On Hallowed Ground (28 page)

Nobody seemed more surprised—or less comfortable—about his elevated status than Knappie himself, who clammed up or stammered
explanations when pressed to speak about his moment of glory. “Look it up in the Medal of Honor book,” he told one interviewer.
“I was scared the whole time I was over there,” he told another. “You go in there and just try to get them guys before they
get you.”
⁴⁴

Shunning the spotlight and avoiding speeches, he quietly left the Army, disappeared into the Pennsylvania countryside, raised
a family, went hunting, and spent the rest of his life trying to be profligately, unapologetically ordinary. Unlike millions
of other veterans returning from the war, Knappie avoided further schooling, even though his education had ended in the fifth
grade. He passed up big pay and supervisory positions for honest, menial work—driving trucks, working for paving companies,
dabbling at farming. He enjoyed the pleasures of his hard-won peace, living with his wife, Hazel, in a trailer surrounded
by woods, orchards, and wild turkeys, with a menagerie of dogs, cats, ponies, a rooster, a horse, a goose, a duck, and numerous
grandchildren for company.
⁴⁵

He died of a heart attack at age eighty-four in 2008. After some debate within the family, Knappie was laid to rest at Arlington
on January 31 of that year. It was a long way from Pennsylvania, but his loved ones thought it was time to give this reluctant
hero the recognition he had evaded in life. So with his family gathered around the grave, attended by Army officers, a marching
platoon, a military band, and a clutch of media, the one-man army was buried in Section 60 with full honors. The weather was
suitable—a biting cold day that fell precisely sixty-four years after the morning in Italy when a frightened young private
crawled up from the frozen ground to face the Germans alone.
⁴⁶

Like most American men and women who fought in the war, Knappie survived the great conflagration, which is thought to have
claimed more than sixty million victims worldwide. Most of those deaths, perhaps thirty-nine million, were civilians. This
gruesome metric made World War II unique: it was the first armed conflict in which civilian fatalities outstripped combatant
deaths. The exact numbers—from death camps, bombings, collateral fire, starvation, displacement, and other causes—can only
be guessed. Thousands of civilians simply disappeared. As in the Great War, the Soviet Union paid the biggest price, with
an estimated thirteen million troops and sixteen million civilians killed.
⁴⁷

Poland, which counted more than 6.1 million wartime deaths, suffered the greatest proportion of losses—20 percent of its population.
⁴⁸
This broke the heart of famed Polish pianist, composer, and statesman Ignace Jan Paderewski, who was forced to watch the dismemberment of his country from exile. Age eighty, he died in New York City in June 1941, just as Hitler unleashed his invasion of the Soviet Union. As the first prime minister of modern Poland and president of the wartime Polish parliament in exile, Paderewski was widely viewed as a symbol of patriotism and independence—a perception not lost on President Roosevelt, who gave the great musician temporary refuge at Arlington. There Paderewski was buried in a vault under the U.S.S.
Maine
Memorial until he could rest again in free Polish soil. Nobody, least of all Roosevelt, imagined that Paderewski would remain at Arlington for another fifty-one years, waiting for the war to end, then waiting for Eastern Europe to shake off domination of the Soviet Union. Paderewski’s long exile finally ended in 1992, when he was brought out of the vault, carried through the hills of Arlington for the last time, and returned to a place of high honor at St. John’s Cathedral in Warsaw.
⁴⁹

His presence at Arlington, like that of other foreigners interred there during the war years, helped make the national cemetery
more international in character. This reflected a maturing outlook of the United States, which was less parochial, less isolationist,
and more involved with global affairs as a result of its wartime experience. The conflict imposed new obligations on Americans,
who, having been thrust onto the world stage by circumstances, remained prominently in that position.
⁵⁰

Compared to European and Asian nations, the United States paid a relatively small price for its role in the war,
⁵¹
sacrificing some 359,000 in combat, accidents, and other causes, while reaping economic benefits and international standing—one
reason, perhaps, World War II is sometimes called the last good war.
⁵²
Seen through the narrow lens of American history, however, the Second World War must be considered a national tragedy, coming
second only to the Civil War in the number of lives it cost. This lesson is brought home at Arlington, where one walks among
endless rows of graves of those who died at Anzio, Normandy, Iwo Jima, and other faraway battle zones, only to realize that
they do not approach the toll from Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and other scenes of America’s bloodiest conflict, which
continues to haunt the old plantation.

