[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 30, Number 23 (Monday, June 13, 1994)]
[Pages 1210-1212]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
United Kingdom

June 4, 1994

    Mr. Prime Minister and Mrs. Major, Mr. MacLean, Chaplain, Secretary 
Bentsen, thank you for your fine remarks. To our British hosts and to 
all the distinguished Americans who are also here, Members of the 
Congress, the administration, the Armed Forces, we have come here today, 
all of us, on a journey of remembrance. For some, like Secretary 
Bentsen, it was a journey to retrace

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time, to go back 50 summers and more when they took to airfields like 
these. For others, it is a journey to honor those who fought and those 
who died for the world in which we came of age.
    In this moment, all of us are joined in a sense of pride, in a sense 
of indebtedness, a sense of wonder, and a sense of determination to 
carry on that work and never forget.
    On these ancient grounds, 3,812 Americans are buried, airmen, 
soldiers, and sailors. More than 5,000 others are remembered on the Wall 
of the Missing. The names of some we honor echo still in our Nation's 
memory, names like Joseph Kennedy, Jr., the brother of our late 
President, a young man for whom a distinguished political career was 
predicted, who gave his life for our country, or Glenn Miller, whose 
wonderful ``Moonlight Serenade'' soothed a savage world and still makes 
us tap our feet. In death, all these people on the Wall and buried 
behind us were equal. They came from every State in the Union. They were 
of many races and religions. They had names like Carillo, Kaufman, and 
Wood. They were, all of them, Americans. They fought to defeat a great 
evil which threatened to destroy our very way of life, what Winston 
Churchill called ``the great principles of freedom and the rights of 
man,'' which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world.
    For long months Britain bravely carried that fight on alone. In the 
Battle of Britain, night after frightful night, the people of this 
besieged island withstood this attack of Nazi bombers. It was their 
finest hour. Amid the horror the British looked west for help. Then the 
Yanks came, deepening one of history's profoundest bonds.
    Overnight, it seems, tens of thousands of GI's filled the streets 
and camps across southern England. All these many years later we find 
the memories of many of them very vivid: smiling GI's tossing packs of 
spearmint gum to British schoolboys, new faces and funny accents at 
corner pubs, Lindy hops in London, kids from Milwaukee invited in for 
high tea, all in uniforms filling the pews at British churches.
    America gave to England an infusion of arms and men and materiel. 
The British gave our troops the feeling that they were not so far from 
home after all. The British gave us inspiration; the Americans gave in 
return, hope.
    At every level, Yanks and Brits worked together like family. 
American intelligence services built on Britain's brilliant successes 
which were pure chronicles in breaking the German code. General 
Eisenhower chose British marshals to be his deputies. Of course, 
Montgomery and Ramsay and Tedder, Roosevelt and Churchill, even as they 
led the assault on tyranny and rallied their own people to support the 
crusade, encouraged each other with personal notes, all shared a sense 
of friendship that sustained them through the darkest moments of the 
war. All shared a faith that our people, nurtured on freedom, would rise 
to the call of history. Nowhere was our bond more important than in the 
air war launched from the green fields like this one. The Royal Air 
Force and the Army Air Corps joined in countless sorties to cripple the 
Luftwaffe, to decimate the Nazi war machine, to soften the Atlantic 
Wall. One British citizen remembered, ``For a thousand days, the sky was 
never still.''
    It was some of the most dangerous work of the war, and the tales of 
valor still amaze us all: pilots going down with burning flames to give 
all the rest of the crew just a few more seconds to get out, of the two 
crew members who shared the only parachute on board as they jumped 
together from their burning plane over England, the Marauders, 
Liberators, Mustangs, and Flying Fortresses, the Halifaxes and 
Mosquitoes. They were all sturdy. But as one American remembered, ``the 
flack sometimes seemed so thick you could walk on it.'' The wild blue 
yonder above Europe could quickly turn cold and gray and lethal.
    In just the 2 months before D-Day, the Allied forces lost over 2,000 
planes and over 12,000 men. Because of their sacrifice, by June 6th of 
1944, the Allies owned the air. Under the shield of that air supremacy, 
our ships crossed the channels, our men crossed the beaches.
    A few days after the Normandy landing, General Eisenhower stood on 
the beaches of France with his young son, John, recently a graduate of 
West Point, and told him: ``If

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I didn't have the air supremacy, I wouldn't be here.'' After D-Day, the 
Air Corps continued to fly toward freedom's horizon, until the entire 
continent was retained and a world was set free.
    The victory of the generation we honor today came at a high cost. It 
took many lives and much perseverance. After D-Day, it took freedom 
another year to reach the Elbe; it took another 44 years to reach Warsaw 
and Prague and East Berlin. And now it has reached Kiev and Moscow and 
even beyond. The mission of this time is to secure and expand its reach 
further.
    The airmen who flew these skies had a ritual that Secretary Bentsen 
mentioned for signaling to their comrades on the ground at the end of a 
mission. As they were coming in for landing, if they fired off a red 
flare it meant that there were casualties aboard. And if they fired off 
a green flare, it meant some lucky pilot had just completed his last 
mission before shipping out.
    Well, the generation that won the Second World War completed their 
mission, whether they walk among us or lie among us today. And after 
looking down in sorrow at those who paid the ultimate price, let us lift 
our eyes to the skies in which they flew, the ones they once commanded. 
And let us send to them a signal, a signal of our own, a signal that we 
do remember, that we do honor, and that we shall always carry on the 
work of these knights borne on wings.
    May God bless them and all our peoples.

Note: The President spoke at approximately 11 a.m. In his remarks, he 
referred to Ed Maclean, president, 9th Army Air Force Association, and 
Lt. Col. Johnny R. Almond, USAF, who gave the invocation. A tape was not 
available for verification of the content of these remarks.