A tribute to courage

KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
WASHINGTON -- Six decades after the most devastating war in world history, America paused Saturday to salute the dwindling generation of its citizens who played a decisive role in the conflict.
Thousands of World War II veterans joined many tens of thousands of people who thronged the vast green mall in the heart of Washington, D.C., for dedication of the National World War II Memorial.
A brigade of speakers, including President Bush, praised the veterans for leading the fight to save democracy in a world of the 1940s that seemed bent on totalitarianism.
"They saved their country and thereby saved the liberty of mankind," said Bush, whose father, former President George Bush, was shot down while a Navy pilot in the Pacific.
The dedication ceremony was, in the words of a war-era song that played on loudspeakers, a "sentimental journey."
Quiet wishes
Amid an avalanche of accolades, many of the veterans -- now in their late 70s at the youngest -- quietly expressed notes of melancholy. Many wished aloud that a spouse or brother or comrade had lived to see this day, so long delayed.
Of the 16.1 million men and women who served in the World War II Armed Forces, about 3.8 million remain. They are dying at a rate of 1,100 a day.
"I figured I would pass away and they'd never build the memorial," said Louis Gladson, of Darby, Pa., outside of Philadelphia, who at age 79 called himself "one of the younger ones."
Gladson, a Navy veteran of battles in the Atlantic Ocean against German U-boats, felt overwhelmed by the affection from the crowds that have descended on Washington for an entire Memorial Day weekend of activities.
"I've got people taking my picture, people shaking my hand," he said. "It actually gets a little embarrassing, at times."
Unlike veterans of later wars, the World War II generation returned home to a nation united in the belief that their fight had been necessary and noble. But while World War II monuments have been built on hundreds of town squares and parks, none had existed in the nation's capital.
The Marine Corps Memorial, at Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac River, had served as a de facto World War II memorial by celebrating the raising of the American flag on Mount Suribachi at Iwo Jima in 1945.
But then the Vietnam War Memorial was dedicated on the National Mall in 1982. And after that came the Korean War Memorial, first planned in the 1980s and completed in 1995.
World War II veterans began to clamor for a monument of their own -- one that was even more prominently located, in order to reflect the importance of a war they had known as "the big one." "I think a lot of them were resentful that both Vietnam and Korea were recognized prior to them; we just felt it was a long time coming," said Roger K. Thomas, 86, of Frederick, Md., the Maryland chapter president of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association.
Ending years of controversy over where the memorial should be located and how grand it should be, Congress in 2001 voted to set aside the most prominent site left on the mall: an area the size of a football field between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.
The federal government gave the land. But it was the veterans themselves who contributed much of the $179 million that it cost to erect 17 million pounds of stonework and establish a permanent maintenance fund for the memorial.
Work began on Sept. 11, 2001, just as the nation had to face a new war against terrorism.
Tribute to people
It is "not a monument to war but rather a tribute to the physical and moral courage" of the American people, said former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, a Kansas Republican.
Dole, a veteran of the Italian theater in World War II who co-chaired fund-raising for the American Battle Monuments Commission, said the dedication came just in the nick of time.
"Our ranks have dwindled ... Our final reunion cannot long be delayed," he said.