[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 177 (Thursday, November 9, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E2143]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



               E X T E N S I O N S   O F   R E M A R K S


[[Page E 2143]]


                          MEMORIAL DAY ADDRESS

                                 ______


                           HON. DICK CHRYSLER

                              of michigan

                    in the house of representatives

                       Thursday, November 9, 1995

  Mr. CHRYSLER. Mr. Speaker, on this important day of remembrance, I 
would like to submit the following Memorial Day Address which was given 
by Mr. Walter Adams, past president of Michigan State University.

                          Memorial Day Address

                           (By Walter Adams)

       On Memorial Day, we pay homage to the men and women who 
     died for our country--from 1776 through two world wars, 
     Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf. This year, the 50th 
     Anniversary of Victory in Europe and Victory over Japan, we 
     pay special tribute to our dead in World War II--the men and 
     women who fought on land, on sea, and in the air.
       The campaigns in North Africa and Italy were anything but a 
     cakewalk. Nor were the battles in Western Europe where I 
     served--first with the 83rd Infantry Division and later with 
     the 11th Armored Division. In France, D-Day was June 6, 1944. 
     According to the plans of supreme headquarters, the British 
     were supposed to take the town of Caen on the first day of 
     the landing. Caen was not liberated until July 8--more than a 
     month later. St. Lo which was the major objective in the U.S. 
     sector was not liberated until July 18. And the Battle of 
     Normandy which was just a slice of France was not concluded 
     until August 22 of 1944--after 200,000 allied casualties.
       My own division, the 83rd Infantry, relieved the 101st 
     Airborne at Carentan. The first objective assigned to us was 
     a little town 12 miles to the south. It took our division 
     close to a month to negotiate those 12 miles. Hedge row by 
     hedge row, yard by yard, inch by inch. [For those of you who 
     do not know what a hedge row is, it is an earthen wall 
     surrounding a cow pasture, square or rectangular, 6 feet 
     high, with thick shrubbery growing on top of it. It was 
     impenetrable. The 83rd had on one side a marsh which could 
     not be negotiated by tanks. On the other side, was a field 
     that the Germans had flooded deliberately. So there was no 
     maneuverability. Tanks could not operate. It was a job for 
     the infantry. The dogfaces of the infantry.] In that one 
     month, the 83rd lost 5,000 out of the division's 15,000 
     men.
       After Normandy, the 83rd went on to fight in the Battle of 
     the Bulge, the Rhineland, and Germany. It suffered the fifth 
     highest number of casualties among the divisions operating in 
     the ETO.
       In March of 1945, I was transferred to the 11th Armored 
     Division which was spearheading General Patton's drive 
     through southern Germany. On its way, the Division liberated 
     three concentration camps--an experience that none of us will 
     ever forget. These camps were the ultimate example of man's 
     inhumanity to man--the ultimate illustration of the 
     consequences of discrimination, bigotry, and hatred directed 
     against groups of people who were considered undeserving of 
     life--Jews, communists, socialists, Russians, Poles, gypsies, 
     homosexuals, etc., etc. If any of us needed an explanation of 
     why we were fighting and the evil we were fighting against, 
     these camps provided incontrovertible evidence.
       Last year, the 11th Armored Division Association received a 
     letter from a survivor of the notorious Mauthausen 
     concentration camp that the 11th Armored liberated on May 5, 
     1945--three days before V-E Day. It came from a Pole by the 
     name of Jerzy Adamczek. I'll read an excerpt from it: ``I was 
     arrested by the Germans in 1944 and sent to the Mauthausen 
     concentration camp. The weeks there seemed to be months, and 
     months years. And finally, the Russian and American armies 
     approached the camp. The 11th Armored of the 3rd U.S. Army 
     got to us first. God bless those boys and bless the fifth of 
     May. I was 16 at the time. During the liberation of the camp, 
     I looked death in the face. I was so weak and my body so 
     exhausted that I lay two or three days more on the pile of 
     dead bodies without showing any sign of life. Some people 
     thought I was dead like the others. But on the seventh or 
     eight or May, I can not remember which, some American 
     soldiers would not give up on this so-called pile of dead 
     bodies. A young American soldier about 25 years old saw that 
     I moved slightly. He picked me up--the bundle of skin and 
     bones. There was barely a spark of life left but he carried 
     me on his back to the square at the concentration camp where 
     other such half-alive men were gathered. I am now a man of 
     66. Since that time I have always said, I have two fathers: 
     my biological father who was killed in 1944 during the Warsaw 
     uprising and the American soldier who picked me from the 
     dead. I don't know his name. I need your help. Please help me 
     find that American so I can be at peace with myself and say 
     thank you.'' That, my friends, was what the war in Europe was 
     all about.
       A word about the war in the Pacific. On August 15, this 
     year, we shall be celebrating V-J Day--our victory over 
     Japan. There are some who now want to rewrite history and to 
     call it V-P Day--Victory in the Pacific day--perhaps because 
     of vague guilt feelings about our use of the atomic bomb or 
     because of a reluctance to offend the Japanese who are now 
     our allies. I think that such revisionism would be a 
     brazen mockery of the soldiers who died on Truk and Iwo 
     Jima, on Okinawa and in the Philippines, and to the 
     sailors forever entombed in the U.S.S. Arizona. The 
     historical record cannot be sanitized. The facts are that 
     some of the worst atrocities of WW II were committed by 
     the Imperial Japanese Army. It slaughtered Chinese 
     civilians for sport; it raped and enslaved Korean women to 
     improve the morale of its soldiers; it conducted grisly 
     biological warfare experiments on prisoners of war. It is 
     a well documented fact that the Japanese ``beat 
     [prisoners] until they fell, then beat them for falling, 
     beat them until they bled, then beat them for bleeding. 
     They denied them medical treatment. They starved them. . . 
     . They watched them die by the tens of thousands.'' No 
     wonder that only one out of three Allied POWs survived 
     Japanese captivity. [Gavin Daws, Prisoners of the 
     Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific, 1994] Yet, 
     after 50 years since V-J Day, the Japanese Government has 
     still not seen fit to apologize publicly to the victims of 
     these atrocities or to their families. In those 50 years, 
     the Japanese Government has still not informed its school 
     children that the long road to Hiroshima started with the 
     sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
       In the Pacific as in Europe, I think that World War II 
     shall remain a symbol of a quintessential confrontation 
     between good and evil. I think the United States and its 
     allies deserve eternal gratitude for ridding the world of 
     that evil. I think it is incumbent on us never to forget the 
     human sacrifice that this entailed. It is incumbent on us 
     never to forget the men and women who died in that noble 
     cause.
       (Walter Adams, Past President of Michigan State University, 
     served in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1945. He landed in 
     Normandy with the 83d Infantry Division and completed his 
     combat service with the 11th Armored Division as aide-de-camp 
     to the Division commander, Maj. Gen. Holmes E. Dager. After 
     the Battle of the Bulge, he received a battlefield commission 
     as a 2nd Lieutenant. He was awarded the ETO campaign ribbon 
     with five bronze campaign stars as well as the Bronze Star 
     Medal for heroic conduct.)

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