The succession of wars led to improved methods for recovering and identifying the dead. As soon as the Second World War ended,
thousands of specialists from the quartermaster’s Graves Registration Service sifted through the battlefields of Europe, Africa,
Asia, and the Pacific to find, identify, and concentrate the dead in 288 temporary cemeteries. There they remained until they
could be shipped home or reburied in fourteen overseas cemeteries from the major theaters of war.
⁵³
As in previous conflicts, families had the option of leaving their loved ones abroad or repatriating them to the United States.
Some 97,000 war dead were brought home, many of them to Arlington.
⁵⁴
By 1955, this influx of World War II burials pushed the number of graves in the cemetery from some 44,000 to 70,000. More
space was needed, and Arlington grew from 400 acres to 600 acres. The new land came from South Post at Fort Myer, where temporary
wartime buildings were knocked down to make room for orderly rows of graves by the river—the very terrain General Somervell
had coveted for his Pentagon.
⁵⁵

As in the Civil War, it took far longer to clean up from the Second World War than it took to fight it. Five years after the
conflict ended, the Graves Registration Service was still recovering bodies. By this time, though, quartermaster squads had
identified all but 3 percent of Americans killed in the war—an extraordinary achievement considering the breadth and violence
of the conflict. The recovery campaign marked the most extensive reinterment effort in history, according to Steven E. Anders,
historian for the Quartermaster Corps.
⁵⁶

Careful record keeping and the widespread use of dog tags made most identifications routine, but in a few cases some detective
work was required. One badly mauled soldier was found with no dog tags or identifying marks, except for a ring he wore. What
made it peculiar was that it came from a girl’s school, which led army investigators to a roster of students, and eventually
to a woman who provided the missing soldier’s name. Dental evidence produced identities for many casualties; laundry marks
or remnants of letters identified others.
⁵⁷
Of the 359,000 Americans who died in World War II, investigators produced positive identification for 271,000; 10,000 more
were classified as unknowns; 78,000 were missing in action. Of those missing, about half were determined to be “unrecoverable,”
lost at sea or entombed in shipwrecks.
⁵⁸
To this day, specialty teams from the Pentagon’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command continue searching for the 39,000 who never
came home—with some success. Each year about fifty of the war dead are found at remote mountainside crash sites, in overgrown
jungles, on isolated Pacific atolls, and sent home, beneficiaries of improved forensic methods, advances in DNA technology,
and the government’s commitment to account for all service members missing from all wars.
⁵⁹

Many are repatriated to Arlington, where they lie among thousands of fellow citizen-soldiers long since returned from the
Second World War. Most are known only to the diminishing circle of family and friends who survive them. But a few others,
whose names are incised on worn tombstones at Arlington, also hold prominent places in the national memory: Gen. George C.
Marshall, who planned and directed the war and helped Europe climb out of the ruins; Gen. Omar N. Bradley, who led the First
Army to victory in Europe; Adm. William D. Leahy, who offered FDR counsel through the war years; Adm. William F. “Bull” Halsey
Jr., who won a hard-fought victory at Guadalcanal; Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, who founded the modern Air Force; Lt. Gen.
James Doolittle, who led daring B-25 bombing raids on Japan in 1942; Lt. Gen. Claire Chennault, who led the 14th Air Force
in China; Brig. Gen. William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who organized the wartime Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the
CIA; Lt. Gen. Brehon B. Somervell, father of the Pentagon; Army Maj. Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier of World War
II;
⁶⁰
Marine Pfc. Lee Marvin, who stormed ashore at Saipan, got shot in the butt, and returned to civilian life as an actor; Pvt.
Dashiell Hammett, who edited an Army paper in the Aleutian Islands; and Sgt. Joe Louis, the “Brown Bomber,” who staged ninety-six
exhibition matches for troops while serving in a segregated unit. Each earned his place at Arlington; each did his duty; each
met the standard described by Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr. “Every little job is essential,” Patton told his troops on the
eve of D-Day in 1945. “Every man is a link in the great chain. Every man … plays a vital part.”
⁶¹

