettuno, Italy) on Memorial Day 1945, just three weeks after the end of the war in Europe, a stock, square-jawed figure would climb the bunting-draped speaker's platform and survey the dignitaries seated before him on folding chairs. Then Gen. Lucian Truscott, who had returned to Italy from France a few months earlier to succeed Clark as the 5th Army commander, turned his back on the living and instead faced the dead. "It was," wrote eyewitness Bill Mauldin, "the most moving gesture I ever saw." In his carbolic voice, Truscott spoke to...the thousands who lay beneath the ranks of Latin crosses and stars of David. As Mauldin later recalled:

He apologized to the dead men for their presence here. He said everybody tells leaders it is not their fault that men get killed in war, but that every leader knows in his own heart this is not altogether true. He said he hoped anybody here [deceased veterans] through any mistake of his would forgive him, but he realized that was asking a hell of a lot under the circumstances. Truscott did say he would not speak about the glorious dead because he didn't see much glory in getting killed in your late teens or early twenties. He promised that if in the future he ran into anybody, especially old men, who thought death in battle was glorious, he would straighten them out. He said he thought that was the least he could do.

(from The Day of Battle, by Rick Atkinson)