[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
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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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