Patton, not always the most tolerant of officers, even admitted that black soldiers had a role to play. Originally skeptical
of how African Americans would perform in combat, Patton changed his mind after watching his all-black tank battalion, the
761st, plowing across Europeand performing heroically. “I have nothing but the best in my Army,” he crowed. “I don’t care
what color you are as long as you go up there and kill those Kraut sons-of-bitches.”
⁶²

Patton’s endorsement helped undermine the long and insupportable practice of segregation in the services. Returning veterans
challenged their government to live up to its democratic ideals at home. President Harry S. Truman rose to the occasion, banishing
racial discrimination in the services with a stroke of his pen on July 26, 1948. His Executive Order 9981 called for “equality
of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.”
⁶³
Truman’s action, designed to help the living, also exalted the dead at Arlington, where segregated burials were soon consigned
to the past.
⁶⁴

In the same month that Truman signed his historic order, the barriers of rank consciousness began to crumble at Arlington,
thanks to a generous departing gesture from one famous old soldier. Gen. John J. Pershing, who had led American forces to
victory in World War I. He watched from the sidelines as the next conflict ran its course, suffering from ill health when
the Japanese surrender brought peace back to Washington. Seemingly forgotten by the public, lonely in his rooms at Walter Reed Army Hospital, the old hero had been relegated to
the shadows, a relic of old wars and old ways. In better times, when the memory of his exploits was green in the public mind,
he had been bombarded with hundreds of telegrams each Armistice Day. On his last one, in 1947, only ten arrived.
⁶⁵

Pershing began to contemplate his own funeral at Arlington, where he had seen so many comrades buried. It was a place as familiar
to him as any home he ever knew. Always a stickler for details, Pershing took care of the particulars. Instead of erecting
a lavish monument to himself, as so many officers had done since Civil War days, Pershing asked for the simple white government-issue
tombstone available to any private. And, unlike officers who routinely commanded better real estate than those who fought
under them, Pershing chose a burial site among enlisted men from the Great War. “Here let me rest among the World War veterans,”
Pershing is supposed to have told an officer who helped him select his gravesite. “When the last bugle call is sounded, I
want to stand up with my soldiers.”
⁶⁶

Age eighty-seven, he died in his sleep on July 15, 1948. Forgotten in life, he was remembered in death as few others are.
Thousands of mourners, including President Truman and General Marshall, filed by his casket in the Capitol Rotunda, where
the old general lay in state for twenty-four hours. Both Truman and Marshall had served under him; both had revered him; both
solemnly marked his passing, as did some 300,000 ordinary citizens who crowded the sidewalks to watch Black Jack’s caisson
make its slow, stately progress to Arlington on July 19. The skies opened and the rains came down; the wet streets fell utterly,
eerily silent, a sign of respect for the man crossing the brown Potomac on his last journey.
⁶⁷

“For Black Jack Pershing I think it would be proper if we walked in the rain,” said Bradley.
⁶⁸

They marched on. Drenched by the time they arrived at Arlington, they joined a sodden khaki tide, which flowed unbroken down
the crest of a hill on Grant Avenue, accompanied by the dull thunder of artillery, the thump of muffled drums, and the memories
of comrades sleeping in long rows all around.
⁶⁹