Memorial Day

"Twenty-seven acres of headstones fill the American military cemetary at Carthage, Tunisia. There are no oblesisks, no tombs, no ostentatious monuments, just 2,841 bone-white marble markers, two feet high and arrayed in ranks as straight as gunshots. Only the chiseled names suggest singularity. Four sets of brothers lie side by side. Some 240 stones are inscribed with thirteen of the saddest words in our language: "Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God." A long limestone wall contains the names of another 3,724 men still missing, and a benediction: 'Into Thy hands, O Lord.'"

So begins Rick Atkinson's book An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943. This was the beginning of the America involvement in the European phase of World War II. In the comfort and safety of our classrooms, we might debate whether the U.S. should have been involved in the European phase of the war, whether North Africa should have been invaded, whether the timing was right or wrong. We can talk about such matters over a cup of coffee. The thousands of basically raw recruits who were crowded into ships and then thrust out onto the shores of North Africa simply had to do their duty.

This opening phase of the war, code-named Operation Torch, was a complicated matter of logistics and diplomacy. Algeria, French Morocco, and Tunisia were under the control of the Vichy French government. This was the puppet government of France that occupied southern France and the French colonial holdings in North Africa. [Remember that France had been defeated by the Germans in 1940. The movie classic Casablanca--which my Dad, Humphrey Bogart, and I all pronounce as "Cass ah Blank-ah" gives good background to the situation in North Africa.]

The Germans and the Italians were maintaining a powerful presence in the Mediterranean and had forces fighting (and by now, retreating, in Egypt and Libya. Efforts were made to woo the Vichy government in North Africa into not resisting the American and British invasion. Due to French animosity toward the British, French fear of a Nazi occupation of southern France, the muddled nature of the command of French military forces, there was for a short time resistance from the French. Some of the first Americans to die in World War II were killed by French troops in North Africa.

The campaign was quite sloppy and chaotic. But consider that 11 months after Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941), we were transporting an army across an ocean that was crawling with German U-boats. Army men on the ships were still being taught how to load and shoot their rifles. America was doing all this while simultaneously building up forces to fight against the Japanese. The American forces were under the command of a man, who at age 55, had thought he had missed out on ever proving his mettle in battle. His name was George Patton.

On this Memorial Day, I want to remember the soldiers who fought for America in North Africa. Many died quite early in the war, long before they could know that Operation Torch would be a success. This campaign has been overshadowed by other great events of the war, but honor is due.

My own father served in North Africa. He was not there for Operation Torch, but was stationed in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt after the Axis armies (primarily Rommel's Afrika Korps) were packed away in POW camps. (He told of acres of the desert that was filled with the broken and abandoned trucks, tanks, and other motorized equipment of the defunct German army.) He was a mechanic in the Army Air Corps and was repairing planes that were taking supplies to both the European and Asian theaters of the war.

Memorial Day is a good time to remember, to give honor to those to whom honor is due, to give thanks to God for our liberties, and to pray for those American military folks who still put their lives on the lines of battle throughout the world.