By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday, May 30, 2016
A few miles outside my hometown of Cambridge, England,
there is a well-manicured field on the far outskirts of a handsome little
village named Madingley. In that field there sit a few thousand crosses, and,
beneath them, the remains of a few thousand American men.
I write “remains” reflexively — evidently, we English
speakers have decided to use this euphemism to indicate that time has passed
and that it has taken the flesh with it — but in this case it is an especially
apposite word, for many of those buried at Madingley were incomplete long
before they were interred. Among other things, this is a graveyard for the men
who did not come back intact. At the Casablanca Conference of 1943, Winston
Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt came to an agreement: The Royal Air Force
would take care of the nighttime sorties over Germany and beyond; the Americans
would fly when it was light. In retrospect, this was a good deal for the Brits.
So ugly were the daytime fights that it was not uncommon for deceased
rear-gunners to be “hosed” rather than pulled out of their positions when —
nay, if — their aircraft returned. In
addition to the buried, there are memorials for the 5,125 airmen whose bodies
were never found.
One sees all sorts of names at Madingley — there are
Abbots, Abernathys, Aguirres, and Airoldis; Bakers, Buchanans, Baczeks, and
Backhauses; Caputos, Carlsons, Callahans, and Cafferatas — and one cannot help
but consider how improbable it is that they all ended up here, in some corner
of a foreign field. These were boys from all over the United States — from New
York, California, Wyoming, and Colorado — the sons of parents who, at various
points in time, had come to America from all over the world. What is it that
had compelled them to travel to this faraway place, thousands of miles from
home, to face fear, injury, and death? What is it that makes any man lay his
life down for others in an alien time zone?
I hail from a family of military veterans but I am not
one myself, and in consequence I shall not attempt to answer this question.
What I will do, though, is express my gratitude for those who have. As a child
I was taken to Madingley often by my father, the better to impress upon me that
all that I had so nonchalantly taken for granted was the product of hard
choices that had been made before I was born. Rarely in human history has the
venerable question, “If not us, who?” been answered as emphatically as it was
between 1939 and 1945. Rarely, too, were the consequences of that answer so
colossal. It does not take an imagination as fertile as Philip K. Dick’s to
conceive what the world might look like without the work of the Abbots, the
Abernathys, the Aguirres, the Airoldis, and all of their unblenching
compatriots. That such conceptions are today limited to the realm of science
fiction is the ultimate testament to those men.
It is easy to forget the dead, and tempting, too, to
caricature those whom posterity has lazily deemed “heroes.” But if civilization
is indeed a compact between the future and the past, such enticements must
always be resisted. When done right, Memorial Day serves as an opportunity to
lift the mask and unveil the price tag, thereby acknowledging the unpleasant
truth that peace and ordered liberty are not humanity’s natural mode but the
legacy of vigilance and heartbreak. At Lexington, at Gettysburg, at
Saint-Mihiel, and at Aachen, the men who took up arms and charged forward into
the fray issued forth a collective, timeless “no.” Here, they insisted, were
the lines that would not be crossed; these were the iniquities that would not
be tolerated; theirs were the torches that would not be extinguished without a
fight. If we are to avoid a repeat of the mistakes that forced them into their
defensive pose, they must never leave our thoughts for too long.
When, on December 7, 1943, the University of Cambridge
donated the land at Madingley, its intentions were distressingly prosaic.
Casualties sustained during flights from nearby airfields were growing rapidly
in number, and the local authorities had no idea what to do with the remains.
73 years later, the terrain has become hallowed. At the far end of the
graveyards, there is a small chapel, its door always open. “They knew not the
hour, the day, nor the manner of their passing,” an inscription reads, but
“when far from home they were called to join that heroic band of airmen who had
gone before.” Thank goodness they answered that call. All shame on us should we
ever forget it.
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