Note to readers:
Due to illness, I’ve been away from these Letters for nearly a month. Nothing serious, let alone life-threatening. But it was tiring in the extreme and irritating beyond that. All is well now, though, just in time for some thoughts about one of my favorite subjects: Memorial Day and veterans. Next week, I’ll offer my perspective on the many down-the-rabbit-hole events that have happened during my keyboard absence.
Now to the topic at hand.
Memorial Day 2025
In 1867, General John Logan, Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, wanted to establish a day to memorialize the approximately 620,000 Civil War dead, the greatest number of American dead in any of its wars. He called it Decoration Day. The concept caught on quickly and evolved to honor all soldiers who died in the service of their country. Decoration Day became Memorial Day, and the first national observance happened on 30 May 1868. Memorial Day has been celebrated annually since then, but it wasn’t until 1971 that it became a federal holiday, always celebrated on the final Monday of May.
From the Revolutionary War to 2024, well over one million American soldiers died in service to their country. World War II saw more than 405,000 perish. These are the dead Donald Trump, looking at row after row of neatly aligned white crosses in Normandy, France, called “suckers” and “losers,” according to General John Kelly, Trump’s Chief of Staff during his first term.
Before World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt had been looking for a way to help Great Britain as it defended itself from Hitler’s assaults, but large pockets of isolationist politics throughout the country prevented him from doing anything meaningful and large-scale. Then Japan struck.
The United States declared war on Japan the day after it attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, “a day that will live in infamy,” according to Roosevelt in his address to Congress. By declaring war on Japan, we also declared war on Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, because each was allied with Japan. Consequently, overnight, the U.S. was fighting a global war on two fronts, Japan in the Pacific and Germany/Italy in the European theatre.
At the time, our army was tiny and untrained; our munitions and equipment, dated and woebegone. Most held over from World War I. But America’s resources were enormous, and her population was large and growing. In 1940, the U.S. population was 132 million, Great Britain’s was 43 million, and Germany’s was 70 million. Because of its limitless potential, the day America entered the war marked the beginning of the end for Hitler.
In the European theatre, that end became evident in mid-1942.
First, Hitler broke his alliance with Russia’s Josef Stalin and invaded Russia. His blitzkrieg offensive had initial success, but eventually and inevitably, he sank into the same Russian quicksand that had swallowed Napoleon Bonaparte 130 years earlier.
While Stalin was beginning to eat German armies in the east, and after months of a quick ramp-up, the U.S. joined Great Britain in attacking Erwin Rommel‘s Afrika Corps in North Africa in mid-1942.
American and British forces drove the German and Italian armies completely off the continent, beginning in Casablanca in the east and ending nine months later with Tunis in the west. German and Italian prisoners numbered 250,000; most would be sent to prison camps in America.¹
Thursday, 20 May 1943, marked the official Allied victory in North Africa and a grand parade to celebrate it in Tunis.
The day before, in Washington, DC, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress after meeting for two weeks with President Franklin Roosevelt and American and British senior military staff as they argued the war’s next phase — Sicily, Italy and up into France and Germany, favored by the British, or the American plan for a dash across the English Channel directly into France. Ultimately, they settled on the Italian campaign first to be followed a year later by the Channel crossing, D-Day.
That was a good decision, because North Africa had proven the Americans were unprepared for the enormity of the Normandy invasion. In North Africa, their unproven leaders and soldiers, beginning at the top with the Supreme Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, had made mistakes costing thousands of lives. But they learned from their mistakes; Eisenhower went from an indecisive administrator, who had never been in battle in his 30-year career, to a commanding, even ruthless, presence. Commanders who had come up short were removed. The soldiers who had slogged through the nine months of battle had learned the value of terrain and stealth. They knew now what it was to be bombed, shelled, and machine-gunned — and to fight on. Better-trained and equipped soldier replacements began arriving, their numbers growing every week. The Americans began to prove themselves to their British colleagues, who had been fighting since 1939.
When it was all over, World War II would cost 60 million lives — one every six seconds — and countless numbers of wounded and traumatized.
In his speech to the Congress, Churchill said:
By singleness of purpose, by steadfastness of conduct, by tenacity and endurance — such as we have so far displayed — by this and only by this can we discharge our duty to the future of the world and to the destiny of man.
The African campaign, Operation TORCH, had been America’s first test of the battle-readiness of itself and its citizen-soldiers. Its army had outlasted the German opposition, but had paid a fearsome price in doing so. Allied killed in action numbered more than 70,000 in the nine months it took to conquer North Africa. The combatants had fired millions of artillery shells. Sixty years later, 200-300 landmines of World War II vintage are cleared annually, and about 40 Tunisians a year are still being killed by the unexploded ordnance. The U.S. State Department reports that at least 2,000 civilians have died from landmines since the end of the war.
On this Memorial Day weekend, as we remember and honor those who have given their all, we find our soldiers and sailors under the leadership of a man named Hegseth, a man of little competence and zero qualifications to be where he is. Memorial Day 2025 finds the sycophantic Mr. Hegseth focusing his efforts and busily getting ready for a full-scale, $45 million military parade through downtown Washington, DC, the kind of parade Russian and North Korean dictators love, complete with great big tanks to tear up the streets. Ostensibly, this parade will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States Army, but in reality, it will be a birthday homage to Donald Trump, who will turn 79 on the day of the parade, 14 June.
Could have picked any day; he picked that one. His narcissism knows no bounds. There will be countless other homespun and devotional parades across the nation on Memorial Day 2025, but none like the one Trump is demanding: The Donald Trump Fealty Parade. Maybe we’ll have a flyover by a certain big jet from Qatar.
This Memorial Day, we don’t have a Franklin Roosevelt. Neither do we have a Dwight Eisenhower, or an Omar Bradley, or a Douglas MacArthur, or a George C. Marshall, and even if we did, Donald Trump would have fired them all.
But we do have our honored dead — the greatest generation and all the other generations that sacrificed everything so this plot of land between two great oceans, this land we call home, can remain the place where dreams come true and men and women live their best lives, free of the evil from those who would do them harm to enrich themselves. That has become infinitely more challenging in 2025, but Americans have proven time and again that when their backs are to the wall, they are up to the task of moving the nation back onto the moral and lawful track, the high ground, the “virtuous” path our Founders intended 236 years ago when they gave us the Constitution that has guided us ever since.
I hope on this Memorial Day 2025, you have time to thank a veteran and to spend a moment thinking of those honored dead who gave their all for you and me and have now faded into the fog of time.
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¹ The German prisoners of war were housed all over the country. In 1943, while my mother was sunning herself with some friends at Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, a bus pulled up by the boardwalk and about 40 young men got out under guard. They were German POWs given a day of R&R. Some of them spoke English, and my mother spent half an hour in conversation with them. As she thought of my father fighting his way through Italy and France, she couldn’t help thinking the Germans were a friendly group enjoying the public beach, notwithstanding the guards with the heavy artillery. Those Germans were the lucky ones.
